The following remarks are from a panel discussin held at Mansfield University on April 9 on Climate Change and Religion.
Hello, I’m Rowena Gibbons, Rector of St. James Episcopal Church, here in Mansfield. As Dean of the Northern Tier and West Branch Convocations I extend greetings from our Provisional Bishop Robert Gepert and our bishop-elect, The Rev. Cn. Audrey Scanlan on behalf of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania. I am honored to have been asked to speak to you briefly today, with my colleague, The Rev. Linda Watkins, who is from the southern part of the state. Unlike Linda I have not formally studied the religious response to climate change and other environmental issues, but as a Christian theologian with a pulpit I do, nonetheless, have some thoughts to share.
I remember clearly some years ago hearing our former bishop Nathan Baxter speak to this issue upon his return from a meeting of bishops from around the world. It was a time in our history when the hot topic was the church’s response to homosexuality and as difficult as that conversation was in the US it was and continues to be far more difficult to have with the worldwide church. He said that as the debate raged among the international bishops, one Anglican bishop from a small island nation got up and took the podium and said something to the effect of this:
As I sit here and listen to you debate the theology of sexuality I am greatly distressed because while that might be of concern to you, the reality that I face, is that most, if not all, of my diocese, our island home, will be under water in the next couple of decades as a result of global weather changes that are causing sea levels to rise. I wonder if perhaps this should not be more of a concern for us?
It was a clarion call for which I personally was glad to hear for many reasons, but none more then the fact that the church often keeps itself busy with things that on the ground, or on the front lines of parish work matter to only a few, wherein larger more pressing issues seem to get lost. The critics of organized religion have rightly criticized the church for this tendency. We, by this I mean all Christians, have been rather slow to get behind the issue of climate change. We do well to respond to the needs of those hard hit by extreme weather events – mission work is right up our alley of course, but not so well in using our pulpits to gather momentum for real change.
However, two of the largest Christian bodies worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, have been sharply vocal in recent months. An online article from the Guardian in December reported:
“Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals. In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centered on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it…. The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands…. The monopolizing of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said. In Lima last month, bishops from every continent expressed their frustration with the stalled climate talks and, for the first time, urged rich countries to act.”
And in March, the Guardian also reported similar movement by the Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori in another on-line article which stated:
The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world. “It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.” In the same context, Jefferts Schori attached moral implications to climate denial, suggesting those who reject the underlying science of climate change were turning their backs on God’s gift of knowledge. It’s hard work when you have a climate denier who will not see the reality of scientific truth… [On March 24 the Episcopal Church kicked off] a month-long action campaign designed to encourage church members to reduce their own carbon footprints and lobby government and international corporations to fight climate change.
From my perspective, one of the problems Christians have had, theologically speaking, is our historically arrogant reading of this passage in Genesis. It is this:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (NRVS)
Translators often use the word ‘dominion,’ but what is more correct would be ‘stewardship’ or “guardianship.” A sound theological way of seeing ourselves in relation to God is as co-creators who have been given charge over the world we inhabit. As co-creators we are then stewards of the earth and its resources. To plunder and destroy what we have been given to care for and use rightly is a violation of God’s original intent. Too often I hear language that assumes dominion over. Even the phrase, “use of natural resources,” implies ownership over commodities. Water is not a commodity. Soil is not a commodity. Animals are not a commodity. Reducing the very things that sustain human life to commodities which can be bought and sold flies in the face of the demands of proper stewardship and is born from a place of arrogance. People of faith cannot begin to make substantial changes to our individual behaviors until we reconcile our own misunderstanding of what it means to have dominion. It is work that bears much responsibility and diligent care, under the best of circumstances. Getting there will take more than convincing arguments, it will require a change of perspective; a different paradigm.
One of the gifts of the Episcopal Church is its open engagement with the many faiths and traditions of the world. I believe that the more we engage in such conversations, especially with the Eastern religions, the more we will begin to understand our interconnectedness to all life. It is not enough to say, When I harm my brother, I suffer. We must also say: When I harm the soil, or pollute the water, or foul the air, I do violence to God.
Every three years when the Episcopal Church gathers for its General Convention, the American Indigenous peoples who are full participants of our faith tradition, open sacred space in their ceremonies, calling on the four winds, the sky and the earth in order to move the rest of us into right relationship with the work of earthly stewardship. We are reminded that in the end the world that was created for us, and all the forces it contains, namely climate, will in the end have the final word as it acts and reacts to the devastation we have rendered upon it. Again and again we have called out of arrogance and into humility and corrective action. This is a call to repentance actually; simply put, a call to change one’s mind – to have a change of heart – to go a different way. It is my prayer for Christiandom, that we chose a different way.
