The gospel reading for Sunday is the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin. You can read it here. This week, I lost hope that trying to care for the earth and reverse the effects of climate change were making any kind of difference, and that by continuing to talk about it and try to DO something about it, I was being foolish. I lost my hope, and I lost faith that God was at work still in this world.
What led to this crisis, you ask? It must have been something really terrible to set in motion such an existential questioning of motives! Nope. It was an opinion piece in the New Yorker, not even written by a scientist, but one of their contributing writers. He has lost all hope that human beings will change their behavior to stop the planet from warming at its current destructive rate. Nothing scientific, just his own model in his own head. His solution is to stay put in his comfortably air conditioned home and eat locally sourced kale grown by homeless people.
For some reason, this article sent me into despair. Why bother, I wondered? What difference can I make, can one church make? Am I just contributing to an already too noisy world bent on division and differences?
I am grateful to say I didn’t remain lost in despair for very long. I found my hope again, and I found it in several places. One, I re-found hope in my identity as a beloved child of God who has been saved by the good news of Jesus. The good news that God loved the world enough to die to save us all. That God loved this WORLD enough to save the people in it; that God didn’t give up on the human community. Second, that good news tells me to love my neighbor as God loves me, and there is much hope to be found in that.
There are many examples of what might happen if we love our neighbor, but one stood out to me this week as I lost and re-found my hope for this fragile earth, our island home. A picture posted on our Facebook page:
The caption read:
In 2019 Nativity Community Gardeners have delivered a total of 266 lbs. of organically grown fresh produce to senior citizens at Windsor Spring, with whom we have developed a warm relationship. In the coming weeks the gardeners will restore and prepare their garden beds for cool season planting.
We love our neighbors. We grow vegetables for them, feeding the soil, moving carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground where it needs to be. We plant new things when it is time. We get to know our neighbors, and they share with us in return. I don’t know if it will stop climate change and save the world, but that’s okay, God has taken care of that. In the meantime, we can enjoy the heaven that is a freshly harvested tomato. May you find hope where you exist, and if not, may God find you in your despair and bring you back home again.