I have visited Methuselah in the White Mountains of California, the oldest documented tree on earth. As Sarah Kaplan noted, “It was a sapling when the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids more than 4,500 years ago.” So, when I read Kaplan’s article concerning what is happening to bristlecone pines (hundreds are dead or dying in Death Valley National Park), I realized the dire warning they represent for the effects of climate change. Kaplan writes of the stress on trees all over the world. But bristlecone pines! They have survived so many crises over the thousands of years of their existence, and they have managed to flourish in the harshest of environments. And yet, they are now in danger of survival.
And Congress has been unable to pass urgent legislation that would only begin to address the extreme weather situation we are increasingly producing. We are in the midst of a mass extinction that is moving faster than any of the five previous mass extinctions our planet has undergone. We continue down a path of making our planet unlivable and show little awareness of what we are doing to ourselves and our earth home. And we do not have the leaders we need (although, they are the leaders we have chosen) for such a time as this.
We have individuals in positions of leadership whose narrow vision is defined by how they can retain personal power. Life on our planet is being destroyed, mass shootings are rising, divisions sap us of a common vision and power to bring about change, and we have leaders who spend time working people up over false issues. (For example, worrying White parents over their children learning the White-supremacist history of our nation.) These kinds of issues sidetrack others from the truly pressing matters of our time, like taking the necessary actions to truly care for our planet, its creatures, and ourselves.
I think of words from a time when Methuselah, the bristlecone pine, was still young, words from the book of Deuteronomy, where Yahweh, who brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt, speaks:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.
This continues to be a message for us. We have before us life and death. We can choose. The word of the Creator is “Choose life!”
Can we see that anytime we do not choose to love; anytime we do not choose to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8), we choose death? Justice, mercy, and faithfulness are life-giving. They are life-giving for our planet because they move us into action to make right what is wrong and to do it with compassion.
Anytime we choose to be motivated by fear, prejudice, hate, or choose to disdain or condemn others (Jesus reminds us there is one judge and it is not us!), we choose death. It does not matter how much “religion” we wrap our choices in. These choices cut us off from others and from the needs of our earth home.
It is hard for me to imagine the kind of movement necessary for us truly to choose life, without a great spiritual awakening. Without a renewal of life in the spirit, life directed outward in openness, receptive to the Spirit of God, our decisions will be locked into our physical desires, our arrogance, and our rationalizations. We will be unable to see beyond our most immediate experienced needs and our self-absorption.
Gracious God, free us from our in-turned bondage, the bondage of our wills. Liberate us to love one another, to truly see the needs of others, including the needs of the creatures who share our earth home. Free us to see with compassion and to act. Amen.