Here is the reading for our Sunday Forum on July 24:
Mind of the House: Climate and Vocation
House of Bishops, General Convention 2022
God is the source of all creation, and we, humankind – made in God’s image – have been given the gift of life and responsibility to care for creation. We depend on God’s creation to sustain our life together, and, by serving as good stewards of creation, we reflect God’s tender love for all that has been made. In caring for our earth, we return our love to God. This is our first vocation, made explicit in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: together with God, together with one another, we care for God’s world.
We are only fully human and fully alive when we are in right relationship with the whole created order. Apart from each other and nature, we are not our whole selves. It is no surprise that once Adam and Eve surrendered to temptation and sought to grasp divine knowledge, to idolize and center the self over all else, that the whole creation began to suffer, and humanity along with it. Sin flowed forth in estrangement, exile, and eventually violence and death.
This ancient pattern of separation and sin is ours today. We crave and hoard what we do not need. We take and grasp what does not belong to us. We burden and dominate what was meant to be free. As a result, the planet and our most vulnerable neighbors suffer. This flows from our failure as human beings to live as the people made in image of God, bearing the sacred responsibility entrusted to us.
Climate change and environmental degradation are manifestations of our turning away from God. The effects of this willful separation from God resonate across our collective lives: All areas of justice are either worsened or made better depending on the health of the planet. A changing climate and degraded environment worsen conflict, forces human migration, and causes food insecurity. These related crises increase the rate of gun violence, cause more natural disasters and humanitarian crises, and deepen the wounds of those already suffering from racism. People living in poverty are plunged further into poverty by the deteriorating condition of the planet.
As people of faith, we are not without hope, but the sustainability of God’s creation demands our action. Confronting climate change and environmental degradation has never been more urgent. As members of The Episcopal Church, we are committed in baptism to resist evil, seek God’s will, treat all people with dignity, and strive for justice and peace. Living into these promises, we must face the climate crisis for the sake of love of God and neighbor:
If we hope to treat all human beings with dignity, we must address climate change so droughts, floods, and extreme weather patterns don’t force people into exile and desperate, life-threatening migration.
If we hope to build peace, we must address climate change so that competition for scarce resources does not drive further violence.
If we hope to ensure that every child of God has enough to eat, we must address climate change so that our bountiful earth can continue to support and sustain food systems that nourish people and the soil.
We are a people of hope. Where do we find the hope that sustains, that dispels fear, that gives us the courage to love and to persevere? We find hope in the power and reality of the Resurrection. After Jesus had been buried, in the dark before dawn, Mary was in despair and utterly without hope. But as she was drawn from the tomb to the garden, she met the living Christ. Mary’s mourning turned to brilliant resurrection hope. From the garden, she ran to proclaim good news to Jesus’ confused and terrified followers.
And so it is for many of us today. We, God’s faithful, are called to share the hope that will empower change. Many of God’s people – especially our children – are in despair as they observe the frightening shifts in our environmental narrative. The risen Christ continues to send us out to proclaim the Gospel to the whole of Creation (Mark 16:15). Like Mary, we go out to all proclaiming God’s love in deed and word. It is our work to lead the way for change, to model good stewardship, and to move forward with courage and purpose.
We are already at work spreading hope and effecting change: We are creating “Good News Gardens”; installing solar panels on church properties; hosting transition programs for coal miners who need help adapting to a changing economy; cleaning up toxic hot spots, like the Salton Sea in southern California; helping to eliminate the terror of food insecurity; setting aside land for the restoration of damaged ecosystems; planting trees, mangrove stands, and prairie grasses; advocating for policy change; fundamentally transforming our way of life from one centered on self to one centered on the flourishing of the whole creation – in these ways and so many more, we can follow Jesus’ call to “preach good news to the creation.” (Mark 16: 15) In these ways and so many more, we embrace the original vocation God gave us, to care together for the world God made.
Dear God, Creator of the earth, this sacred home we share;
Give us new eyes to see the beauty all around and to protect the wonders of creation.
Give us new arms to embrace the strangers among us and to know them as family.
Give us new ears to hear and understand those who live off the land and sea, and to hear and understand those who extract its resources.
Give us new hearts to recognize the brokenness in our communities and to heal the wounds we have inflicted.
Give us new hands to serve the earth and its people and to shape beloved community.
For you are the One who seeks the lost, binds our wounds and sets us free,
And it is in the name of Jesus the Christ we pray. Amen.
(prayer from the 2019 meeting of the House of Bishops, Fairbanks, Alaska)
Davis, Ellen F.. Getting Involved with God. Cowley Publications.
Chapter 17
Now the riffraff which was in their midst craved a craving, and indeed the Israelites wept again and said, “Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish that we used to eat in Egypt (for free!), the cucumbers, and the watermelons, and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. And now our throat is dry; nothing at all before our eyes except the manna!” (Numbers 11:4-6)
THIS CHAPTER FROM Numbers is a tangled tale of manna and quails, greed and prophecy. Israel has just left Sinai, moving through the desert like a great army on the march, and manna is falling from heaven like dew for their daily rations. But some of them are unimpressed by the bread of angels: “the riffraff” (as the writer frankly calls them) demands that God serve meat. Now, the key to this confusing story is the double answer that God gives to their gluttonous craving. First, there is the angry answer: “You want meat? I’ll give you meat; you’ll eat meat till it comes out your nose!”—and God pours on the quails. God’s second answer is just as extravagant, but more kindly: God pours out prophecy, a spirit of prophecy so abundant that clergy and laity alike start speaking the Word of the Lord.
Unbridled greed and free-flowing prophecy—the central message of this story lies in the connection between those seeming incompatibles. It is a story that has particular importance for us who live in twenty-first century North America, because greed is the governing spirit of our society. Our craving more than enough is the deadly sin that is already wreaking havoc on a global scale. If we take scripture seriously, then we must believe that our greed, like Israel’s, puts us in danger of God’s devastating anger.
That we are greedy is indisputable. No society in the history of the world has lived as far beyond the level of subsistence as we do, and there is no doubt that the earth cannot indefinitely sustain the burden that our accustomed lifestyle imposes on it. If we are to find any hopeful message in this story (and I believe we can), it is crucial that we understand the nature of our sin, which the Christian tradition has identified as one of the seven deadliest. The essential insight on the nature of greed is found already in the Psalms. Reflecting on this story, the seventy-eighth psalm says that the Israelites demanded meat
because they had no faith in God,
and did not trust his saving power
[though] he had opened the doors of heaven.
He had rained upon them manna to eat;
the grain of heaven he had given them.
Mortals ate the bread of angels,
he sent them food enough. (Psalm 78:22-25)
The psalmist goes directly to the heart of the matter: because they did not trust God, the Israelites could not be satisfied, even with the bread of angels. Greed stems always from lack of faith. We crave more than we need because we do not look to God to fill the emptiness we quite accurately perceive in ourselves. In fact, only God can fill the emptiness within us; it is for God’s sake that we alone of all the creatures are given the capacity to feel that ache of emptiness which is familiar to us all. So greed is nothing other than a perversion of our natural desire for God. Frantically and vainly we attempt to fill our emptiness with food or drink or clothes or houses or cars or works of art—with all the stuff that fills our malls and eventually our garages and garbage cans to overflowing but does not satisfy us, because it is not God. We are trying to fill ourselves with what is not God—the problem is as simple as that. Greed is simple but deadly: it kills by a kind of spiritual malnutrition. The psalmists, those brilliant spiritual diagnosticians, call it “leanness in the soul” (Psalm 106:15). False desires consume us; our souls waste away for lack of real substance.
In the biblical story, the Israelites’ greed quite literally kills them. When the meat they had craved
was still between their teeth, not yet chewed, the anger of the LORD burned hot against the people, and the LORD struck the people with a very heavy plague. And they called that place Kivrot haTa’avah, “Graves of Craving.” for there they buried the craven people. (Numbers 11:33-34)
The great tragedy of Kivrot haTa’avah is that Israel already had plenty; God “sent them food enough.” Manna is the great biblical symbol of sufficiency. “The grain of heaven” fell nightly for forty years in the wilderness, specifically to win Israel’s trust in God and to teach them the discipline of sufficiency. In the morning each household would gather what it needed for that day and no more, for manna had no shelf life. Anyone who took more than they could use in a day ended up with a mess of maggots.
So manna in the wilderness was Israel’s training in the art of sufficiency. Being content with what is enough is not just a matter of getting by, a strategy for survival in lean times until a better alternative presents itself. Rather, sufficiency is one of the chief arts of the spiritual life. Mastering any art involves practical skills but also an aesthetic sensitivity, a certain developed sense of beauty. And so with this art of sufficiency. Tuition bills, growing debt load, cutbacks at work—these things may stimulate thought about how to do with less than we have all been taught to want. But sufficiency becomes an art form only when an aesthetic change takes place within us, so that we come to see the beauty of “enough” and actually prize it over “too much.”
In the Christian tradition, the great artists of sufficiency were the early monastics, the men and women who went out into the same Egyptian desert where the Israelites are traveling and camping in our story. They chose the desert specifically for its starkness, the very thing that chafed the Israelites. In the fourth century, the desert mothers and fathers were pioneering the monastic ideal of what we now call “voluntary simplicity.” With typical monastic bluntness, they called their practice “mortification,” literally, “making death.” And in a sense, that is just what voluntary simplicity is. It is making a place in our lives for our own death.
We do it by treating our material desires always in the context of the needs of those who will come after us in this still lovely world. We make room for death by leaving the air and water as clean as we found them, by not taking more than our share of resources that can be depleted in a few generations but take geological ages to rebuild—like oil, coal, or mineral deposits, or fertile soil. The motivation for voluntary simplicity is, of course, a hunger for justice: when a few have far too much, many have too little. But also and less obviously, it is aesthetically motivated. Excessive consumption is ugly, as Numbers graphically displays: the Israelites are wading in quail up to their armpits, stuffing themselves until the meat comes out their nostrils. This picture is meant to be repellant. It is a sad irony that, craving a superabundance of stuff in order to magnify our worth, we are actually diminished in our dignity—certainly in God’s eyes and, if we are observant, in our own.
The biblical story is deeply disturbing, but it also affords an element of chastened hope. The hope lies in God’s second extravagant answer to Israel’s greed, when God pours out a spirit of prophecy that more than fills the seventy officially appointed elders. The overflow of prophetic spirit runs out into the camp of ordinary Israelites, so that two guys named Eldad and Medad start speaking God’s truth. And when Joshua son of Nun complains that things have gotten out of hand, Moses says, “What, are you jealous for me? If only all God’s people were prophets!”
So what is the connection between Israel’s greed and this overflow of prophecy? We are not told the content of the prophecy, so we have to guess. But we know this: the basic function of all the prophets is to give Israel a God’s-eye view of its situation—to help the people see when what they are doing is hostile to God and call them back to a life lived in dignity and beauty before God. And so here at the Graves of Craving, I imagine the prophets were trying to reorient the people from craving for meat to gratitude for manna. In no uncertain terms they challenged Israel to focus on God’s faithfulness instead of their own wants.
And what does this have to do with us? At the risk of sounding weird, I believe that in our time we are experiencing a similar overflow of prophecy, for God’s truth is being uttered in startling and compelling ways even by Eldad and Medad—that is, by people whom the church has not officially charged to speak for God. Catholic Christianity is rightly wary of identifying people outside the Bible as prophets, but in this instance the biblical story itself pushes us to this kind of language: “If only all God’s people were prophets!”
Various people in our society are performing the prophetic task of waking us up to our hostility toward God and God’s creation. I am thinking of the economists who point to the fact that our nation, with six percent of the world’s population, presently uses thirty-five percent of its resources—six times our fair share; or the political analysts who show the connection between international violence and our own gluttonous craving for gasoline, plastics, and other petroleum products. Another function of the biblical prophets is to speak on behalf of the poor: those people, generally invisible to us, who suffer because of our selfishness. If we read the daily news in light of their prophecy, we will recognize with increasing clarity that our lifestyle extracts a price from people most of us will never see in person, at least this side of the Resurrection. Third World countries have little to sell on the global market but the bones of their land—its minerals and forests—and the cheap labor of their people. They are exchanging short-term gain for ever deepening long-term poverty as their land is stripped and their water and air are polluted, in no small part by First World industries.
More shocking to us, the invisible people who suffer from our selfishness include our own grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who will live on soil presently being worn out by high-chemical, maximum-production agriculture. They will drink water from rivers, lakes, and bays that are dumping grounds for industrial chemicals and toxic sewage. The most startling prophetic proclamation of our time is that the earth itself suffers on account of our selfishness. One theologian calls the earth and its non-human inhabitants “the new poor.” All over the globe the God-given richness of the natural world is being diminished; plant and animal species are becoming extinct more rapidly than at any time since the Ice Age as their natural habitats are poisoned, unnaturally warmed, paved over, or clear-cut.
We do not normally talk about this in church—or in seminaries, for that matter. Like Joshua son of Nun, the church has not on the whole been eager to recognize the unordained prophets who speak the truth in this matter. But Moses says to Joshua, “What, are you jealous for me? If only all God’s people were prophets!” I challenge you, as a spiritual discipline, to take up the prophetic task of identifying the connection—the myriad small connections—between what we do and the well-being of God’s creation. I warn you now that drawing those connections is painful; it means choosing to see the deep woundedness of the world and our own complicity in inflicting those wounds.
The church has been too slow to name the healing of the earth as a central Christian responsibility. Nonetheless, this is the best place for us to stand—within the church—as we struggle to meet that responsibility. For Christian worship itself is basic training in the art of sufficiency. Here we learn to ask for what is enough for us: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Here we receive the one thing that can truly satisfy us, the bread of heaven, that draws our memory back to manna in the wilderness—when, against all the odds, everyone had enough, riffraff included. The liturgy points our imagination forward to the heavenly banquet where all will be filled, riffraff included. So listen carefully to the language of the eucharist. Every prayer is teaching us to speak the language of sufficiency, to articulate, and gradually, if we allow ourselves, to feel the consummate satisfaction of those who feed on Christ in their hearts by faith, with thanksgiving. Come then, the table is ready. Eat, and be filled. Drink deeply, and be satisfied. Amen.
