This Is Not Normal

Like many of you, I have been watching as wildfires tore (and continue to tear) through Los Angeles – personally knowing people who have now lost everything. It is gut-wrenching to witness the devastation.

At the same time, snow and ice have been covering a good deal of our southern states with weather patterns that were unheard of just 25 years ago. I read that last week that it was colder in Tennessee than northern Alaska for a few days straight!

With pretty much any headline we read these days, a sub-headline (which should probably be the lead!) could say something about the impacts of climate change.

Former President Jimmy Carter who recently died at age 100 was one of the first United States leaders to directly speak about climate change. He also stressed the need for renewable energy sources, advocated for environmental consciousness and named the harms associated with American consumerism. He could already see the interconnected nature of the crisis and wanted to try to substantively address it.

It was not a message that the American public wanted to hear, however, and the mainstream media dubbed his famous 1979 speech the “malaise” speech because he spoke openly about the problems we were facing. Carter, however, saw the writing on the wall and knew that we needed to do something. He felt an urgency that others did not share.

In today’s gospel from Mark 1, Jesus hears of John’s arrest and sets his own ministry in motion. Mark’s gospel (the first gospel written) offers no lead up to Jesus’ ministry or birth narrative. Instead, Jesus appears on the scene and gets right to work. It is a gospel of action and urgency.

Jesus’ first words in his ministry were, “This is the time of fulfillment.The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

I have always loved the word “repent.” Its meaning is to turn away from sin and make amends. And if we think of the word “sin” in its original meaning (to miss the mark), then this call is meant to help us realign our lives and make amends for the harm that has been done (personal and collective).

Linguistically, the word repent also shares a root with the word reptile. And while its current usage is related to specific kinds of creatures, it originally meant to crawl close to the ground.

And so Jesus appears encouraging people to realign their lives, make amends/repair and stay close to the ground. 

He then sets about calling a crew of people to be on the journey with him. You’ll notice quickly that he does not pick “kingdom building professionals.” No rabbis. No politicians. No A-list names. He just recruits ordinary folks. And they respond!

I often imagine the conversations at those dinner tables that night where Simon, Andrew, James and John go home and announce to their families, “I did something crazy today! I quit fishing and decided to follow this guy around…” 

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has an urgency about the kingdom and wants his followers to share in that sense of urgency as well. I don’t think he’s encouraging panic or a crisis mentality so much as saying “this is REALLY important work!”

When Jesus came on the scene, poverty wasn’t new. Injustice wasn’t new. Domination systems were not new. Even forms of environmental destruction were not new. But all of these had become so normalized that they hardly rattled people in a significant way any longer (well, of course they rattled those most affected, but the wider population probably lived with a passive acceptance…). But Jesus shows up on the scene and invites people to recognize the harm in their midst and to not normalize it.

What is happening in LA, for example, is obviously a crisis that needs our response. What we may fail to name, however, is that the conditions and the structures that are underneath this current crisis were ALREADY a crisis as well. This was the kind of stuff Jimmy Carter (and others, of course) were trying to name and address decades ago.

We’re all currently living our lives in the midst of multiple crises (what some have called metacrises) that have become normalized. They are generally “just how we live” and function in society (especially in the West) and they are also harmful and toxic for the earth and for human relationships. And it’s nearly impossible to try to “solve” one without impacting (or even creating!) another.

I know that it can feel overwhelming to try to take all this in at once and I’m not sure we even can. And while it may be true that “the whole system’s gotta go,” that may not help us much as a starting point and will probably make it MORE LIKELY that we do nothing!

So we must start with what we can do and with what is on our hearts and minds, AND keep holding an urgency (what MLK called “the fierce urgency of now”) that helps us to not accept the reality in front of us as just how things are going to be.

Steady and sustained action.

Activist and writer Rebecca Solnit says that, “People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash.” Yet, she says, “a lot of change is undramatic growth,” and goes on to remind us that, “a common source of uninformed despair is when a too-brief effort doesn’t bring a desired result—one round of campaigning, one protest. Or when one loss becomes the basis for someone to decide winning is impossible and quitting—as if you tossed a coin once and decided it always comes up tails.“

As people of faith, we will need to continue to do multi-level work if we’re going to effectively address the challenges in front of us – accepting that the pace of change may be slow AND yet not giving up on it. The process will likely be messy and may not often feel significant, but maybe like our prayer life we must just keep coming back to it.

My sense is that Jesus understood this and called ordinary people into the work of slow, radical change. May we be willing to take up our place in it.