Becoming People Who Won't Look Away
Rejecting apathy and cynicism in the face of predictable tragedies
Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released it's latest report. In their press release, they wrote,
In 2018, IPCC highlighted the unprecedented scale of the challenge required to keep warming to 1.5°C. Five years later, that challenge has become even greater due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change.
Then, a paragraph later, the IPCC goes on to describe some of the implications of our collective failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. In every region, people are dying from extreme heat. Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase with increased warming. When the risks combine with other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more difficult to manage.
On Monday of this week we again received the terrible news about another school shooting, this one in Nashville. I've written before about the hopelessness that characterizes these mass killings. As with the predictable news about climate change, these deaths are overwhelming in part because they have become so expected. It's an awful thing to stand before a slow moving train, knowing with certainty that it can be stopped and that the most we'll do is argue about whether it's worth stopping it.
Given these awful circumstances, how do we avoid succumbing to cynicism or apathy? How do we become the sorts of people who refuse to quit, who will not abandon God's vision of the whole Creation singing our thankful praise?
In the early days of the pandemic, when I was preaching to our dispersed congregation through a camera from our office, our church began a series of sermons from 1 Peter. I chose this letter because of how it begins: "Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces..." While our situations differed from those of the communities to which Peter wrote, it seemed we too had entered a time of scattering.
But Peter's letter to exiled and struggling Christians surprised me. While acknowledging their hardships ("...for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials..."), the apostle didn't dwell for long on these circumstances. Instead, the letter is full of counsel on living as a set-apart community, "a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession." Peter is not subtle about this, reminding the churches that "just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do."
You could read 1 Peter as an invitation to spiritually escape the persistent turmoil in the world. Perhaps the circumstances faced by these young Christians were so big - famines, fickle emperors, local ostracism - that the only reasonable response was to turn inward. If so, this certainly wouldn't be the last time Christians were accused of being no earthly good.
But Christianity is not an escapist religion. As Norman Wirzba writes in his recent book, "To want to flee embodiment and materiality is to want to flee the places where God is at work. It is to suffer from a failure of incarnational nerve." So if Peter is not urging a retreat into quietism, what?
I'm privileged to have as friends Christian women and men who've given much of their lives to the pursuit of justice. Time and time again, they wade into the terrible depths, willingly taking in the scope of this world's agonies. And while they each make regular time for rest, they do not turn away. They have not allowed the overwhelming nature of our groaning world to press them into apathy or cynicism. They have become the sort of people who are not overcome.
It seems to me that this is the urgent need in our day, to become the kind of people who will not look away. Who will continue to bear witness. Who will nurture resilience when others have fled to comforting distractions. These are the sorts of people who won't give up the good fights for peace in our cities and schools, for policies which hold back exploitation and extraction, for economies which make life in all its vulnerable forms more desirable than death.
I think this is how Peter was encouraging those young and relatively defenseless churches to live and worship. His focus on formation was not an excuse to retreat, but to become people who would, as Peter writes in closing, stand fast in the grace of God. For the foreseeable future, these Christians would be faced with intractable troubles but these would never be enough to overcome the kinds of people these communities were becoming. They were being shaped to persist with joy.
And us? What sort of people are we becoming?
(Photo: Pixabay)