Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 378

He said to them, "Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?" 

Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm. The men were amazed and said, "What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?"

Today's readings invite reflection on our relationship to the natural world in which we live. It is not as easy as it used to be to suppose that catastrophic weather conditions are not caused by human sin. Even if we're reluctant to see in wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes the punishing hand of a righteous God, we can admit that our Mother Earth is trying to tell us something, and many of us refuse to hear it. 

Eventually we will have to sit up and take notice. We will have to change our ways because the Earth and its punitive weather can outwait our stubborn denial. We should learn a lesson from the dinosaurs, who survived for sixty million years! The human race has not seen a million and we're already facing extinction.

Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato si, showed how exploitation of the environment is exploitation of the poor, and vice versa. The attitudes of greed, carelessness, selfishness, and irreverence are the same. Where natural resources are wasted and misused people suffer. The wealthy will insulate and inoculate themselves from the consequences for a time, but their security is temporary, at best, for their extravagance is supported on the collapsing strength of the weak.

Some Christians might wash their hands of ecological concerns, supposing their faith will take them out of this world into an ecologically invulnerable heaven. 

But we can no longer imagine human nature without our intimate connection to the world in which we are born. We are "earthlings" made from the dust of the earth. We are creatures of time and place, that is history and geography. Our attitudes and actions are, if  not determined, certainly affected by the chemistry around us and within us. Humans have used mind-altering substances since prehistoric times, for good and for ill. If there is only one "human race," class and racial identity profoundly shape our ethics and moral behavior. 

The doctrine of the "resurrection of the body," enunciated in the Apostles Creed, reminds us that we are creatures of matter, and that the material world matters to us. To dismiss the Earth as disposable trash is to dismiss ourselves and everything that matters to us. The worship of Jesus, born of a woman in Bethlehem many centuries ago, commits us to care for the Earth.