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Climate Justice

Resisting Apocalypse

As I approached this service and read the appointed readings I was struck by the sense of end times captured there. In our present era it feels as if we are in the end times. It gives me more sympathy for the writers of these apocalyptic pieces and helped me decide not to jettison them in favour of Maya Anjelou or Richard Wagamese as I might otherwise be tempted to do.

Of apocalytic texts in general, the theologian Ched Myers, who has preached here on a few occasions has this to say:

“Apocalyptic discourse in the Bible is not about predicting God’s cataclysmic destruction of the world, as so often assumed in popular culture.  Rather it expresses the fierce imagination of those who long for the end of destructive oppression by the imperial state.  After all, for the poor, the “end of the world” is already and forever being visited upon their communities by soldiers and fortune hunters and police.

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“becoming available to the land”

George McKibbon,
Environmental Planner, McKibbon Wakefield Inc.

Let’s pray: may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and Redeemer. Amen.

Thank you for the opportunity to deliver this sermon to you today. This opportunity comes at a perilous time: we are failing to address the threats arising from a warming climate. David Wallace-Wells speaks to the dangers facing us in his book entitled: The Uninhabitable Earthi. I can summarize his analysis visually as three successively larger rings each fitting within the other. The inner ring identifies what is incontrovertible: the world’s climate is warming. This inner ring is surrounded by a second larger ring, within which he describes the results of this warming: species lost, wildfire such as that occurring this weekend in California, extreme weather such as the winds that are driving the wildfires in California, flooding, rising sea levels etc. linear results. In the larger third ring are less well understood and tipping points, loss of agricultural productivity, permafrost melting, uninhabitable landscapes, failed societies, climate refugees, etc. non-linear complex tipping points where the landscape character changes substantially and possibly irrevocably.

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