Today’s readings bluntly acknowledge the pain of anger and our need for forgiveness. But are there times anger is needed?

Sins and ecological degradation has been linked by our Popes, bishops, and theologians, perhaps first named by the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, but what truly is our own complicity?

Not primarily the small actions of excess waste, or failed recycling, or use of fossil fuels in driving. We know that personal small actions matter and create the habit of virtue to do more.  But the reality, as Pope Francis clearly names in Laudato Deum, is of persistent deception and greenwashing by industry, financial and governmental leaders.

And in response to this we do need to stay angry- with the clarity to identify the real sinner: the persistent structures of unrepentant polluting industries. We are called, through our commitment to health, to love, to life, to advocate – to raise a voice of anger against these systems.

Our Church clearly teaches our obligation to care for our common home through rapid and large scale change.  As Pope Francis declared in Laudato Si,

We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay. …. Politics and business have been slow to react in a way commensurate with the urgency of the challenges facing our world.” (Laudato Si’ 165).

Our response is not simply a political advocacy response, but a deeply spiritual response to a cultural crisis engendered by entrenched enemies- and we have to be comfortable with this term, as was Jesus, who spoke of enemies quite directly. So does Pope Francis, using the term “assault.” He writes in Laudate Deum:

“the ecological conversion and an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” characterize our response.

Thus we can seek pardon from the desperate task of personal environmental purity and the futile (and antagonizing) moral zealotry of seeking perfect lifestyle sustainability. Instead, it challenges and empowers climate disciples to be organized just as intelligently as the polluting industries and to forge our alliances across the intersectionalities of injustice and enact the new transition. Thus, sent forth, climate disciples are challenged to speak truth to power and expose the lie of greenwashing and the shame of the personal carbon footprint invented by fossil fuel companies to gaslight the modern world.

We see and feel the impacts of the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.  We hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. Yet God has guided God’s family through the desert before.  With the problems of today, as serious and even frightening as they are, our fundamental faith response is one of trust. We can turn to God our Creator in trust and pray that the individual ways we may have failed to care for the earth, but much more the greater industrial polluting systems we struggle to dismantle, will not have permanently destructive impact and God will put these transgressions behind us.  

The Psalm for today honors God’s forgiving kindness.

The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills.
He redeems your life from destruction,
crowns you with kindness and compassion.

Through this fundamental trust, we let God be Creator, truly “Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 14).