Today’s Washington Post breaking news announcing that the U.S. will be one of five nations leading the way on limiting methane and soot (see earlier post with link below) prompts me to re-publish Climate Change commentary on “All Things Considered” (MPR.org) – personal reflection on a day with Earl, the old oyster fisherman, on the “Skipjack” on the Chesepeake Bay.
A Washington Post story on Climate Change reports this breaking news:
“With global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions stalled, the United States and five other countries are starting a new program to cut other pollutants — including methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons — that contribute to global warming.
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is set to announce the five-year initiative Thursday morning. Canada, Sweden, Mexico, Ghana and Bangladesh are also participating. The plan will be administered by the United Nations Environment Program, with a $12 million contribution from the United States for the first two years. Canada will add $3 million; contributions from the other countries are not known.”
It goes on to report, “Paul Bledsoe of the Bipartisan Policy Center noted that, in the United States, efforts to reduce methane and soot are far less politicized than efforts to reduce carbon dioxide. Even one of the most vehement congressional opponents of limiting carbon dioxide emissions, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), supports cutting soot emissions. Senator James Inhofe (R, OK), supports cutting soot emissions.”
I have to remind myself to celebrate small steps. This is one of them. My hope and prayer is that Senator Inhofe’s acceptance of scientific evidence supporting action on methane and soot will be one small step toward a saner discussion of global warming. I just asked the question of the Washington Post whether they know why Senator Inhofe is convinced by the scientific evidence re: methane and soot, and, likewise, what scientific evidence convinces him that we do not need to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Anybody know?
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Gordon C. Stewart Feb. 14, 2012
“Who was Jesus?” I asked the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had rung the doorbell. Through the upstairs window where I do my writing, I had seen the van pull over across the street and empty out. I thought perhaps there was a family gathering next door until two of them walked up the drive way.
An email response to “Whitney Houston, the Leper, and You” (posted below) reminded me of the conversation that ensued. Here’s the email from Ann in Texas:
“So nice to hear from you and feel your energy out there flushing out injustice and ranging around in the ‘big ideas,’ and formative experiences. Bravo! Passion writes action… and here’s mine… an odd reaction, I’m sure, but to the leper story, and the overturning of the tables and all the examples we use to cast aspersions on ancient Judaism that help perpetuate in my mind a subtle continuing contemporary anti-Judaism and the continuing need for an Israel that has morphed into “pants” to small to hold it. Now there’s a view from the edge!”
I share Ann’s concern. I hold my breath every time I preach or write on texts like this, painfully aware of the anti-Semitism that continues in subtle and not-so-subtle forms.
When the Jehovah’s Witness rang the doorbell, I was deep into writing a sermon on planetary stewardship and sustainability in the wake of the B.P. oil “spill” – Deep Water Horizon blow out in the Gulf of Mexico.
The dogs were barking up a storm at the two men standing on their porch. I went down, answered the door, and stepped outside to meet them.
They were kind and gentle people. They wanted me to know that the world was coming to an end. “Yes, I know,” I said, “what do you fellas think about the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico?” They preferred to talk about Jehovah, the Book of Revelation, the end of the world… and Jesus.
“Okay, let’s talk about that. “Who was Jesus?”
“He was the Son of God.”
“And who was the Son of God?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And who was Jesus Christ? Christ is not Jesus’ last name. It’s a title. So who was Jesus?”
“The Son of God, Jesus Christ.”
“Let me ask it differently. Who was Jesus of Nazareth?’ Who were his people and what was Jesus’ religion?
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Jesus was a real man, in real time. He lived in a particular time and place. Jesus didn’t suddenly plop down out of the sky. So who was Jesus of Nazareth?
“He was the Messiah, the Christ. He came to bring the new Covenant.”
“And what about the first covenant? What was Jesus’ religion?
“He was a Christian,” they said.
“Jesus was a Christian?! You can’t follow yourself. A Christian is someone who follows the Christ. Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew. And he’ll always be a Jew. You don’t get to make him up like that. We can’t create Jesus in our own image. You don’t get to have a non-Jewish Jesus!”
We talked then about Jesus and the Book of Revelation. We discussed the fact that the Book of Revelation is a literary genre of the first century called “apocalyptic” that was peculiar to that time; that it was written by a disciple of Jesus held prisoner by the Roman Empire on the Isle of Patmos, who was denouncing the imperial claims of the Roman Empire, and proclaiming its end in bizaare images of Jewish Scripture (in Danile and Ezekiel). The Book of Revelation wasn’t, as so many think today, a book of predictions about the future or the end of the world.
“You’ve thought about this a lot,” said one of the men. “You really seem to have spent a lot of time studying this.”
I thanked him for the compliment and responded that although I’ve been thinking about these matters all my life, I still know very little.
At the end of the 45-minute conversation, I told them how much I respected their commitment to their beliefs and their sacrifices of time and money. I took their literature and invited them to think about what Jesus would have us do about the crabs, the oysters, and the oil-soaked birds drowning in oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
If we were all as committed to the healing of the planet and to the care of the poor as my visitors were that day to spreading their message with urgency, the world would be a better place.
Those of us who carry the name “Christian” don’t get to have a Jesus who is a Christian. The only Jesus we get to have was and always will be the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, whose people have been crucified many times by the anti-Semitic pogroms of those who claim to follow him.
The Jesus who heals the leper also tells the leper to “go and show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing….” Jesus is telling the man to practice his Jewish tradition, but Christian interpreters typically fail to notice the startling clarity of Jesus’ Jewishness. Likewise, any reading that begins with the assumption that Jesus was a Christian mistakes Jesus’ turning over of the money-changers’ tables in the temple as his rejection of Jewish faith and practices rather than the deepest affirmation of the Jewish covenant by which he lived. In faithfulness to the covenant, he protested the abuse of the covenant by the religious leaders of his time who had forsaken their high calling by collaborating with and cozying up to the Roman economic and military powers that occupied Jerusalem – just like today.
Thank you, Ann, for the email that reminded me.
Gordon C. Stewart published by MPR December 30, 2010
About this time of year, people in the Upper Midwest are wishing we were in Florida, Arizona, California or Mexico. The snow and cold get old.
But there’s a beauty to the snow and cold. Last week my friend Steve, who lives in Florida, finally came to Minnesota. Steve and I went to junior high school together in Pennsylvania. He’s lived mostly in the sunny climates of California and Florida. I’ve become a Minnesotan.
I’ve been trying to get him here for years; he always laughed when I told him how beautiful it is. “It’s cold!” he’d say.
Last week when, to my eyes, the snow had gotten dirty and the cold was bone-chilling, Steve finally came to Minnesota for his nephew’s wedding. When I picked him up at his hotel, the first words out of his mouth were, “It’s beautiful! This is really beautiful!”
We drove to the Dunn Brothers in downtown Chaska for a cup of coffee. “Wow, this is really neat,” he said. “We don’t have anything like this in Florida. This is a real town.” After an hour of catching up over coffee, he asked if we could walk down to the river. We walked the few blocks to the river and along the path that runs along the top of the levy in front of the townhomes.
It’s a beautiful scene of the Minnesota River. I was freezing up there, but Steve shot pictures, as excited as I would be snapping pictures of sea turtles spawning on a warm beach in Florida.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Steve was beholding it. I was not — until I got home and saw the picture Steve had posted on Facebook, and the comment posted by someone who hadn’t been chilled to the bone on the riverbank. “That’s beautiful!” she wrote. “It’s so perfect it doesn’t even look real.”
And I realized: It is beautiful, and it is real. Just like the real downtown and the old corner coffee shop where strangers get to know each other by name — a real place to warm ourselves while we complain about the winter weather over a cup of coffee.
About the middle of January I’ll forget how beautiful it is here in Minnesota. I might spend a few days at Steve’s condo in Florida just to get warm, and to realize again what we have here that Steve doesn’t have there.
In the meantime, when the snow and cold get old, I’ll look at the Currier and Ives picture Steve put up on Facebook to remind myself of the beauty I take for granted in the Land of 10,000 (frozen) Lakes.
My way of listening and seeing is profoundly shaped by Willem Frederik Zuurdeeg, the late Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and author of An Analytical Philosophy of Religion, and Man Before Chaos: Philosophy Is Born in a Cry, completed following Zuurdeeg’s untimely death by his colleague and friend, Esther Cornelius Swenson, my undergraduate college professor.
They were those rare Christian philosopher-theologians whose work crossed the solid line between the philosophical rigors of empiricism and linguistic analysis, on the one hand, and the depths of existentialists Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, and Marcel and their precursors Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard.
Every day I start out with a fresh-brewed cup of coffee and read the newspaper. What a way to start a day!!! “Don’t give me no bad news, no bad news, no bad news!” But most of the news that’s printed is just that: bad news.
But good news reporting is a thing of joy and a call for celebration. My heroes include muckrakers like A.J. Muste, reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Harrison Salisbury, Daniel Schorr, Bill Moyers, Paul Krugman, and the comedians whose irreverent and sometimes coarse humor exposes the absurd and helps us laugh when we would cry: Jon Stuart, Bill Maher, Lewis Black, Steven Colbert.
I come at the news from a different angle than professional journalism or comedy. My ears are tuned by Willem Zuurdeeg, Esther Swenson, other beloved teachers at Maryville College, McCormick Theological Seminary, and Harvard Divinity School; the people of the congregations and campuses where I have been privileged to minister, and the criminal defense clients of the Legal Rights Center, Inc. where Dostoevsky’s world of Crime and Punishment, Dom Sebastian Moore’s The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger, and Jesus’ Beatitudes and parables helped me to hear a deeper Voice than the cries that sometimes drove them and their defense lawyers to despair.
I have always had the sense of living at the edge of existence. From the edge I listen for the spoken and unspoken convictions “where ignorant armies clash by night” (Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach“) to win our minds and hearts, the wars between and among ideologies, ideals, prejudices, states, nations, political parties, religions, economic convictions that shape us for good or for ill.
Lately I have been drawn back to Gabriel Marcel’s The Mystery of Being and Homo Viator to which Dr. Swenson introduced me in college but which were then beyond my experience or interest. Many years later, I find myself more and more at home in the mystery of being itself. I resonate with William Sloane Coffin’s reflection in his last years of life following a stroke.
There is a Zen paradox whereby we may lack everything yet want for nothing. the reason is that peace, that is, deep inner peace, comes not with meeting our desires but in releasing ourselves from their power. I find such peace is increasingly mine. It’s not that I feel I’m withdrawing from the world, only that I am present in a different way. I’m less intentional than “attentional.” I’m more and more attentive to family and friends and to nature’s beauty. Although still outraged by callous behavior, particularly in high places, I feel more serene, grateful for God’s gift of life. For the compassions that fail not, I find myself saying daily to my loving Maker, “I can no other answer make than thanks, thanks, and ever thanks.”
– William Sloane Coffin, Credo
Following a conversation this morning about why climate change seems to have fallen off the national radar screed as a “hot” topic, John Hopkins, a biologist who recently moved from Alaska to Minnesota, sent me these two important stories:
From the Pew Foundation: Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate Change connects the dots, and
From the the University of Alaska-Fairbanks’ School of Fisheries and Ocean Science: Ocean Acidification in Alaska: New findings show increased ocean acidification in Alaska waters
The pteropod (also known as a sea butterfly or swimming sea snail) may be one of the first marine organisms affected by ocean acidification. Pteropods make up nearly half of the pink salmon diet. This particular pteropod is the Limacina helicina helicina. Photo by Russ Hopcroft, UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
Thank you, John, for sharing. Love to know what others think. Why has the topic cooled when it is getting hotter?
Views from the Edge 