Category: climate change

A Prayer for Earth Day Resurrection

by Steve Harsh, posted in climate change, hope, prayer

O Holy, Mysterious God, You are so much more than we can comprehend.  We are in awe of the power of resurrection around and within us.  As we celebrate Earth Day tomorrow the birds and buds and blooms are bursting forth with every color in the rainbow all around us.  Even in the midst of powerful storms that frighten us you manage to water the earth and bring forth new life.

We pray that your words of hope spoken and sung on this fourth Sunday of Easter will nourish new seeds of hope and faith in each of us as well.  We have marveled this month at the miracle of a total solar eclipse and the orderly progression of your cosmos that made it possible to predict that heavenly event years in advance down to the second in every exact location.  We are so humbled by the majesty and mystery of your creative power.

And yet we are called to repentance when we ponder the ways we have failed to be good stewards of this planet we call home.  We are reaping the whirlwinds of our sin against creation.  Extreme weather events and deadly wars cause so much suffering for your children.  Fear and hatred infect personal and international relationships, and we despair at the seeming hopelessness of the human condition.  Remind us again, O creator God, that what is impossible for us is possible for you if we trust in the power of your love and grace.

We pray for your resurrecting Holy Spirit to flow through the delegates at our United Methodist Conference meeting this week, and into the halls of Congress, and over the war torn landscapes of Ukraine and Gaza.  Blow your holy wind into the hearts of political enemies all over the world so that a new resurrection of peace and good will can blossom forth in the deserts and wilderness places in our world.

And we pray too for all those carrying a heavy burden of personal grief in our congregation and beyond.  May hope and peace be resurrected in those who have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, or purpose for their lives.  We dare to believe in resurrection because you have showed us, O Holy One, that you can bring life out of death in so many ways, and it is in the name of our risen, living Lord, Jesus Christ that we offer our lives and our prayers, saying together the prayer he taught us to pray. 

Northwest UMC, April 21, 2024

Reaping the Whirlwind

by Steve Harsh, posted in climate change, Faith and Politics

“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7)

So far in 2024 my home state of Ohio has the distinction of being number 1 in a very undesirable category. We have had more tornados here in 2024 than any other state in the union, some of which have been deadly.

As we were sitting through another round of severe weather and tornado alerts today the verse from Hosea above came to mind. Hosea was talking about the consequences of breaking a covenant relationship with God, and in a way our human betrayal of our relationship with God’s creation is a similar situation.

For 150 years at least, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Western civilization has sown the winds of pollution by prioritizing profits over people. The fossil fuel industry has known for decades that we have been poisoning Mother Earth with our addiction to fossil fuel, but they hid that scientific knowledge just as the tobacco industry suppressed their awareness of the lethal dangers of smoking to protect their bottom line.

And now we are reaping the whirlwind (sometimes literally) of our denial of humanity’s contribution to climate change. More frequent and stronger severe weather, flooding, wildfires, glaciers melting and causing ocean levels to rise, all are consequences of our irresponsible treatment of God’s creation.

And that’s the simple lesson Hosea is teaching us: our actions have consequences in all areas of our lives. It is such a basic rule of life that Paul elaborates on it in Galatians: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever you sow, that you will also reap. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.” (6:7-8)

And as I read recently somewhere, if you sow bullets, you will never read peace.