Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth

“Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth”

The Fifth Annual Richard W. Snowdon Lecture

Sponsored by

The InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington

April 19, 2009

At Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church

by

Rev. Richard Cizik

 

 

Good afternoon, on the Sunday before Earth Day.   I am honored to be with you here today to give the InterFaith Conference’s “Fifth Snowden Lecture” entitled “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth.”    

 

I want to thank my friend Rev. Clark Lobenstine, the Director of Washington’s InterFaith Conference, for this invitation.  While Clark knows me from my sporadic involvement with your annual “9/11 Unity Walk” and my outspokenness on creation care, I’ve warned him that he’s taking a risk whenever he invites an Evangelical to speak at an “interfaith” event.  “Pray tell, why?” you might ask. 

 

Historically, evangelicals shy away from anything “interfaith” for theological assumptions that any such gathering must surely promote syncretism or universalism.  I think that’s an unfair characterization, but it exists.  In any case, if I say something untoward or out of place, you’ll have to forgive and then correct me. 

 

My title “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth” reminds me of the following story:

An evangelical (substitute your own faith group) was driving over hill and dale when he jumps out of his truck and strides up to a shepherd quietly tending his flock.  The American says, “If I can tell you how many sheep you have, can I have one?”  While he’s struck by the absurdity of the question, the shepherd nonetheless consents.  Whereupon, the evangelical goes back to his truck, gets on GPS (God’s positioning satellite), and within moments goes back to the shepherd to tell him he has 1,168 sheep.  The shepherd exclaims, ‘That’s amazing.  How did you know?  Go pick one out.”  Well, the American is driving away when the shepherd runs up to him, knocks on his window, and asks: “If I can tell you what you do for a living, can I have my sheep back?”  The American responds, “of course.”  The shepherd says “You are a consultant.”  “That’s amazing the evangelical says, “How did you know?”  The shepherd answers “You come into my world, about which you know nothing, ask me questions for which I don’t need answers, leave out charge me a lot of money, and most of all, you don’t know diddlysquat, you took my sheep dog.” 

 

We’re all a little like that, proposing to give others answers to questions not previously asked, and doing so in a way that makes us look foolish.   What I have going for me here is that the reality which I intend to present to you is so compelling that the prospect for misdiagnosis is minimized and the obviousness of the solution is maximized. 

 

 

 Let me begin by saying that this is a defining moment.  Why do I say that?  we are at a “defining moment” in human history.  Why? 

 

 

First, it’s a troubling and difficult time in American history.  These realities range from global warming to terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an economic meltdown that poses risks of unparalleled nature.  Literally, millions of people have lost their jobs, homes and livelihoods.  For them and surely others watching these unsettling events it’s easy to feel as if the wheels of civilization are coming off.  Some of what’s happened has been the result of uncontrollable natural events, such as Katrina.  Others are self-inflicted, such as when a nation overextends itself in war and must as a result alter its course.  Other consequences are the result of pride, apathy and greed and innocent people suffer. 

 

From a global perspective, people are divided into the super-fed and super-entertained few and huge masses living on the edge of starvation.  We may ache for our embattled planet and the losers among us, but we are way too embedded in our long dysfunctional economic and political structures to see our way out to natural safety.   

 

Second, the reigning world views for millions of people are notably unable to chart their way through the insanity of our times.  Neither hyper rationalism (which is no attack on reason, since reason itself is a matter of faith) nor hyper emotivism or for that matter postmodernism, provide needed answers for a complex world.  The former is filled with false pride and the latter with false humility.  It’s so, to quote G.K. Chesterton, who wrote one-hundred years ago but is extraordinarily appropriate today, because “unlike lunatic rationalists who believe they know everything, mad emotivists deny they know anything, loathe to make ethical claims of any kind.”

 

The cure for hyper-rationalism, wrote G.K. Chesterton, is “imagination.”  To see it not as two separate realms – the visible and invisible, the literal and the figurative, the natural and the supernatural.  In other words, the cosmos invites us, instead, to discern these spheres as mysteriously, even miraculously, overlapping and intersecting.”  As for hyper-emotivism or post-modernism, the suspicion of all meta-narratives, whether Copernican and Newtonian science of Enlightenment, or in the Christian creeds, that worldview doesn’t suffice either.  The idea that we can make no comparative judgments, engage in time-transcending religious arguments, allow no privileging of certain cultures, is also false.  The cure for it, in the mind of Chesterton, is a “decisive liberty, the liberty to bind myself.”  He said that “discipline and fidelity, oaths and obligations, are the means of joy.” 

 

Third, the world is getting warmer and the planet is in peril.  In 2005, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecological Assessment .  The work of 1,360 experts in 95 nations from 22 national science academies, the study reported that over the past 50 years a rising human population has polluted or over-exploited two-thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends. 

 

Last year, I visited what is our “early warming system” for North America, an island village named Shishmaref located off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea.  The native tribe of Inupiks are already experiencing a devastating blow, sea level rise that is forcing them from their homes of the last four hundred years.  The impoverished residents of coastal megacities in the Third World will soon face a similar fate.  For them, it’s not a matter of halting climate change; it’s too late for that.  Learning to adapt is the challenge.

 

  Those species that do adapt, survive.  Those which don’t adapt, according to Professor Bob Doppelt, a climatologist and systems analyst at the University of Oregon, go extinct.    Human beings have a greater capacity to adapt, but won’t necessarily do so.  Climate change has, in his systems mind, the capacity to “determine the winners and losers.”  It will even determine the fate of religious movements and political parties.  So, listen up evangelicals and the climate-denying Republicans who together share one thing in common – both by nearly identical percentages, only about 38%, agree that climate change is anthropogenic, or human caused.  

 

Fourth, and finally, we’re at a defining moment in history because we must make fundamental choices about the ways we are going to live.  Grasping the significance of the moment to make the deep shifts in thinking, perception, and behavior required to succeed in this new reality is what historian Thomas Berry calls “The Great Work” of a people.

 

   Some illustrations of failure to do this include the Mayan culture which collapsed in part because they failed to heed the warning of depleted soils, silted lakes, and declining water supply in dry years.  Geographer Jarred Diamond suggests that the Norse culture in Greenland collapsed because they did not adapt their thinking and perspectives to cooler weather conditions. 

 

 

We need a new kind of leadership at so many levels.  I like the line from Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf said:

 

“The rule of the realm is mine.  But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care.  And for my part I shall not wholly fail if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair, and flower and bear fruit in the days to come.  For I too am a steward, did you not know?”

 

Let us remember that, in the end, it was the fun-loving, unassuming little hobbits, who took on their shoulders the awesome task.  They were scared and they didn’t know which way to go.  But in the end, all the kings and warriors and wizards could only stand by as the little people saved the world. 

 

What is real leadership?  It is extraordinary courage from ordinary people.  Literally, the fate of the world depends on it.     

 

 

There is a “great paradox”:  92% of the public is aware of global warming; 74% believe it’s real and already underway; 61% agree there’s a scientific consensus on the topic; and 71% consider it a somewhat to serious problem. 

 

But if Americans seem concerned, they still rank the environment about last of the most important problems facing the nation, just below urban sprawl.  Why do some people see it is an urgent, imminent danger and others merely a gradual, incremental problem?

 

The answer is that American risk perceptions and support for certain policies are strongly influenced by experiential factors – including affect, imagery, and values.  In other words, our risk perception of global warming is influenced by both psychological and socio-cultural factors, especially one’s worldview, dimensions that are rarely examined by opinion polls. 

 

 

You may say to me, “Of course, I knew that.”  But most theorists assume that decision making about risk is essentially a cognitive activity.  They focus on the role of scientific information and knowledge in the formation of the public’s environmental beliefs and misconceptions.  For example, many people mistakenly believe that ozone depletion is caused by aerosol spray cans.  This leads to the logical, but mistaken inference that banning aerosol spray cans is an effective solution to climate change.  But simply providing more accurate information is not sufficient to generate public concern.

 

Cultural theorists explain that social values and world view play an important role in risk perception and behavior.

 

Let me illustrate it this way:  A man goes to his doctor and complains, “Doc, I’m dead.”  And his doctor responds, “No, you’re not.  You’ve very much alive.”  Nonetheless, the man persists, so his physician gives him an MRI.  But the man disbelieves.  So, his doctor gives him an electrocardiogram.  And, still, this poor benighted soul disbelieves.  Finally, in exasperation, the doctor pulls out a lancet, grabs the man’s hand, and pokes his finger.  The man turns ashen white, exclaiming “My gosh, dead men bleed after all.”  In other words, his world view wouldn’t permit him to believe the evidence no matter how persuasive.  

 

Four different worldviews or models of “rationality” exist:   hierarchical, fatalistic, individualistic, and egalitarian.  Each worldview thus represents a different presupposition about the ideal nature of society, which leads each group to perceive different risks and prefer different policy responses.  (Anthony Leiserowitz, Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values, 2006, Decision Research, Eugene, Oregon)

 

Leiserowitz argues that “hierarchical types fear social deviance, which threatens the status quo.  They call for the active management of risk by ‘experts’ in whom they place trust.  Individualists most fear restrictions on their autonomy, such as government regulation, so they promote market-based strategies.  Egalitarians are more concerned about injustice in the distribution of risk cost and benefits and thus promote participatory, democratic, and consensus-based decision making that includes all affected parties as equals.” 

 

Remember, these are only ideal types, and few individuals hold to these positions consistently.  Still, some themes emerged: Egalitarians were more likely to support higher taxes to mitigate climate change.  Fatalists (e.g., if a person has the get up and go to acquire wealth, that person should have the right to enjoy it), hierarchicalists and individualists were more likely to oppose them.

 

   In the final analysis, 68% said they were most concerned about the impacts of global warming around the world and only 13% with impacts on themselves.  Support for national and international climate policies was strongly associated with pro-egalitarian values, while opposition was associated with anti-egalitarian, pro-individualist and pro-hierarchist values.  And, finally, these value commitments were stronger predictors than either political party identification or ideology. 

 

Bottom line:  underlying values and worldviews strongly condition the way many members of the public think about climate change risk and public policy options to mitigate it.

 

For people of faith, this poses great challenges and opportunity.   What is a “worldview” except a picture in one’s mind of reality?   That picture or vision for millions upon millions of citizens is guided not by religious ideals or values but by a “rationality” that conflicts with their own stated belief system – whether they know it or not.  

As a result, we don’t often listen to or even hear any challenges to our existing worldview.  What do we do about this?  How does one begin to see things differently?  I suggest that we must, first of all, have a new vision. 

 

 

I. A New Vision Requires that We See and Think more Clearly.

 

To have a new vision requires moving from simply “seeing” to “beholding.”  What’s the difference?  It’s seeing the world through God’s eyes. 

 

The Bible says that “without a vision, the people perish.”   For those of us who come from the Judeo-Christian heritage, we’ve adopted a new language or idiom, and we call it creation care.  It comes from Genesis 2:15 where we’re told by God to “care and protect” the creation, be a steward over it.  

 

Why haven’t we been able to see with new eyes before?  A quote from John Maynard Keynes in 1935 explains this.  He said, “The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” 

 

No one likes to change.  Margaret Mead once said that “The only person who likes to change is a wet baby.”  Change is hard to assess, brings uncertainty, and entails cost.  Beyond all these factors, however, a failure to adapt is powerfully exacerbated by converging biological, psychological, organizational, political, and even religious phenomena.   

 

The history of the Christian faith community is a lesson in itself.  Why did it sacrifice its voice on the environment? 

 

Long ago, early Church fathers substituted a platonic vision emphasizing the spiritual over the material for proper stewardship of creation.  Then the great reformers viewed the earth as primarily as a stage for the contest over man’s soul.  And in more recent decades, the Bible’s authority has been undermined by challenges to its authority from many quarters, including new age religions.

 

And, today, believers are more than willing to turn over their duties from God to the State.  The typical believer who has been entrusted with stewardship duties has given that role over to the government.  This concept of “fiduciary ownership” is understandable and even justifiable but it would seem to call for an engagement with the political world to assure that that ownership is exercised wisely.     

 

But on a very fundamental level, according to theologians such as N.T. Wright, the evangelical Bishop of Durham, we’ve all been influenced by Plato, the most influential thinker in the history of the Western world.  For Plato, the present world of space, time, and matter is a world of illusion and our task is to get in touch with the true reality, which is beyond space, time, and matter.  The platonic stream entered Christianity early on through the phenomenon known as Gnosticism, which has influenced some of the seminal thinkers of the last 200 years – Blake, Goethe, Melville, Yeats, Jung, and others though their ideas have been cross fertilized by other ideas too.

 

Gnostic spirituality is quite at odds with the very concrete kingdom-of-God-on-Earth announced by the Jesus of the canonical gospels.  I first heard Tom Wright on this topic a few years ago at Windsor, England.  He writes in Surprised by Hope that “most Western Christians – and most Western non-Christians, for that matter, -- in fact suppose that Christianity was committed to at least a soft version of Plato’s position.  The “just passing through” spirituality (as in the spiritual “This world is not my home, I’m just a’passen through) though it has some affinities with classical Christianity, encourages precisely a Gnostic attitude.    

 

A massive assumption has been made in Western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to “got to heaven where you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that mention heaven are read as if they did say that, and texts that say the opposite, like Romans 8:18-25, and Revelation 21-22, are simply screened out as if they didn’t exist.

 

Bishop Wright says that “Secularists often criticize Christians for contributing to ecological disaster, and there’s more than a grain of truth in the charge.”  In other words, he writes, “I have heard it seriously argued in North America that since God intends to destroy the present space-time universe, and moreover since he intends to do so quite soon now, it really doesn’t matter whether we emit twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as we do now, whether we destroy the rain forests and arctic tundra, whether we fill our skies with acid rain.” 

 

No wonder millions of evangelicals are ripe for attitudes like the following:  environmentalist are disdained as “leftists”; mainstream science in distrusted on account of evolution and Darwin; stories the media “hypes” are rejected as scaremongering; free-market economics is distrustful of governmental solutions; and “dominion” allows us to do whatever we want with this earth.  .

 

 Moreover, you can add one more ingredient to this noxious brew – the environment is not divided by national or political boundaries, but is a global entity.  And, this is potentially beyond personal perception and realistically foreseeable political will.       

 

            But a new vision is taking hold.  It’s called “creation care,” which essentially means living a sustainable lifestyle.   The Biblical commands in Gen. 2:15 “to serve and to protect,” “avad” and “shamar” means to be care-takers, not just takers.  It’s living a sustainable lifestyle. 

 

Sustainable?  Where does that come from in the Bible?  Well, my favorite verse is Luke 6:13:  “Store up your treasures not on earth, where moths and rust destroy, and thieves steal, but in heaven, where neither occurs, for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”  My friend Bishop James Jones of Liverpool, an evangelical thinker and advocate, says the best word to describe heaven is a place where things don’t rust or mold, or thieves steal.  So what happens in heaven?  Nothing goes extinct.  And, so Jesus in the same passage of Luke 6 says, in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  He calls this the “earth-ing of heaven” and the heaven-ing of earth.”    

 

            This is the vision.  However, when I ask on campuses, “Has your pastor, rabbi, or Imam ever taught a sermon on stewardship of the earth?  Has he or she ever made the connection between faith and care for the earth, the answer is almost universally “no.” 

 

            Why not?  It may be “too divisive” or controversial.  It may reveal our consumerism lifestyle which touches too close to home. 

 

Why did it take the American Christian 100 years to grasp what William Wilberforce was doing in Great Britain by abolishing the slave trade?   They were addicted in their day to the sugar cubes in their coffee, made possible by the slave trade, in the same way we are addicted to a lifestyle dependent supposedly on oil and the burning of fossil fuels.

 

            Or it may be the impact of a faith that teaches an end-times doomsday scenario is that it has contributed to preachers’ unwillingness to address the environment.    In years to come, the generations that follow us will ask the same questions of those who lived during slavery and the Third Reich, “Now could you not know?  How could you wait so long?”

 

 

 

 

II. An Effective Strategy Requires that We Care More Deeply.

 

            It’s been said that a vision without a strategy is an hallucination.  No, we’re not hallucinating here.  But we do have to move from a Gnostic, neo-platonist, and what is ultimately an anthropocentric world view, to a cosmo-centric worldview, as in “For God so loved the cosmos, He sent his only-begotten Son…)

 

               Believing it’s possible, to begin with, is the start of this journey. 

But it’s not just a theological vision that’s necessary.  It requires a strategy that works.  And, the best strategy is one that forces us to “bridge outward,” as Princeton professor Robert Putnam puts it.  The biggest obstacle to creating change – in whatever vocation you choose – depends upon fostering what scholars call “cognitive liberation,” a freeing of people from their destructive worldviews.    

 

History doesn’t march with some inexorable Hegelian force, but turns on our decisions and choices.  And, if we have significant parts of our population that are unwilling to take action the environment, or a part of our population that doesn’t believe in human-induced global warming, we’ve got to effect some cognitive liberation of their world view. 

 

The only way to bridge this gap is to bring scientists and people of faith together.  Science answers the question of “what?”  Religion answers the question of “why?”  Bringing the two groups together is the strategy. 

 

 And that’s exactly what we have done with our “Scientist-Evangelical” retreats and expeditions co-sponsored by the NAE and the Harvard Center on Health and the Global Environment. 

 

One of the most interesting personalities in this conversation is Gus Speth, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and the Environment.  Here’s what he said:

 

  “Thirty years ago, I thought that with enough good science, we would be able to solve the environmental crisis.  I was wrong. I used to think the greatest problems threatening the planet were pollution, bio-diversity loss and climate change.  I was wrong there too.  I now believe that the greatest problems are pride, apathy and greed.  Because that’s what’s keeping us from solving the environmental problem.  For that, I now see that we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.  And we in the scientific community don’t know how to do that.  But you evangelicals do.  We need your help.”

 

Well, we as evangelical leaders are committed to offering that help. You can discover how these two communities have come to agreement about protecting Creation by reading our statement entitled “An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation,” released January 17, 2007, at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.  Additionally, the the PBS “NOW” program entitled “God and Global Warming” is another example of bridge-building across the faith-scientific divide.

 

Many scientists, led by E.O. Wilson, the leading environmental scientist of our time, have agreed to refer to the earth as “the creation” once again.  The era of name calling has come to an end.  The era of cooperation is at hand and none too soon. 

 

            Together we can help our two worlds change their thinking.  And, it’s the changing of one’s way of thinking that brings about behavioral change. 

 

            If you have a defective vision of the world – an anthropocentric cultural bias (that leads believers to understand “people” in place of the literal translation “the world” in John 3:16) – then Christianity loses its relevance for the earth and a secular, utilitarian world view emerges that turns the earth and all its features and creatures into mere commodities.  What at first appears to be a slight error becomes a monstrous wrong.

 

If you have a defective strategy for change – one’s mind frame is myopic meaning only focused on your immediate needs and you can’t see how your actions affect the ecological system you are part of – you can’t expect people to change. 

 

 A lot of the information on the web and in books describes what people should do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and behave sustainably.  Books describe “”50 Things You Can Do To Save The Earth.”  No less than 39 sets of sustainability principles have been established.  But few resources exist to help people think through and decide why and How to make creation-positive sustainable decisions given the complicated nature of the issues.  These questions are much more important than catalogues of actions individuals can take.  People need reasons, not directives, to guide their thinking and behavior when fundamental change is required. 

 

A friend of mine, Bob Doppelt, author of The Power of Sustainable Thinking, says that we must move from a “Take, Make, and Waste” mentality to a “Borrow, Use, and Return” mentality.   Research shows that a systemic relationship exists between the weight people give to the pros and cons of a potential change and their readiness to make a shift.  The more the downsides dominate, the more the people will resist new approaches, and the more the upsides rule, the greater the likelihood that change will occur.    

 

Generally, eighty percent or more of a group of people are not prepared to quickly alter their thinking and behavior on an issue.  This is especially true when the changes involve deeply held beliefs and assumptions about the natural environment or other people.  It should therefore be no surprise that many climate protection and sustainability initiatives struggle. 

 

Change experts have known for a long time this truth:  Information alone is not sufficient to foster fundamental change.  Action without some increased awareness also fails in the long run. 

 

What is needed is for faith leaders to re-frame the conversation along lines that have heretofore been either ignored or regarded as too difficult.    Reframing is defined b by Professor here at American University as “…..”  

 

I like the way Anouar Majid, Chair and Professor of English at the U. of New England, put it at our recent Muslim-Evangelical Consultation on Climate Change held at the World Bank:  “Creation care requires unconditional love for God’s whole creation, including our fellow humans, without regard to their religions.  One could imagine this approach leading to more trust, even love, thereby tempering the destructive (but equally human) drive for accumulation and conquests,” he said.   

 

“In the language of faith, Christians and Muslims alike are called upon to care for God’s creation.  If we can’t come together to do something about environmental degradation, both communities will have, in essence, forfeited their missions, if not abdicated their faith altogether,” he added.  

 

I’d say that the tinder is dry. Conditions are right. All it takes is a spark here, a match there, and the interfaith religious community is going to wake-up and sneeze and bring grass-roots activism, and prayer and study, and working together as peacemakers for the sake of God’s good earth. 

 

 

 

III. Appropriate Tactics Require that We Act More Boldly.

 

            Politics makes strange bedfellows. Global warming, too, makes strange bedfellows.  It’s my sense that if our respective faith communities could agree on what to do about climate change, that might spur wider rethinking of positions and tensions.  And at the same time it might even contribute to world peace by bridging some divides.

 

Finally, let me offer some advice about the tactics we need to use.  My favorite story is the story of Daniel in the Old Testament.   Why?  He offers us lessons on the right tactics to employ in this great struggle for the hearts and minds of our faith groups and the nation as a whole. 

 

In the time of King Darius, Daniel was not only a servant leader but an irritant to his competitors in the royal court. Darius intent on creating a Medes-Persian empire, has his critics and they devise a plan to bring him down.  An edict is sought from the King declaring (Daniel 6:7) “that anyone who prays to any god or human being during the next thirty days, except to you, your Majesty, shall be thrown into the lions’ den.”  Daniel, on the other hand, “went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened to Jerusalem.  Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.”  A coup is thus begun to bring down not just Daniel but the King.

 

Dairus must make a choice of a nature not unlike leaders of the world today:  save his friend Daniel and sacrifice his kingdom or sacrifice Daniel and save the kingdom.  It’s what ethicists call a “tragic moral choice” where both options are perilously bad.  Today, leaders and politicians must make a similar choice: save their friends, those who have given them millions of dollars from special-interests, and sacrifice not just the kingdom but the whole planet or save the planet and sacrifice their friends.  In my estimation, we have leaders in Congress who are willing to sacrifice the health of Creation itself, in order to save their friends.     

 

Leadership is essential.  What is this new kind of leadership?  It’s the ability in our own circumstances to make things happen.  It is the capacity and ability to facilitate movement from “the way things are” to the “way things out to be.” 

 

            For those of us in the religious community, we must be both the “Daniels” or “Danielles” to speak up.  It requires being a “disturbance” in a positive sense.

 

Why is that tactic necessary?  For two reasons:  First, leadership is about vision, but it is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted, according to author Jim Collins in his book From Good to Great:

 

“There’s a huge difference between ‘having your say’ and having the opportunity to be heard.”  Great, not just good leaders, understand this distinction, creating an environment wherein people have the opportunity for the truth to be heard.”  Second,  Bob Doppelt in his book The Power of Sustainable Thinking (Earthscan, 2008) states that “the most powerful force for the altering internal psychological structure of a human being is discontinuity between their prevailing thinking behavior and some deeply-held values and aspirations.”   

 

Think about the big changes you have made in your life?  Did this dynamic hold true?  Did you feel tension between your current state and a desired goal? And did you need to feel confident that you could close the gap before you took steps to change?   This is what is called the “trans-theoretical model of change” which recognizes that all change is a staged process. 

 

Our challenge is to move people from a position of denial to deliberate, to design, to doing, and finally to defending.  They can be called the “Five D’s.”  From “I won’t change,” to “I might change,” to I will change,” to “I am changing” and “I have changed.”      

 

 

By way of tactics, people ask me:  “What’s the one thing I can do – aside from changing my personal lifestyle – to change the reality on these issues?  My answer is to develop a sense of biblical outrage – to light a fire under America’s seeming apathy. 

 

This kind of action you can’t e-mail in, sign a petition online, or do a mouse click for carbon neutrality.  That won’t cut it.  You need politicians to pay attention.  Not patronize you.  This kind of godly action can only be uploaded the old-fashioned way -- by speaking truth to power.  Face to face.  Virtual politics is just that – virtual. 

 

We need young people – a Daniels and Danielle – who like James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, the first African American to enroll at the university, back in 1962.

 

The Meredith bronze is poised as if he’s striding toward a tall limestone archway, re-enacting his fateful step, onto the segregated campus, defying a violent, angry mob.

 

Above the archway, carved into stone, is the word “Courage.”  That is what godly moral vision, imagination, being a blessing means, that’s what God is calling us to be and do.  Understand your own power and virtue. 

 

Understand that we do not have time to spare.  Scientists such as James Hanson suggest that we’re on a short fuse before “tipping points” we don’t understand commence. 

 

There is a Screwtape story of three young devils who were completing their training in hell. 

 

Immediately before their dispatch to earth, they appeared before the chief devil for their concluding examination.  Turning to the first of the three, he asked:  ‘What will you tell them when you go up to earth?’ ‘I shall tell them that there is no God’, the first devil replied.  ‘That’s not much use’, said the examining devil, ‘they’ve been told that many times before.  The trouble is that too many of them know Him personally.’ He turned to the second devil.  ‘And what shall you tell them? He enquired. ‘I shall say that there is no hell,’ he the second responded. ‘Ah,’ said the old devil, ‘that’s more ingenious.  But unfortunately it won’t work.  Too many of them are living in hell already.’ Finally, he asked the third, ‘What will you say?’  And the third answered, ‘I shall tell them that there is no hurry.’ ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed the chief demon. ‘Go up immediately and set to work.’

 

John Wesley’s “A Charge To Keep” puts it this way: “To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill, Oh may it all my powers engage, to do my Master’s will.  Arm me with jealous care, as in Thy sight to live, Oh, thy servant lead, Prepare a strict account to give.

 

 

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