Of Making a Difference

Especially during hurricane season, I like to peruse the Weatherunderground web site. You can get local forecasts, live Nexrad radar, animated satellite imagery, computer models…all kinds of cool meteorological stuff. Since at the moment, there is no tropical activity in the North Atlantic, Dr. Jeff Masters, the chief weather guy and co-founder of the web site, who usually writes the forecast concerning the tropics, today wrote an extensive piece on global warming, reviewing a new book called “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” by James Hansen, a highly respected scientist on climate change who teaches at Columbia University in New York and who has headed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York since 1981. Hansen has done extensive study on the disappearing polar and sub polar ice sheets, the rise of ocean levels and temperatures, and the catastrophic result if we don’t find a way to stop our continued pollution of our biosphere with greenhouse gases.

At the end of the piece, which normally is the end of the blog, there is the usual section by which one may comment on what one has just read. Usually, because the blog is a weather forecast, weather geeks make comments about barometric pressure, cloud tops, sea surface temperatures, the making and remaking of eye walls, etc. but today was decidedly different. One comment (expletives deleted) said, “Let’s stick to weather!…this site shouldn’t be about *&%# politics. Politics!? I thought…this isn’t about politics…this is science, and genuine concern for our mutual well being…and yes climate change has everything to do with weather…but as I scrolled down the blog comments…they all became instruments of the culture wars…name calling…the so-called liberals and conservatives going at it…disparaging remarks about presidents past and present. It was all quite off the subject at hand, and mean spirited, and to say the least, of no productive value.

There was a time, an era perhaps, in which the church was thought by most best seen and not heard. Ours was not to meddle in the affairs of the world…issues deemed political or social or economic…and to that we now can add environmental…Ours was not to call out injustice in its many manifestations in our common life…Ours was to be the proverbial “hospital for sinners”…a safe haven ironically from the very world we are meant to serve…a place in which to affirm our own private salvations. I want to say that if church is to survive with any integrity,  then we must say goodbye to those old ways, which were in truth ways, even if unconscious, to abdicate our responsibilities as people of faith, people of conscience, people of intelligent and imaginative inquiry and discourse….people who make a difference…people who serve the salvation of the whole.

But let me hasten to say also that we can’t engage effectively our world amid the boorish angry ethos of the culture wars. No, our way is different. Our way is to do the hard work of understanding the issues that face us, and to intelligently, artfully and graciously make our case as ones who serve first the greater good, always recognizing that other solutions may be possible, that we aren’t the only ones who own the truth of the matter…even recognize, in the face of the complexities of our world, that we might be dead wrong about things we were once so very sure about…We must do our work as citizens of God’s commonweal, and graciously engage our world with urgency tempered with steadfast patience for the good of the whole. If we don’t who will…certainly the rancor of the culture wars has proved fruitless, polarizing and downright abusive.

 Ours is to model truth…I don’t mean to say the “I’m right and you’re wrong” kind of truth…I mean truth as an imaginative process of discovery…living as a community into the possibility of a world made whole…to live as the healer we are made to be…because that in all truth will make all the difference.