TEMPERATURES ARE AGAIN breaking records around the world, a now grimly familiar annual event. During an early summer heat dome over much of the country, a much-shared video showed a car in Missouri go airborne as it hit pavement severely buckled by the extreme heat. 2024 was officially the first year that the world eclipsed a 1.5 degrees Celsius surface temperature rise above the pre-industrial standard — busting through the ceiling for temperature rise that was agreed to in the Paris climate accords. Worse, the Trump administration seems determined to reverse as many of the Biden administration’s climate accomplishments as possible — undoing progress that, while insufficient to the scale of the crisis, was still a step in the right direction.
As Christians, how do we reckon with the reality of the climate crisis, not as a future hypothetical but a present reality? A text that comes to mind is Psalm 24:1-2: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for God founded it on the seas and established it on the waters.”
When I think about this text, I feel both righteous anger and grief for what human beings, each of us created in God’s image, have wrought upon God’s world. Yet at the same time, I have long believed that we have a responsibility as believers to be prisoners of hope — followers and instruments of a Lord and liberator who is alive and continually at work in the world to make all things new. As the recently departed Walter Brueggemann put it, “God is doing something lively in the world ... it may be slow, but it is very sure ... a new world is coming into being.”
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