In a Deadly Heatwave, The Psalmist Finds Shade: Under His Bible (Ps 121)
Climate Bible Study: July 2022
Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632)
“Burning planet: why are the world’s heatwaves getting more intense?” (Guardian, 18 Jun 2022)
The Lord watches over you—
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night. (Ps 1221:5-6, NIV)
Even Japan made the headlines—“Japan swelters in its worst heatwave ever recorded” (BBC News 30 June 2022). As I watched the headlines roll out this past month from Madrid, New Delhi, and Phoenix, I also kept one ear open to my own memory. I was a missionary in North India for 14 years. I knew what these extreme temperatures felt like. I knew that moment of anguish when the electrical grid, unable to handle the increased load, suddenly shuts down, and your one remaining ceiling fan whirls down to where no air moves across your body at all.
This newsletter reflection is about how to read our Bibles in record high temperatures when the sweat drips down on the pages. This newsletter reflection is more broadly about how to read our Bibles in this new era of climate change—especially when—hello!—the writers of Scripture knew nothing about parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere, about the Paris Climate Agreement, about heat domes. It’s time for me to come clean about what I’ve been trying to do with these monthly Bible reflections.
In April, May, and June in our North Indian city, we knew how to regulate our daily activities until the monsoon rains finally came to give us some relief from the heat. You woke early and went off to the bazaar to run your errands before the sun was too high in the sky. By 12 noon, you tried to safely be back under your own roof and you didn’t venture out again until dusk. One day however I found myself trying to get in “just one more errand.” I think maybe I was booking a new gas cylinder at a shop on the road that leads west from Lanka bazaar, but I was walking in the wrong direction, away from home, and additionally away from where I could buy water. I had been out too long. My water bottle was dry. I looked around. There was no shade nearby. Suddenly, I felt myself begin to swoon. “I’m going to faint,” I said to myself with a degree of embarrassment, incrimination, and panic. But then—suddenly—I found coming to me the words that I had—randomly—read just that morning in Psalm 121:5-8:
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
I can’t claim to have pro-actively memorized this passage. I don’t know why I recalled it in the King James Version, except perhaps because the phrase “shall not smite thee” felt more powerful. Regardless, the Lord would be my shade. He would preserve my going out and coming back in. Here’s the thing: I immediately felt refreshed, strengthened, as if the cells in my body were being instantaneously re-hydrated. I felt strengthened enough to turn around, walk back to the bazaar, buy some water, and the get safely home.
So what happened there with my body’s reaction to the Word of God? In our city, there were some Muslims who would reportedly go to visit a pir, a folk practitioner, and they would receive a slip of paper with a verse from the Koran written on it. They were instructed to boil the slip of paper in a cup of water and drink the pulp and the ink as a tea. Had I—metaphorically—treated the Word of God in a similar fashion? And what was I to make of that statement (NIV now) that: “The Lord will keep you from all harm”? All harm? Was that a straightforward promise? If so, it didn’t seem to align with other legs of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral which says we have four sources for theological development: scripture, but also tradition, reason, and Christian experience. And what was I to make of the KJV saying in verse 7 that God will “preserve thy soul” while the NIV translates it “he will watch over your life”? It was my body, not my soul, that I was worried about on that hot, hot day?
The way I interact with Scripture today has been greatly influenced by theologian Pete Enns, author of How the Bible Actually Works. Enns also collaborates with Jared Byas as they co-host the podcast The Bible for Normal Bible. In a recent episode (#207) where they explore “Respecting the Bible for What It is (and Isn’t),” they ask the question “Is it fair to ask the Bible to provide clear instruction on modern problems/issues?” Byas answers “When we ask the question, ‘What does the Bible say about X?’ we’ve already assumed that it has something directly to say to us today in the modern world and that it’s geared toward this moral or ethical purpose.”
And then Byas asks his co-host Enns, the explicit question that I, as a writer of climate-based biblical reflections, was dreading: Is it even fair to ask the question: “What does the Bible have to say about climate change?” Enns replies: “No, I don’t think it’s fair at all. . . . You’re gonna start looking for things to justify what you already think. I would rather say, is there wisdom in our tradition that we can engage today for understanding a problem that [the writers of the Bible] never envisioned?”
When I first began, circa 2009, writing about the Bible and climate change, I no doubt was taking a “greatest hits” approach: exegeting such verses as Gen. 1:28, Gen. 2:15, Psalm 104, Rom. 8:19, Ps 24:1. There was even a speciality Bible that came out at the time called The Green Bible which highlighted all creation care verses in green ink. But after making the comment in this episode that he considers creation care and climate change to be “very, very real” and that Christians should be “on the forefront of saying this planet is a gift” and asking “what are we doing?,” Enns says, “I don’t think we need to anchor that in the biblical principle or a biblical verse.” He gives three examples: First, “I don’t think giving humans dominion over the planet is supportive of climate change activism." Second, about the Year of Jubilee: “I don’t think that’s about caring for the planet, because the whole point [of the Jubilee passages] is to care for the Israelites. You want to have good crops and stuff, just let the land lie fallow for a year and then start up again." Finally, about Romans 8, creation groaning, and waiting for the revelation of the sons of God: “Again, that’s a very theological eschatological statement; I don’t see what that has to do remotely with climate change. But I still think it’s a very true and real thing, but for a different sort of sets of reasons.”
In other words, the Bible—an ancient text—was written for a specific context which had its own set of problems. Climate change, and 195 nation-states trying to work out a voluntary treaty to deal with it, was not one of the biblical writers’ problems. Instead, as modern readers of the Bible who are greatly interested in the issue of climate change, let’s ask, as Enns would rather we do: “Is there wisdom in our tradition that we can engage today for understanding a problem that they never envisioned?”
The wisdom that I find in a passage like Psalm 121 is that God is willing to be shade for us, and that he is willing to respond to us in the immediate moment (“on my right hand.”) He is willing to triangulate himself between the sun and our vulnerable human bodies. From my experience with reading Psalm 121 in the middle of a heat wave, I learned that our faith can be used to not only inform our policymakers; our faith can be used to inform our blood cells.
This marks the 17th Bible reflection that I have written for a Climate Intercessors newsletter. I know I’ve had some crazy headlines such as, “Jonathan’s Armour Bearer Wonders Whether COP26 will be Cancelled” or “Blind Bartimaeus Sits Astride the Keystone XL Pipeline” when, of course, they did no such thing. Four months ago, I anointed “Hagar, Patron Saint of Climate Refugees” when Enns and Byas declare in their podcast episode that the Bible doesn’t speak about our modern refugee crisis. Byas immediately says, “I think sometimes I cringe regardless of where the argument is, whether it’s my position or a position I disagree with, when we (what I would call it) disrespect the original intentions of the text where it’s clear, at least in my mind, that this isn’t what this is talking about.” But honestly, while I reserve the creative perogative to use cringeworthy headlines to spark interest, I feel like I was seeking the wisdom from Hagar’s story in Genesis 16 and 21: namely that God in her story is the same God today who sees and who hears the plight of those who are out from their homeland’s protection. In fact, I’ve begun to call my Biible study process “injective Bible study” (as another tongue-in-cheek play on the “inductive Bible study method that I had been trained in.) I take a story from Scripture, inject the issue of climate change into it (knowing that the passage is NOT about climate change), and then see how that interaction metabolizes into a wisdom that we can use now, today, in the middle of our modern crisis.
I remember the first time I changed the actual wording of a famous Bible verse for the sake of making a point about modern climate action. I wasn’t a theologian or biblical scholar. I was a missionary who worked in India who understood that I was doing the work of “The Great Commission” not only in a time that had changed since the New Testament, but on a planet that had also changed. I quoted from the famous “Go and make disciples of all peoples” statement (Matt. 28:18-20) but ended with Christ’s promise “And lo I am with you always to the end of [the Anthropocene Age.]” I let people know that that is not what this passage said, nor meant, but my point was insistent: if we missionaries were going to further the Great Commission, then we needed to know God’s companionship was guaranteed, but also that our ministries needed to change for the set of geological circumstances that many now call the Anthropocene. I did the same thing with what preachers call “the Great Commission” in the Book of Acts (1:8). We would be Christ’s witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the “uttermost ends of the Eaarth.” Why the misspelling? I wanted to introduce my missionary audience to what Bill McKibben wrote when he harkened his readers to a 1968 photo taken from Apollo 8 and said:
But we no longer live on that planet. In the four decades since, that earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans no longer thrived. We’re every day less the oasis and more the desert. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different place. It needs a new name. Eaarth (3).
The ”uttermost ends of the Earth” is not the same place when Jesus employed in the first century. Pete Enns’s book How the Bible Actually Works has a very distinctive subtitle: “In Which I Explain How an Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News.” Enns apparently has a book coming out soon about the Bible and Science, in which climate change is included. I can hardly wait. Meanwhile, I’ll keep up my journeyman efforts. Record hot temperatures this summer? May we know God as the shade at our right hand.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team
Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2019.
Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, New York: Times Books, 2010.
Jared Byas and Peter Enns, Episode 207: “Respecting the Bible for What It is (and Isn’t),” The Bible for Normal People podcast.