ENGAGING THE UMC IN CLIMATE CHANGE
Sharon Delgado 2/2/2025
Very long preamble precedes this excerpt. Using MLK Letter from Birmingham Jail…..
William Myers recently retired from work at United Nations and cites Berry toward the end of his essay.
…I would like to submit for your consideration a way of thinking that has come late to me, but that now in my old age I find useful in starting to learn how to actively love in a time of climate change. I personally find its broad intellectual and spiritual roots most beautifully expressed in Thomas Berry’s great classic, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. I see three fundamental bases from which love must spring.
First is understanding who we are in terms of our complete interconnectedness with each other and all life. That is a fundamental modern scientific finding, but also a spiritual insight from many sources, including Christianity. We need to understand ourselves as part of the whole, not as “individuals” somehow separate from it. We are who we are through our relationships. Every “Me” is a “We”, and that “We” can encompass the planet.
Second, through our interconnectedness we experience the presence of God in all. Loving God means loving the whole works, the first part of the Great Commandment.
Third, because we are interconnected, everybody on Earth is our neighbor, and living the second part of the Great Commandment entails loving them all, including those dying kids and their grieving parents we help make suffer and that haunt us. We have to work out how to become such globally loving neighbors in practice, which is not simple. But maybe we can start with children.
Love in the time of climate change, I propose, may have to be unsettling love that yanks us out of our familiar comfort zones both personal and institutional, propelling us into courageous new relationships we may not yet fully understand or feel easy with. But isn’t that a definition of growth?
Maybe that is where the UMC as a church has to go in order to grow in more ways than one. What if it completely divested from fossil fuels and then, driven by love more than profit, re-invested that money in healing people and planet from the damage we already have caused, building a healthy world for children and generations to come? What scenario would best fit our denominational mission, “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world”? – KC