I am a native Oregonian, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. My parents built a house on the back side of Mt. Tabor, on a lot behind my mother’s family home. My folks moved into that house before I was in kindergarten. I lived there until I was out on my own.
I was lucky that the grade school I attended was only a couple of blocks away. I walked to school regardless of the weather. Fall was always lovely and is still my favorite time of the year. Winters were snowy so there were usually a couple of sleds hanging in the garage. Spring was wet, very wet, and green. I always wished that we could go to school in June and get September off instead. We knew that the rain would stop only after the Rose Festival was over, and often, not until after the 4th of July. I watched many Rose Parades in the rain. It was just the way things were.
But weather patterns have shifted. The heat dome the Portland area experienced two years ago was a wake-up call for many people. It was extremely hot and scary for anyone without a cool place to be. This June about a third of the continental United States, including 100 million people, is experiencing a heat dome. Summer heat waves, which are simply rises in temperature, are to be expected. A heat dome is a high-pressure system that traps heat, allowing temperatures to remain elevated over an extended period of time without dropping as expected overnight. Until two years ago, we could not have commiserated. Now we can.
It is the first weekend of summer and climate news from around the world is not good. Maps showing hotter than usual temperatures encircle the globe. In Saudi Arabia, more than 1000 people have died from heat related illnesses as they attempted to fulfill their obligation to make a pilgrimage to their holy sites in Mecca. Earth has experienced the hottest-recorded start to 2024 and is on the way to breaking last year’s record. We are living in a chaotic climate “heat storm” of growing proportions, yet people don’t want to hear about Climate Change. I know that but I can’t stay quiet.
This Sunday’s readings, from Job, 38:1, 8-11, and from Mark, 4: 35-41, both assure us that God is in charge of the natural world. Both readings speak of a storm. In the first reading God speaks to Job from out of the storm. In Mark, the disciples wake Jesus to save them from a storm. Storms have long been used as metaphors for chaos and confusion in human history. In the midst of unusual storms, people try to figure out why things are happening the way they are. Who or what caused it? Why is it happening? How can we be saved? It is an ancient question: “Where is God in the midst of the storms of our lives?”
Ched Myer writing in Who will Roll Away the Stone offers the following commentary on this week’s Gospel.
“Jesus accompanies the disciples on their inaugural journey to the ‘other side’ of the Sea of Galilee, the master metaphor for boundary crossing in the first half of Mark. But a storm – the ancient Hebrew symbol of opposition and chaos – blows up. The little boat – the ancient Christian symbol of the church—begins to take on water. The disciples, among whom we may presume were experienced boatmen, realize they are going down. They panic while Jesus sleeps(!). Mark chooses this desperate moment to place on their lips the disciples’ very first query in the story, screamed into the teeth of the howling gale: ‘Teacher! Do you not care if we perish?’ This is such a compassionate vignette! How often have we felt like this, terrified that we will be overwhelmed by all that threatens us, uncertain whether Jesus cares? Yet there is something odd about this tale; the disciple are more unnerved after Jesus silences the storm than they were in the midst of it.”
“The incredulity arises from this: If Jesus opens new space with his alternative authority, we can no longer take refuge in the excuses that we cannot reasonably be expected to live differently. Lovers of normalcy, we are uncertain where we want radical change; as on the Sea of Galilee, the storms of history are rough but at least they are predictable.” (Pgs. 406-407).
The storms we face today are different than those that the disciples and early church experienced, but we, too, are “lovers of normalcy.” Change does not come easy even in the face of abundant experiences and scientific data that reveal the causes and effects of not changing. Jesus was right there in the same boat with the disciples and yet they were afraid. He quieted the storm for them, but then challenged their faith.
It is a central tenet of our faith that God/Jesus works through us, the people who currently inhabit the world. We say we are the hands and feet of Jesus and yet, more often than not, we fail to step up to the tasks we are given. God has spoken through creation. God has spoken through scientists. God has spoken in our individual and collective experiences. God has spoken powerfully through Pope Francis. The message is intensifying: Our lifestyles have to change. We are running out of time. We are holding on to normalcy while the Earth burns. We refuse to end our dependence on fossil fuels for energy, on animals for food, and consumption as a way of life. We like our way of life. We don’t want to change.
Pope Francis reminds us repeatedly: everything is interconnected. Poverty, violence, human migration, the depletion of aquifers, the rising sea level, all of this and more is worsened by the ‘Climate Storm’ we face. God speaks through us and to us through others. We can see holy writing in desertification and floods. We have heard what we must do, but our actions, individual and collective, tell us that we don’t yet believe it. “Why? Are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”