Soon, Pope Francis will be coming to America. His message will be mixed for our political discourse. He will speak for life and love. His recent encyclical on the need to act against the human sin of pollution and its resulting global warming hit home to me with two events.
In the last month, I have seen the sun colored blood red from a thick smoke coming from the devastating fires we have had in the Northwest. It was hard to breathe and in the middle of the summer kids had to stay inside for health reasons. Forest fires fueled by a drought, which is expected to last into next year. We are breathing in our own sin of greed. When global warming was first detected, one of the predictions was drought. Water would become precious.
Over the weekend the Internet was chattering about 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi. The boy was pulled up from the beach after drowning as his family was trying to escape Syria to Europe as a victim of global warming. I was reminded of the pope’s point of how the poorest of us pay the steepest price for our addiction to oil. The Syrian Civil War was the first, and horribly, not the last war which has had as one of its roots in global warming. Syria had been in the middle of a seven year drought that climate science arises directly out of our lust for the dead black liquid. The Syrian farmers lost their land and move to the cities, putting social pressure on the country couldn’t handle. The pressure exploded into the tragedy as desperate people turn to the ISIS’s poisoned ideology. How many more Syrians will die be before we start taking action to stop the sin of greed upon the planet?
We are at a crossroads. Do we continue to indulge in our oil addiction and continue to see human suffering or do we repent and start to get ourselves off oil? This the most important moral issue we face as Christians and as humans. We as Christians are called to work for the welfare of the place God places us. If we continue to ignore God’s call to love and plug our ears with siren call of climate deniers, then we too well face the consequence of the sin of greed about God’s creation. We are given a choice between death (and oil) and life. God urges us to choose life.
