Our Stewardship of God's Creation

            We have all watched in horror at a very strong typhoon has destroyed the province of Leyte in the Philippine Islands.  Over 10 thousand people have been killed in this terrible disaster and countless properties have simply been swept away.  There is nothing left in many villages and the people are suffering greatly.  The world has mustered all of the help that is available for things like this; the Red Cross, the United Nations, every nation is pledging help and it is on the way; but such destruction is almost beyond comprehension.

            There are many who say that such storms are a result of our neglect of the climate; that we have been less than proper stewards of our environment, our greenhouse gasses have been released into our atmosphere to make the planet warmer and that this has produced storms of this magnitude.  They say that this will continue until we get it through our heads that climate change is our responsibility and that we need to do something about it before we destroy this planet.  Those arguments have great merit and we need to listen to them; but in the meantime we have the horror of what has happened in the Philippine Islands and that is our more immediate responsibility.

            For these people, we will do all that we can, but it is essential that we don’t stop with the aid that we can give them.  More important is to work for the cleaning up of our atmosphere so that storms like this can’t rise to such strength.  Do we have the will to do this?  Certainly when I look at our divided politics and our lack of leadership, I wonder what it is that we can all resolve to do about much of anything.  Moneyed interests will fight tooth and nail against any regulation of their activities.  Getting legislation passed that will curb the pollution of the atmosphere is going to be a hard job.  But with ten thousand deaths staring us in the face, we certainly ought to be able to put our greed and our self interest on hold for a moment and consider what it is that needs to be done.  Our attention span is so woefully short.  Some other thing will shortly come along and make us forget about this terrible tragedy.  We have seen this over and over again:  mass shootings happen, are in the news for a while and so is our outrage, but that is rather quickly forgotten and we get on to other things.  What is wrong with us?  Can’t we focus on what is going on around us and pay attention to our individual responsibility for these things?

            As we get closer to Advent, our lessons are becoming more and more apocalyptic.  In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus hears people admiring the way that the temple is built in honor of God and he tells them: As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down!  The people ask when this will occur and Jesus goes on to tell them that their lives will seem to be disasters, that they will be persecuted, arrested and even killed because of his name.  He tells them to persevere and that throughout all of the suffering, they will gain their souls. 

            There was another time that Jesus said the same thing.  It was when he told his disciples that he would be tried and killed and then raised on the third day.  The point of this all is that God is in charge of not only this world, but of us.  There is nothing that we can do to lose that love, even though we fail miserably in our responsibility to take care of God’s creation.  The earth may ultimately be destroyed, but we are safe in God’s loving hands.  That basic truth ought to help us to pay attention to the creation that has been placed in our hands.  Could we not be better stewards of what we have been given?  Is it really necessary for ten thousand or more people to be killed by storms that our pollution has caused?