“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”

• Scriptural Reference: Luke 18:1-8
• May 11, 2008
• Listen to the Audio

I looked for a power socket to plug my computer in at Starbuck’s. My VW was across the street for an expensive, scheduled service. I went to Starbuck’s because they have wireless and I can sit there for a couple of hours and do my work, which would largely consist of composing the sermon for today – a sermon for Mother’s Day which would also need to be about Global Warming as a part of this sermon series and at the same time recognize the fact that all across Christendom, this is Pentecost Sunday. And do all that in ten minutes.

So, I crossed West Broad, where no pedestrian crosswalk exists and toodled along through alleys, grass swards, and past dumpsters at the back doors of strip mall buildings where no sidewalk exists (by and large, or suburban sprawl doesn’t expect people to do anything remotely human like walking) and arrived at Starbuck’s. The plan was to get coffee and a pastry, keeping it under $5.00, locate a plug for my laptop with the old battery that won’t last more than six minutes, sip coffee, nibble pastry, and let the sermon flow underneath my rapidly tippy-tapping fingers. I looked behind tables and chairs searching for a socket, probably resembling a homeless person searching through dumpsters, and found one behind a pair of easy chairs, one occupied by a young 20-something woman. I put my briefcase down and ordered my coffee.

“Regular coffee, please.”

“You mean a ‘tall’?”

Oh yeah. In Starbuck’s, small is tall. The coffee and apple fritter cost $4.50.

I returned to my chair and as I sat down, the young woman moved to a table, something I chose not to interpret. I opened my briefcase: no power cord. I knew my computer hardly had the power to launch, so I closed it back up and hid my face in my hand. My car wouldn’t be ready for two hours. With no computer, I couldn’t do my work! I couldn’t check my email! I couldn’t go on line to Google Bible passages! I couldn’t shoot out my sermon underneath rapidly tapping fingers. I couldn’t blend in with the rest of the funky crowd around me, tapping away at their laptops with superior batteries. I was stymied. Frustration began to churn in my gut.

Then I remembered my journal; blank pages bound by a black cover lying there in my briefcase. I looked at it and it was almost as if the journal actually grinned at me. Pen and paper didn’t need a power socket. All I had to do was open my journal – no waiting for it to boot up. I could still record my thoughts, and although the font would be illegible at times, it would be unique. Besides, up until about twenty years ago, that’s the way the vast majority of writers wrote – by, ahem, writing.

I discovered – or rediscovered – a very satisfying option when I decided to repent. That is, I repented in the literal sense of the word; I re-thought and even though I couldn’t go high tech, my decidedly low-tech solution got the job done, and I got to work on my long neglected penmanship. While I reflected on what I was going to write next, I doodled on the side of the page and drew out some Celtic patterns. I had been forced to change my habit – and discovered that the sacrifice yielded unexpected joys.

Jesus would’ve already known this. Sacrifice always yields unexpected joys. That’s behind this parable of the unjust judge. In those first eight verses of chapter 18, Jesus tells the story of an unjust judge who for the sake of his own comfort and convenience ignores the plea of a widow seeking a decision concerning justice. The woman, though, makes a pain out of herself. She buzzes around the judge like eastern North Carolina gnats. He can’t swat her away so he relents and does what she wants. That’s when Jesus makes this statement: “When the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” What’s he referring to?

He’s not referring to the judge. That judge grants justice to the woman for the sake of his own comfort. There isn’t a whole lot in Jesus’ teachings that could be construed to affirm that attitude.

The woman’s persistence, however, matches both Jesus’ own tenacity and his admonitions never to surrender to the spirits of evil in this world. Jesus admires the tenacity of the woman in the story then asks, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on the earth?” What’s that faith? It’s not a set of doctrines. Jesus defines faith as what that woman did – be tenacious in the seeking of justice. When the Son of Man comes, Jesus is saying, will he find his followers following? Will they be pursuing justice with the persistence and tenacity of the heroine of this parable? They better not be like that judge, doing all they can to maintain their comfort while silencing the voices of conscience.

Enter the issue of Global Warming. And justice. And tenacity. And sacrifice.

It is a foregone conclusion that our planet’s atmosphere is warming. Ice sheets are melting faster than at any time in the last tens of thousands of years. Places like Virginia haven’t had a proper winter in years. It’s also true that other weather patterns have changed as a result of the warming. In fact, increased snow fall in some places results directly from warming since the condensation needed to produce snow happens when temperatures in frigidly cold areas rises into the teens and twenties and encounters moisture. The debate isn’t about rising temperatures. The debate is over what’s causing the rise in temperature.

Some have asserted that the warming results from human activity. Our burning of fossil fuels has increased CO2 in the atmosphere which along with some other emissions, traps solar energy near the surface and keeps it from radiating back out into space. This threatens our planetary balance, therefore we need to dramatically cut our fossil fuel emissions so we can address the unnatural affects warming is having on our ecosystems.

Others have questioned whether the warming is human caused. A few climatologists have serious questions about what certain figures, data, and measurements mean and whether we truly understand complex climatological variables thoroughly enough to construct reliable computer models capable of accurate, long-range predictions. These folks say that we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the warming of the planet is caused by human activity.

Unfortunately, the scientific debate has been warped by politics and economic interests. Many people reject the notion that human activity causes our current heating only because its most visible proponent is Al Gore. I was sent an email recently with an elaborate debunking of Al Gore and the global warming idea. It involved mainly personal disparagements in which his motives and character were lampooned without much reference at all to method of argument or reasoned critique of his use of scientific data. Rejecting global warming as human caused because you don’t like the person voicing the idea is exactly what you do in middle school.

For my part, I believe that the data strongly suggest that the current warming trend is at least aggravated by human activity. Our current release of carbon into the atmosphere far outpaces any natural process short of major volcanic cataclysms. It only seems logical that these heavy releases of carbonic gasses would have an impact on our incredibly thin and fragile layer of atmosphere.

On the other hand, I have read a number of reports that substantively question the assumptions behind the data used to report the volume of CO2 in the air. Some scientists who have no political motivation for doing so have called for further debate. They’ve called for dispassionate, non-political, honest assessments. This dialogue needs to proceed, drained of the sensationalism that often goes into this issue.

Here’s one reason why: science almost never deals in absolute certainties, short of some things like gravity and the necessity of breathing, and we knew about those things long before there was a scientific method. Science, on the other hand, always deals in degree of probability. The problem with global warming is that the truth deals with probability. There is a high degree or a low degree of probability that global warming in human caused. People, though, don’t like to make policy decisions on the basis of probabilities, though insurance companies base their rates on probabilities on a daily basis. Most of us, though, want to remove all risk and deal only with certainties. No politician wants to risk being wrong, so in the absence of certainties, we do nothing.

My greatest frustration, though, is not with the inaction associated with global warming. The sensationalization of the global warming issue has served to divert attention from what is really a more weighty issue. You see, IF we were able to arrive at a high degree of probability that global warming is NOT human caused, we would STILL need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels and production of carbon emissions. Have you ever heard of acid rain? It’s still an issue and the sensationalized global warming debate has pushed this very real issue off the radar screens. Thousands of forests and lakes in the Canadian northeast are dead today because of the acidic content of the rain falling on them, acidic content resulting from the coal fired pollution from power plants and exhaust all across the Ohio Valley and surrounding environs in the US. Acadia National Park in Maine issues bad air warning for ground level ozone during the summer advising park visitors against outdoor activities. Imagine that – park rangers advising visitors to a national park not to do anything outside because of bad air. The pollution comes from Boston, New York, and the Megalopolis south toward where you and I live. Japan and China are conducting talks now in large part because coal fired pollution from China is drifting across the Sea of Japan and killing the forests and lakes of the northern Japanese islands.

My regret with all the media hype regarding global warming is that it concentrates our attention on an exotic possible problem while diverting our attention form very real problems close at hand. We need to reduce carbon emissions whether the planet is warming or not because the emissions demonstrably kill with a degree of probability so high we can call it a certainty. You can forget global warming. There are many toher far more concrete, indisputable reasons for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and if CO2 IS causing global warming, then we’ll solve that problem, too.

Much of the refusal, though, of folks to recognize this problem lies, it seems to me, in the knowledge that if we DO admit to ourselves that CO2 is a huge problem, then the only moral thing to do is change our style of life. We don’t want to change, so we cling to any bit of information we can get that suggests that we don’t really have a problem. Addicts do this, incidentally, all the time. It’s why they have such a hard time kicking their habit.

Again, forget global warming. The effects of acid rain have been known ever since the 18 th century when the rain falling through the coal-fired exhaust from industrial revolution London factories and houses completely killed any aquatic life in the Thames River.

This is where my pastoral radar starts to bleep. People are willing to talk about just about anything until it begins to implicate a behavioral change which feels like a sacrifice. People will often deny data that requires sacrifice as a response. The argument isn’t rejected on the merits of the data; rather the data is rejected or ignored because one refuses to sacrifice.

We will never solve the current planetary crisis without sacrifice. Sacrifice, however, isn’t possible without a change of heart. This change of heart is precisely what Jesus spoke about in Luke 18.