"To Work It And Take Care Of It"
Genesis, Joseph, And Solving Our Environmental Puzzle By Listening First
Dear Friends,
I am, I think unsurprisingly, someone who loves a good puzzle. Jigsaw puzzles, of course, but also doing the New York Times Spelling Bee with my wife, performing mental manipulations of objects, and experimenting with codes. I grew up a stack of kids’ MENSA books and one of my newest pleasures is the New Yorkers’ Name Drop.
My interest in the Name Drop is a funny one. I am notoriously terrible at remembering the names of famous people. In high school, my Russian teacher loved using photos of celebrities as a tool for practicing descriptions of people. I, however, was a teenage girl who couldn’t tell Brad Pitt from a box of socks, and also couldn’t tell you anything he appeared in. Luckily for me, the New Yorker is the sort of place that “name drops” the types of people I’m more likely to actually know. I’m not phenomenal at it, but I do okay.
The Name Drop is only posted on weekdays, so besides my ongoing loyalty to Wordle, it’s often one of the first things I do on Monday mornings. It’s a way of reorienting to my week, engaging my brain in a small cognitive exercise. So, this Monday, as I set about starting my day, I flipped over to that puzzle and, with two of the six clues, broke the code.
Spoiler alert if you play the Name Drop intermittently but the answer for Monday August 21st was Greta Thunberg.
One of the things. about all these puzzles is that they often provide us with a connection to our particular moment. When the Wordle first took off, we all noticed when the word seemed themed to the day. Top-notch jigsaw puzzle constructors have infamously built puzzles with interchangeable answers based on current events (if you don’t know about the CLINTON-ELECTED/BOBDOLE-ELECTED puzzle of 1996, you need to check this out.) In a related manner, the organizer for my jigsaw puzzle contests often picks puzzles related to the season or timely trivia facts that he can ask us to earn door prizes.
So, on this Monday, Greta Thunberg seemed like a puzzle themer, not just the name that was on the basic schedule for the day. Given the state of things, the young woman who stood before the UN demanding that they recognize that “Our House Is On Fire” – that they not just acknowledge, but act like it, – couldn’t have been a more fitting answer.
Our house is on fire because of our own systemic inaction, yes, but our Biblical forebears were not unfamiliar with sensation. This past Sunday, scripture (at least if you used Track 1) reminded us of how Joseph came to understand his place in Pharaoh’s house as God’s way of intervening to save people amidst the great famine, while this coming Sunday will shift us into Exodus and, over the next few weeks, the plagues. Undoubtedly, such famines and blights made it feel like the world was on fire. Archaeologists, geologists, and others have uncovered mass extinctions and devastating ecological events of the past.
People have felt the panic we feel now. Unfortunately, we’ve created conditions under which the fire most likely cannot go out. It’s terrifying for us, and I’m sure terrifying for our children. Greta Thunberg herself is right between my two much younger sisters in age, and (while of course it involved some major recessions, job market nightmares, and its own array of not-so-natural disasters), I got a 10-15 year head start on adulthood compared to these young people. The world – our house – is on fire. And much like the other horrors of our contemporary moment (see my post on gun violence), we have to know how to talk about our climate crisis and, vitally, listen to young people talk about it, in ways that empower them.
Maui is burning. Canada has been burning. Spokane, Washington, Camden, New Jersey, and Tenerife, Spain are all alight. So what do we say?
Becoming Prepared
In the part of Joseph’s story in the book of Genesis that we heard this past week, Joesph tells his brothers, “do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.” What extraordinary grace and mercy!
Joseph was a seer, a prophet, and this was part of his work. But the conditions at hand may make this one of the most prescient texts we have at hand in regards to climate change. This was a vast, seven year famine that was set before them and here was this young man, the youngest most beloved brother, elevated now in the house of Pharaoh, leading them through it. This story is in so many ways our story.
So what do we say about it?
Unlike Joseph, we cannot and should not way, “do not be distressed.” But we must enter into a dialectic. Distress must stand beside certainty, the certainty that we can do something to make things different. We are not the government or the corporations, but this is our house, the gift of creation that stretches back even before we were born, even before the world was formed in God’s great hands. We are still beholden to it and to each other.
We Are Water Protectors written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade is an all-time favorite among Godly Players, and this beautiful book makes frequent appearances on our resource list for several reasons. Not only is it an excellent text for Creation Care, it honors the particular relationship between indigenous Americans and the local environment, it is also an invitation into the work of protecting the water we have been given all around the globe. (Carole Lindstrom also offers this excellent activity pack to go with it.)
Another empowering text that addresses the urgency of the moment without pushing us into a state of despair is Old Enough To Save the Planet written by Loll Kirby and illustrated by Adelina Lirius. I love books with concrete examples of how young people are changing the world because learning how to direct their faith towards service is a big piece of the work of formation for those of us working with children in late childhood and youth. Their belief in possibility can temper our experience, and our experience and resources can support them in their efforts to push for action. Our most central role in this battle is to be listening ears and a foundation for their dreams.
Joseph dreamed his community into survival. He was the wise young person who pushed a nation, an empire, toward preparedness and when we are short on dreams, we have young people all around us who are offering theirs, begging us to support them.
Our House Is On Fire
This past spring, my wife and I went to see one our favorite bands, the folk duo Emma’s Revolution. While the source of their name is the obvious (though actually somewhat fictionalized) quote, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution,” musicians Sandy O and Pat Humphries know that after decades of making protest music, they are no longer the ones leading the fight for change. Instead, they’re the ones listening to young revolutionaries – and in honor of that, they wrote “Our House Is On Fire,” drawing on Greta Thunberg’s declaration:
In addition to moving into our program year, many of our communities are highlighting the season of Creation Care. Godly Play even offers little orange additions for our calendars if this season is central to the life of your church. But what is this season and how do we make sense of its place in our lives?
Creation Care is, obviously not traditionally liturgical in the way we have long thought about liturgy. Arguably, it may even be extrabiblical. That being said, it can also be argued that it’s absolutely foundational. God creates the world and we the beings who bear God’s image at the very beginning of Genesis. And by Genesis 2, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” In this way, it is the first commandment, even before God tells Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Here is the Earth, God says. It is yours and you are to care for it. Go forth and do so.
The earth is on fire and the earth is our home and our children know it, as much or more than we do. How will we care for it in the midst of it?
The Season of Creation begins on September 1st (and a blog post on talking about climate crisis is forthcoming), so share with us your plans. How do we touch the earth with healing hands and open our ears to the cries of our young.
Peace,
Bird