Category Archives: Climate Change

Climate Action: From Local to Global

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Note: This post is addressed to my neighbors who live here in Western Nevada County, California, but it’s relevant to all of you, dear friends, wherever you are.  On Sunday, September 17, people concerned about climate change are invited to join a demonstration calling for climate action on the Broad Street Bridge in Nevada City following the Constitution Day Parade, which begins at 2. Everyone is invited to join. Some of us marching in the parade’s Minewatch contingent will be there with our NO MINE signs. This article describes why these two issues go together. 

It is past time to have another big climate demonstration here in Nevada County, as we face the shared reality that the ravages of climate change that scientists warned us about decades ago are upon us. This summer’s record-breaking heat waves and other extreme disasters (including on Maui and now in Florida) bring home to us the extent of damage caused by a 1.2 ͦ C (2 ͦ F) rise in average global temperatures.  (See Global Citizens’ “Shocking Photos of Extreme Weather Around the World in 2023 So Far.”) The terms unprecedented, the new normal, and apocalyptic have become common but do not adequately express the climate emergency that has come upon us. Today’s disasters provide a preview of what’s coming if we don’t turn around and change our ways, a “new abnormal” of escalating dangers. At the current rate, greenhouse gas emissions will raise global temperatures by 3 or 4 ͦ C by the end of this century, and our beloved Earth will become progressively inhospitable to life.

Many of us respond as individuals or groups to these weather-related disasters through relief efforts, by donating money or with hands-on help. Some individuals, faith communities, and other organizations are adapting to climate change by “greening” their lifestyles and facilities. Some communities are working to become resilient and to be prepared for disasters. Nevada County has detailed plans and initiatives to address both Climate resilience and Emergency Preparedness. A primary focus is on being prepared for the danger of wildfires made worse by climate change. These actions provide relief, demonstrate renewable alternatives, reduce our carbon footprints, and offer a witness to our concern and care for our community, our global neighbors, and future generations.

Here in Nevada County, we have taken our collective response to climate change even further. We have expanded our work of relief, adaptation, and resilience to also take on the work of mitigation. In 2019, our Board of Supervisors adopted a Nevada County Energy Action Plan. Its goal is to “reduce the projected annual grid supplied electricity use in 2035 by 51% and annual natural gas use by 30%” through “energy efficiency, renewable energy, and water efficiency.” Following through with this plan allies us with others here in California and around the world who are taking coordinated actions to mitigate climate change, that is, to halt and reverse the upward trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.

We should all be grateful for the work that has brought us to this point and support other such forward-looking policies in the future. This requires vigilance, which means paying attention to local development decisions, and it means adding our voices and our bodies to the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change and to protect the rural quality of life here in Nevada County.

A most pressing local development challenge continues to be the actions of Rise Gold, which, according to Market Screener, is “a Canada-based exploration-stage mining company” whose “principal asset is the past-producing Idaho-Maryland Gold Mine…” Now that the Planning Commission has gone on record opposing the mine, this foreign corporation is now threatening to force our County to accept the reopening of the old Idaho-Maryland Mine by filing a petition granting them the “vested right to mine.” This would mean proving that the Idaho-Maryland Mine is not a “past-producing mine” but has been a working mine all along.

As mentioned above, Nevada County’s Energy Action Plan calls for gradually reducing both electricity and natural gas use, but Rise Gold’s projected electrical and natural gas use would cancel out this plan. There would be massive carbon emissions caused by diesel-powered heavy equipment used for constant construction during the first year and half; ongoing continuous excavating, underground blasting, drilling, rock crushing, loading, hauling, unloading, spreading, and compacting to create engineered fill up to seven stories tall; continuous mine dewatering by pumping, treating and sending millions of gallons of wastewater down Wolf Creek; increased new diesel truck traffic (up to 100 round trips a day, seven days a week, 16 hours a day). This would result in significant increases in greenhouse emissions rather than decreases as outlined in the county’s Energy Action Plan.

There are plenty of other reasons to oppose reopening the mine, including the harmful impacts this working gold mine in the City of Grass Valley would have on our land, air, water, endangered species, and quality of life. Furthermore, Rise Gold has a terrible track record. CEO Ben Mossman is waiting to be sentenced after being convicted of fourteen counts in Canada for the environmental harm a previous mine of his caused there. Locally, this foreign corporation has misrepresented facts and has falsely claimed that our community is in favor of reopening the mine, despite broad, sustained, and reasoned opposition. Find details at the Minewatch website.

I will be part of the Minewatch contingent in the Constitution Day Parade at 2 p.m. on Sunday, September 17. This happens to also be the Global Day of Action to End Fossil Fuels, the day on which public demonstrations will take place around the world, including in New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, and here in our community. That’s why after the parade you will find me standing on the Broad Street Bridge with others who are concerned about climate change and the mine’s potential impacts on climate. I know from experience that it will be fun and energizing. I would love to see you there.

Resurrection and New Creation

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“The new creation is not a different creation. It is the new creation of this deranged world. Eternal life is not a different life. It is the resurrection of this life into the life of God. . . . So the kingdom of God means that this world will be different and will be born anew out of violence and injustice to justice, righteousness and peace.”[i]                                                                                Jürgen Moltmann

After months of wind, rain, and snow, Easter Sunday was a glorious spring day, with greenery and flowers springing up all around. This Lenten blog series “Creation, Cross, and the Powers,” culminates today with me addressing the challenging question: How is the resurrection of Jesus relevant today, as we witness the deadly impacts of the domination system on our human family and the community of life? To answer this, I point to the following passage:

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:17–18). The passage makes clear that the scope of reconciliation in “[the risen] Christ” extends beyond God and the individual to all creation.

The concept of new creation has been used to illustrate a hopeful vision of renewal that may motivate people to take seriously our call to care for the earth. One way that Christians have interpreted this concept is to relate it to the afterlife, as an assurance that no matter how bad things get here on earth, no matter how many ecosystems are destroyed or how many species go extinct, God will ultimately reconstitute creation in a renewed and even better way. But such ideas bring little comfort to those of us who love life here on earth as we witness the escalating speed and efficiency of the institutional engines of death that are destroying it.

Of course, the promise of resurrection and creation’s renewal at the end of time offers us freedom from the fear of death and fosters courage to face life’s challenges. But the biblical concept of new creation does not just symbolize hope that at the end of the world, God will reconstitute it in a new form. As Moltmann said, it symbolizes hope “that this world will be different.”

It is also an invitation to live in light of the resurrection now. Living in the Spirit of the risen Christ enables us to recognize the glory of God in creation, to live in reconciled relationships, to comfort those who suffer, to stand in solidarity against oppressive powers, to allow the love that we have received to flow through us, to acknowledge that all creation exists within the circle of God’s care, and to take actions that embody hope for the future and are proportional to the challenges we face—in short: to live into the reality of the new creation.

As extinctions become more numerous, climate change accelerates, and the powers assert themselves in ever more ecologically destructive ways, the biblical concept of new creation illustrates a spiritual reality that can be experienced and lived into. As followers of Jesus, we are already part of the new creation here and now, as is made clear in the text above. We are already part of a new creation because we are in Christ.

As reconciled people who are empowered as participants in God’s saving work in our time, we are called to reach out with the message of reconciliation not only for individuals but for creation as well. This path is costly. Carrying the message of reconciliation must include challenging dehumanizing institutional idols that are undoing creation, and working for systemic change in ways that enable people to flourish. In this process, we are given a new orientation toward life and courage to rise even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds.

God rejoices with us when we rejoice, weeps with us when we weep, showers both the just and unjust with all the blessings of creation and calls us to embody love in this world. Jesus did just that. Those of us who follow him are called to do so fully and completely, renouncing fear and paralysis, living in the power of the Spirit of the risen Christ, rising in courage, and heading straight into the heart of the struggle for a transformed world.

 

Parts of this post were excepted from “Creation Crucified: The Passion of the Earth,” the fourth chapter of The Cross in the Midst of Creation, Sharon Delgado (Fortress Press, 2022).

This is the tenth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 

[i] Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 22–23

 

 

Care Enough to Weep

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Last weekend I was on a silent retreat, sharing prayer spaces and meals with a few church friends and a larger group of Buddhists.  On Saturday I walked the Stations of the Cross at the retreat center, knowing that the next day was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Sometimes when I walk that path, one or another of the statues portraying the events of Jesus’s last hours overwhelms me. This time it was the first statue, the one that portrays Pilate sitting in judgement, with a child pouring water from a pitcher over Pilate’s hands as he washes them, and into the bowl beneath. It struck me that this really was the decisive moment, the official decision that set the crucifixion into motion, with all the other participants (executioner, soldiers, and the like) carrying out their assigned roles–just doing their jobs.

Grief washed over me, along with the realization that this dynamic is at the root of the harm being done to creation today, as individuals relinquish their responsibility in the face of powers that seem out of human control. Looking at that stature brought home to me how Pilate’s action of washing his hands of Jesus’s fate is exactly the cause of the extremity of the global situation we face today. I wept.

Of course, the stage for Jesus’s trial and execution had been set long before. Jesus’s passion for the reign of God and his teachings and actions to bring it about had threatened the uneasy collaboration between the Jewish religious establishment and the Roman army that occupied Jerusalem.

I will return to the story of Jesus’ trial and execution in a later post in this series. For now, let’s consider the story of Palm Sunday. Surely Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt and the people calling on him to save them and hailing him as king further antagonized the religious authorities. They saw him as a political threat to the established order of the violently enforced Pax Romana, the so-called “Roman Peace.” When the Pharisees demanded that Jesus order his followers to stop, he replied, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

The way Luke tells the story, as they came near to Jerusalem and saw it, he wept over it. Jesus wept! He could see what was coming. He said, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God” (Luke 19:41-44).

Jesus weeps because he can foresee the terrible things will befall the people of Jerusalem and their descendants. This destruction is not God’s will, but is the result of people not recognizing God’s presence among them or “the things that make for peace.”

Jesus weeps. As we look at creation’s dilemma today, which is also our dilemma since we are part of creation, we also have reason to weep. According to climate scientists, (in many ways the today’s prophets), we can see that the terrifying consequences of industrialized civilization are already upon us and are coming at ever greater degrees of magnitude for future generations. Who are our “enemies”? According to Ephesians 6:12, “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  In other words, against the powers and principalities.

Like the Pax Romana, Pax Americana will not bring us “the things that make for peace,” for it is also ultimately enforced through violence, including racial, gender, and economic violence. Today’s corporate-dominated global capitalist system is also enforced by multiple modes of violence. It is incapable of protecting us from the certain ecological consequences of our current way of life, which are essentially locked in by our interlocking network  of global institutions, unless we discern “the things that make for peace” and perceive where God is at work in our world. Only then will we be able to discern what steps we might take to avert disaster.

What can we do? When William Stringfellow was asked this question, he said, “If you want to do something, the most practical thing I can tell you is: weep.  First of all, care enough to weep.”[i]

Like Jesus, we can weep.

This is the seventh post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts are as follows: 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 

 

[i] William Stringfellow: Essential Writings, Bill Wylie-Kellerman, editor (Fortress Press, 2013)),  page 180.

Don’t Look Up

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“You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn—and I would heal them.”                                     Matthew 13 14-15

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its Synthesis Report of its sixth assessment (AR6)[i] It should have been at the top of the news everywhere, but it was not. The constant barrage of attention-grabbing news headlines with violent, distressing, or random content makes it almost impossible to grasp what’s most important. It makes it hard to “see the forest for the trees.” But if the forest is dying there will be no trees, as is happening here in the Zombie forests[ii] of California, due of course, to climate change.

In the movie “Don’t Look Up,” filmmaker Adam McKay uses the metaphor of a world-destroying comet to parody how policy-makers and the media downplay the imminent threat of climate catastrophe. Jennifer Lawrence plays a doctoral student who discovers a massive comet headed straight for Earth, and Leo Di Caprio plays the scientist who confirms her discovery. Together they do everything they can to awaken people to the threat. The response of the US president, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, is to “sit tight and assess,” and finally to support a billionaire entrepreneur’s high-tech (market based) money-making scheme. They go directly to the press but the talk show host, played by Cate Blanchett, ignores the danger, trivializes the topic, and dismisses the Jennifer Lawrence character for desperately sounding the alarm.

Film maker Adam McKay describes his motivation for producing “Don’t Look Up” by pointing back through geological time to the asteroid that many scientists say is responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs and many other species.  He says, “[Climate change] is the biggest story in human history, and arguably the biggest threat since the Chicxulub comet 66 million years ago.”[iii]

Is this an exaggeration? Climate scientists today are sounding the alarm.  According to the IPCC’s AR6 report:

“Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities that have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected.”[iv]

“In this decade, accelerated action to adapt to climate change is essential to close the gap between existing adaptation and what is needed…Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C. [v]

According the IPCC’s press release, “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”[vi]

Last November, in his opening plenary remarks at COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterrez summed up our situation: “The clock is ticking. We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.” He added, ‘We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”[vii]

Many of us in the global North are privileged enough to be able to find ways to insulate ourselves (temporarily) from the reality and impacts of climate change on our lives and hope that the fires and floods don’t come for us. We might tell ourselves that there’s nothing that we can do, or we might feel we are doing our part because we recycle or don’t fly or are vegan or have an electric car, or we might hold out hope for the next technological fix or the next billionaire entrepreneur to save us.  But these responses are inadequate in light of the existential threat we face. These are all forms of denial, because they enable us to pretend that life will continue go on as is has before. They are ways of saying, “Don’t look up.”

In many parts of the world, people don’t have that luxury, because extreme weather is destroying their homes, their crops, their livelihoods, and even their very existence as a people (as with island nations).  Our young know that climate change is upon us and accelerating, and that they and their descendants will disproportionately bear its escalating burdens long after those who have presided over the current fossil-fuel intensive global system are gone.

Clearly, powers very much like the dominating powers of Jesus’s age, continue their death-dealing work today. Creation itself is being crucified. As William Stringfellow said, “The work of the powers in the Fall is the undoing of creation.” This becomes ever-harder to ignore as temperatures rise, weather extremes multiply, and ecosystems that sustain life are progressively unraveled, putting an ever-greater strain on our corporate-dominated capitalist global empire, leading to rising epidemics of poverty, violence, and misery.

This post is an invitation and a challenge to readers to come out of denial and face the extremity of our situation. The season of Lent is a fitting time for this, for it is God in Christ, immanent as well as transcendent, who suffers in and through us and all creation. We are approaching Holy Week, and we know that Easter is coming. Yet we cannot bypass the cross to get to resurrection.

As we walk with Jesus through the painful events that led to his death, in retrospect we can see, like the Gospel writers, God’s divine presence and providence in these events. But it’s important to look at these events in context, for it was not God but the rulers of his age who “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8). In other words, it was the dominating powers of his day—the Roman Empire and the elite religious establishment that collaborated with the Roman occupation of Jerusalem who found Jesus to be subverting the existing establishment.  For that, he was killed.

In An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, William Stringfellow speaks of the moral impoverishment  that afflicts us as we relinquish our human responsiblility to the powers. He says, “I mean by `moral impoverishment’ what the Bible often cites as hardness of the heart” or as the impairment or loss of moral discernment; the incapacity to hear, though one has ears; or to see, though one has eyes… I refer, thus, not so much to an evil mind as to a paralyzed onscience; not so much to either personal or corporate immorality as to a social pathology possessing persons and institutions; not so much to malevolence, however incarnate, as to the literla demoralization of human life in society.” It is not so much that there are evil people running things, but that things are running on automatic according to the institutional imperatives in a global system that is working against life. “Don’t look up,” encouraged by the dominating powers that benefit from the current system, is a way to avoid facing the truth or feeling the need to respond.

As people of faith and followers of Jesus, how do we collaborate with the rulers of this age, that is, the interlocking network of institutional powers that makes up today’s global empire? How can we withdraw our support?

First, we must open our eyes and look up—to see what the scientists are showing us. We must open our ears and hear the cries of people suffering on the front lines of climate change. We must open our hearts to understand, process, and grieve what is at stake:  the integrity and continuation of the interdependent community of life that has evolved here on Earth, life as we have known it, the creation that God calls “good.”

Second, we must recognize that the damage being done to creation is not the result of natural evolution or human history. Rather, it is the result of policies developed by wealthy and powerful individuals and the dominant institutions of our time, supported by those of us who tolerate and accept this system. We can break out of this complicity by naming, unmasking (exposing), and engaging these powers and by pointing in a new and life-sustaining way of being in the world.

Third, even as we reflect on and grieve the painful realities of our time, Christ’s risen Spirit is alive and active in our world today on behalf of life, and as we experience and recognize that activity we are invited to participate. The global movement for climate justice is one such expression of the Spirit’s power.  Bill McKibben said, “The best way to counter organized money is with organized people.” People who have the courage to look up.

This is the sixth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts are as follows:

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 [i] “AR6 Synthesis Report, Climate Change, 2023,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

[ii] “Mapping California’s ‘Zombie’ Forests,” Elena Shao, New York Times, March 6, 2023,

[iii] “Climate Scientist and Netflix ‘Don’t Look Up’ director talk comet metaphors and global warming,” Elizabeth Howell, Space.com, May 11, 2022,  https://www.space.com/dont-look-up-climate-change-comet-metaphore-scientist-praise

[iv]  “Synthesis Report of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, March 20, 2023,

“Banking on Our Future” as Demythologized Exorcism

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Ironic: Chase bank with the “C” obscured by tarp held by sand bags from recent extreme storms. “What will you do when the time runs out?” See more photos below.

Note: This post is intended for those who aspire to following Jesus in the context of today’s interlocking network of institutional “powers and principalities” that make up the global economy. I hope that by “demythologizing” some of these terms, people of other spiritual or secular traditions will also find value.

While writing this Lenten blog series on “Creation, Cross, and The Powers,” I was also working with others on Third Act’s Day of Action, as I write about below. It dawned on me as I was doing so that in Judeo-Christian terms, this action can be seen as a form of demythologized “exorcism.” Not spooky, but practical. Here’s how.

Third Act’s Banking on Our Future Campaign called for a Day of Action (for the climate) which was held on 3.21.23. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, gathered in cities, towns, and small rural communities like mine for public actions focused on the top four funders of fossil fuel projects: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Citibank. Many changed banks. They had opened accounts at local banks or credit unions in advance.  They went into their banks and closed their accounts on the Day of Action. Some publicly cut up their debit/credit cards outside the bank. On the weekend before the action, people gathered to make colorful signs, banners, and giant cardboard scissors that say, “Cut it out or we’ll cut them up.” Others prepared songs, chants, and performance arts.

As part of Third Act Faith (an interfaith working group of Third Act), I was part of a faith contingent in the larger Day of Action demonstration here in Grass Valley, California. It was an expression of our spiritual/faith commitment to protecting and preserving creation (including our human family). There was also a contingent of young people, including members of Nevada County Sunrise.

Why gather? As record-breaking snowfall has followed long-term drought and frequent wildfires here in Northern California, we are now living under an atmospheric river with seemingly endless rain. Does that mean that things are finally balancing out? Is the drought over? I would love that. My grandchildren have lived through record-breaking weather extremes their whole lives. I would love for them to get a break, to be able to get established and build lives for themselves without chaotic weather disruptions.

But these extremes of heat and cold, drought and precipitation, are exactly what climate scientists have predicted for decades.  Heat increases evaporation and moisture in the air, which must come down somewhere—just not always when and where it has historically. With the melting of sea ice, sea level rise, changes in patterns of the polar vortex and the jet stream, our young people and future generations are bound to experience more frequent and intense weather extremes rather than less. Such is the reality that we call “climate change,” which sounds so benign. It is really a “climate emergency.”

How does all this relate to the theme of this Lenten blog series or to today’s post on “Demythologizing Exorcism.”  Just this: If followers of Jesus are called to “cast out demons” (Mark: 14-15), we do not have to think in terms of spooky Hollywood portrayals of priests unsuccessfully attempting weird rituals to drive out some evil spirit that has taken possession of an innocent person, usually a child. Instead, let’s consider how to interpret what “casting out demons” might look like in contemporary terms that are relevant to the existential challenges facing humanity today, specifically climate change.

In previous posts in this series, and in many of my writings, I refer to William Stringfellow and other theological forebears and their practical understanding of what we call, in contemporary terms, “the Powers that Be.” These are the dominant principalities and powers that we read about in the Bible, “all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Ephesians 2:21),” against which we struggle “with all the armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10-17).  They are “the rulers of this age” who do not understand “the wisdom that comes from God” (1 Corinthians 2:6).

The institutional powers that dominate our world have outer and physical realities (a bank façade or the Capitol or the Pentagon), but also inner and spiritual (or psychic) realities that impact all of us who live under their authority. We tend to internalize their values. The most obvious expression today of the “rulers of this age” is the interlocking network of political, economic, ideological, and military institutions that make up the global “domination system” of today.

Part of the pain of facing the reality of our time is that we know we are complicit in climate change and other harms caused by this global system, in which we participate and from which many of us (especially white, middle-class, US-Christians) benefit. What can we do to remedy this situation? We can begin to “exorcise” the demon of complicity, and Banking on Our Future shows us a way to do just that.

By participating in this Day of Action at any level, including coming to show support, we renounce our complicity while “unmasking” the banks that promote the destruction of life and hope by funding the fossil fuel companies that continue to greenwash, promote doubt about climate change, and build new infrastructure to keep the fossil fuel party going indefinitely.  By refusing to invest in banks that do so, we free ourselves (by the power of the Spirit) from this form of (literal) “possession” by the fossil fuel economy. At the same time, we call (urge, demand, entreat) these banks to assume their rightful role in society: to provide financial security and stability for bank “customers” while investing in ways that enhance life and serve the common good—in this case, by rapidly divesting our money from fossil fuels and investing it in just and sustainable sources of energy that can carry us into a clean energy future.

 

 

This is the fifth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts in the series are as follows: 

 

 

 

 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books.