The last decade has witnessed an exceptional number of
extreme heat waves around the world, increasing in frequency and
intensity. Some 55,000 deaths have been
attributed to the heat wave in Russia in 2010, which destroyed about 25% of the
annual crop yield, produced massive wild fires burning out more than 1 million
hectares of land, and cost about $15 billion in economic losses.
This year’s drought in the United States affected about 80%
of agricultural land, the largest drought since the 1950s. 2012 was the hottest year on record in the
U.S., with forest fires ranging from Missouri to Colorado, the Mississippi
River at a near-record low, and water systems taxed throughout the
country. We are witnessing a ten-fold
increase in the surface area of the planet experiencing extreme heat since the
1950s.
Then there was Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic
hurricane on record in terms of diameter, with winds spanning 1,100 miles and
effecting 24 states. Preliminary
estimates place the cost of damage at $65.6 billion, $63 billion worth in the
United States. More than 250 people died
and thousands are homeless. A 13 foot
storm surge flooded much of lower Manhattan; probably not for the last time
given the combination of rising sea level and increasing storm intensity.
In countries like Bangladesh, with low lying river delta
regions barely above sea level, a new class of people is now appearing in the
urban slums by the thousands: climate migrants fleeing homes lost to river
erosion and sea level rise. Bangladesh,
by no means a rich country, has spent $10 billion to mitigate the affects of
climate change there. This is just the
beginning of the largest mass migration in human history, with estimates of up
to 1 billion people eventually being displaced by the effects of climate
change.
Global mean temperature is on track to rise between 3.5 and
4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with an accompanying increase in
sea level rise of between .5 and 1 meter.
That is IF governments adhere to
the current climate conventions to which they have agreed. Without further commitments and action to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the following centuries would like experience 6
degree Celsius warming with several meters of sea-level rise.
While this may not seem large, consider that a global mean
temperature increase of 4 degrees Celsius approaches the difference between
temperatures today and during the last ice age, when much of central Europe and
North America were covered with kilometers of ice. And the magnitude of climate change we are
experiencing – human induced – is occurring over a century, not a millennia.[2]
We really don’t know how well the planet – much less human
beings and human institutions – can adapt to such rapid change and the
cascading effects it will have on weather patterns, biodiversity, sea levels
and ocean acidity, crop failure, water scarcity, disease vectors, flooding,
drought, collapse of infrastructure, economic instability, human migration, and
political conflict. We do know that the
greatest suffering will be among the poorest and most vulnerable communities.
I’ll tell you who warned you to flee from the wrath to come: the scientific community and such wild-eyed
prophets of doom as Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank. Al Gore is our John the Baptist; and the
unquenchable fire John threatened is beginning to look mild compared to the
apocalyptic scenarios predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.
As Walter Wink has said, “We are living in an apocalyptic
time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded appropriately.”[3] Apocalyptic times call for apocalyptic
prophets: people who are willing to risk
their reputations and even their lives to tell us the truth about our
situation, however difficult it may be to acknowledge. We need the prophets’
capacity to shock us into recognizing reality, their uncanny ability to
envision futures that we literally can’t imagine.
The philosopher, Gunther Anders, writing at the height of
the Cold War’s commitment to Mutually Assured Destruction, said, “Imagination
is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot
take it in.”[4] Global climate change, like nuclear war, is
so overwhelming that we cannot take it in; but unlike a nuclear war, climate
change already has begun. We don’t have
to imagine: we just have to pay attention.
Our prophets are not predicting; they are describing.
As difficult as it is for us to pay attention to our
prophets, thank God for them. They paint
such ghastly pictures for us precisely because they want us to avoid them. Their urgency is in the service of our
conversion because they believe we can change.
In the wager over the probability of the apocalypse, the prophets are
betting on us.
That is the take away from John’s confrontation with the
crowds who come out to hear him. For all
his indelicate language, notice his receptivity to their plea, “What shall we
do?” He is even open to the possibility
that tax collectors and soldiers – the very people driving Israel toward its
apocalyptic conflict with Rome – can change.
It is as if coal and oil industry executives gathered at the feet of Al
Gore and said, “Teacher, what should we do?”
The Gospel stretches our imagination not only by envisioning an apocalyptic
future, but also by envisioning the possibility that the apocalypse can be
averted precisely by the people we are least likely to entrust with our future. They, too, can repent and move into the
future that God desires for us.
Conversion is possible.
We can change. This is the good
news of John the Baptizer. The kingdom
of God is near, and it is the anti-apocalyptic possibility that we can not only
imagine, but also experience as God-with-us.
Thus far with John the Baptizer we can go. But there is a problem with his vision; at
least, the One who is coming to reveal God-with-us, Jesus, doesn’t comport to
John’s image of him. He sees Jesus
coming to baptize us with the Holy Spirit AND with fire. John’s Jesus is the source both of the
sharing of God’s life with us that is the Holy Spirit, and of the wrath that is
to come.
The actual Jesus comes only to baptize us with the Holy
Spirit. Rather than dealing out divine
wrath, he becomes the victim of purely human wrath. Yet the Holy Spirit, the life of God within
him overcomes that wrath, such that in the Resurrection he appears to those who
betray and abandon him and breathes Holy Spirit over them saying, “Peace be
with you.”
It is we human beings who are the source of the wrath to
come, the apocalyptic possibility that is a function of the structures of
exploitation and violence that we create. It is not God who condemns us to the
hell of a warming planet. It is we who
condemn ourselves.
Like the crowds gathered around John the Baptizer, we are a
people caught between two possible futures.
We are troubled by the words of the prophets, frightened, bewildered,
and, yes, guilty as charged. And we look
into the face of the Apocalypse and ask, “What then should we do?”
We can choose to change.
We can be converted to the future of God-with-us by recognizing and
entrusting ourselves to the Compassionate Presence that is coming, is always
coming, to renew the face of the earth.
That renewal begins with our acknowledgement that God has created and
redeemed us for life, not for wrath. The
only fire that Jesus brings is the purifying fire of love.
It is the fire of this love that will ignite our capacity to
imagine a future that now seems impossible: a post-fossil fuel world. “Nothing can save us that is possible,” says
the poet, W. H. Auden, “We who must die demand a miracle.”[5] The miracle we demand has already
happened. The One who is coming has
already come, demonstrating that only love conquers death. God so loved the world that he gave us his
Son, his very life, God-with-us. We must
come to see ourselves, and our planet, as the objects of this undying love, and
allow that love to become the touchstone of all our relationships.
The prophet’s frightening scenarios serve to wake us up to
the truth. But is this love, and not
fear of the wrath to come, that will give us the energy to heal the world. The prophets point beyond themselves, and
their apocalyptic visions, to One who is coming to heal and forgive. We do not want for technological and economic
pathways to a better world. What we lack
is love, for if we truly loved the world, we would not destroy it. In fact, we would make the sacrifices
necessary to preserve it.
For God so
loved the world . . . We, too, must have the courage to love and to demand a
miracle.
[2] Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4˚
Warmer World Must Be Avoided (The World Bank, November 2012). Information on Hurricane Sandy comes from
coverage in the New York Times.
[3] Walter
Wink, “Apocalypse Now,” The Christian
Century, October 7, 2001, pp. 16-19.
[4] Quoted
in Wink, ibid.
[5] Quoted
in Wink, ibid.
