At a small event space somewhere in Brooklyn, 19 people gathered in a circle. They included a therapist, an immigration lawyer, a climate activist, an artist and a reporter. They were there for a workshop called “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis.” To the reporter, the title sounded wildly optimistic. “Have you ever known someone who … doled out carbon offset gift certificates at the holidays?” she asks in a story she wrote about the experience. “[Someone] who sees new babies and immediately flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits per year? Who walks around shops thinking about where all the packaging ends up? You do now.”
Her name is Cara Buckley. She knows the planet is in trouble. And she does what she can: She donates to environmental causes, eats vegan, composts, takes public transport, carries around bamboo utensils, buys second hand and stocks up on carbon offsets — and yet none of it has been balm. “I [feel] complicit by merely existing,” she writes. “After all, I [belong] to the species that [is] taking most of the other ones down.” A friend suggested that her climate angst was an extension of her melancholic leanings, which struck her as plausible, but not quite right. “We know that the future is looking bad, that the present already is, and that inaction, especially here in America, is making it all worse. But how are we supposed to live in our hearts and souls with such an existential threat?”
What she took away from the workshop was a prescription for learning to live with hope. The facilitators taught her ancient wisdom: to seek out a spiritual path to forge gratitude, compassion and acceptance. Operating out of denial, fear, anger, and blame only burns us out. She began to see that what is needed is a way to move to a place not of tacit acceptance, but of compassion, fierce, roaring compassion, as she called it.[1]
Wanjira Mathai also knows the planet is in trouble. She’s a Kenyan environmentalist, and on the sidelines of the climate summit in Egypt, she commented on the testy deliberations about how we are going to pay for the transition to carbon-free energy production and for various mitigation measures. Wealthy nations like the United States, Great Britain, and European countries have been responsible for emitting the most greenhouse gasses into the environment. The world’s poorest countries, however, have been facing the gravest consequences of climate change, including floods, droughts, and deadly heat waves. Many agree that the economies that reaped the greatest benefits from development driven by fossil fuels also ought to pay the greatest share for the transition to a sustainable global economy. Even as negotiators contend with how to make those payments, Ms. Mathai said, “if we do not get over the fact that there is a crisis in how we see people of different colors, cultures, genders and geographies, we are cheating ourselves. We are lying to ourselves.” To her, the issue, in the final analysis, is not an economic or a political one. “We have a crisis in empathy,” she said. “We don’t acknowledge just how connected we are.”[2]
Where do we turn to learn compassion, to broaden our capacity for empathy? We turn to Jesus. During the final days of his ministry, he and the disciples were in Jerusalem, and they spent much of their time in the temple. Jesus overheard people marveling at the building’s size and splendor, and with great calm, I imagine, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
The temple was still under construction then. It was one of Herod’s biggest and most ambitious projects. Begun long before Jesus’ birth, the temple itself was completed in less than two years, but work on the outer courts and decorations continued until 64 C.E., decades after the disciples had begun to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.[3] It was an enormous complex. Scholars estimate that the outer court could hold 400,000 people, and that during pilgrimage festivals it frequently held crowds of that size. “And the exterior of the building wanted nothing that could astound either mind or eye,” wrote the first-century historian, Josephus.[4] It was a space of great splendor, built to the glory of God.
It was also a space that didn’t reveal at first or second glance how it was being funded. In the same chapter of Luke, just before this scene, we read about Jesus seeing rich people putting large gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”[5] She put in all she had to live on. The church has long held her up as an example of generosity and trust in God, but the magnificent structure would be associated with Herod’s name, not hers. The Jewish people knew it was a house for the name of God to dwell, but they also knew that Herod had reasons for building it that had little to do with God’s name and a lot more with his own.
“As for these things that you see,” Jesus said, “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Construction wasn’t even finished yet, and Jesus spoke of destruction and collapse. The disciples wanted to know when; they wanted a detailed forecast. They worried about news of wars, earthquakes, famines and plagues, just as we worry about what the future holds for our children and their children. Jesus warned them not to go after those who claim to know the endtime like it was a cosmic train schedule. You will go through times of blow after blow of heartbreaking and soul-draining news, and inevitably there will be those who will tell you how it all makes sense, how each event is a mile marker along the tracks to the great and final day. Do not go after them. Stay on the way with me, he said. Follow me. Don’t confuse the kingdom of God with beautiful stonework or with a glorious set of ideas that fit together seamlessly like blocks in the temple wall. The days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down and turned into a heap of rubble. Yet even amid the rubble, trust in God. Trust in the promises of God. Trust in the faithfulness of God. Trust in the power of God to create newness beyond the limits of your own imagination. Don’t go after the apocalyptic calculators, but continue to cultivate love: in your relationships with each other and with your fellow creatures, in your relationships even with your enemies. Cultivate love, and watch your compassion grow and your empathy broaden. Trust in the slow work of God, within you and among you.
“I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” says the Lord, and it’s more than a saying. It’s a song of promise and hope, a song about a city without tears, a city of justice and fullness of life for all. It’s a song that carries echoes of our beginnings in God’s garden, of life in the blessed conviviality of creation. The song is the sound track of Jesus’ life and ministry. Trust in the promises of God. Beware that you are not led astray. Do not be terrified. Do not worry. Cultivate love and trust in the slow work of God.
Beautiful words. True words. On way too many days, though, a world of no more weeping, no more laboring in vain, and no more bearing children for calamity, seems so far away, and I find it much easier to imagine the whole world heating up and flooding in humanity’s denial, ignorance, and selfishness. Walter Brueggemann suggests that Isaiah’s vision of new creation “is outrageous because the new world of God is beyond our capacity and even beyond our imagination. In our fatigue, our self-sufficiency, and our cynicism, we remain convinced that such promises could not happen here.”[6] But Jesus, tirelessly, not only pointed to such promises, but lived them faithfully. Jesus embodied the fantastic truth of God’s profound solidarity with creation, and in particular with all of us, the creature made in God’s image, in our struggle to be who we were made to be.
That brief scene in the temple, the word about the collapse of even the grandest, most sacred structures, was among Jesus’ final teachings before his arrest. What followed was the overwhelming flood wave of rejection, betrayal, denial, ridicule, and torture, and at the end, his execution. Every lie, every injustice, every self-righteous illusion, every hateful word and angry blow — we let him have it. And he died, bearing it all for love’s sake.
And God, in fierce, roaring compassion, raised Jesus from the dead, for love’s sake. It was the dawn of a new creation, the first day of new heavens and a new earth. What a fantastic truth. What a fantastic occasion to finally acknowledge just how connected we are; not only through our common ancestry and intricate webs of mutual dependence, but through our shared belonging in the covenant of love which binds us to God and to each other. How do we cultivate active hope amid the crises of our days? We go to work, trusting in the unrelenting love of God.
[1] Cara Buckley, “Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help”, New York Times, November 15, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/sunday-review/depression-climate-change.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/11/climate/cop27-climate-summit
[3] Six years later, in a Jewish uprising against the Roman occupation, the entire structure was razed by Roman troops, leaving only portions of the outer wall standing.
[4] Josephus, Jewish War 5.222
[5] Luke 21:1-4
[6] See Lectionary Homiletics Vol. XV, No. 6, 61.