To Lose the 1.5 Degree Target So Soon After Pentecost (Acts 4)
Climate Bible Study: May 2022
St. Peter in Prison, by Rembrandt
So much happens to the disciples in the first four chapters of the Book of Acts: they are still coming to grips with the Resurrection, Jesus ascends to his Father, they reorganize themselves, the Holy Spirit falls upon them in the Upper Room, community and community practices are formed, a lame man is miraculously healed, people join the church in multiples of a thousand in response to Peter’s first attempts at preaching. . . it’s a cinematic whirlwind.
I’m interested, however, in that one single hour—say, around 2 AM in the dark morning—when Peter and John sat overnight in jail (Acts 4:3). Luke the historian skips pretty quickly over this solitary 2 AM hour. The next verse, v. 4, jumps back to the joy of what put them into jail in the first place: 5,000 who believed the message. The verse after that quickly announces “sunrise!”: Peter is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and seizes another opportunity to proclaim the Good News that “the man you crucified” is the one “whom God raised from the dead” (v. 10).
But what about Peter and John sitting in jail overnight? I once spent a night in jail, in North Carolina in the summer of 1981 after my first year of university. It was silly, really. I had been unwittingly selling books without a license in violation of a city ordinance that my manager said was nothing to worry about. I was bailed out by said manager the next day after a free breakfast, which I appreciated because I was not making any money in a job for which I was wholly unsuited. The charges were dropped with a phone call. Nonetheless, before I fell asleep that night in jail, I cried like a little boy. “Why did it have to be so hard?”
Subsequent jail times in the Book of Acts will feature rejoicing, such as when Peter is miraculously released in Acts 12 or Paul and Silas are singing hymns in Acts16. But the overnight jail sentence in Acts 4 is characterized by silence. Surely for the first few hours, Peter and John were catching their breath from the cinematic whirlwind, but by 2 AM had they grown quiet and reflective? Did they ask the questions: “How is this possible?” “How are we in jail so soon after Pentecost?” “Is building the kingdom of God going to be this hard?”
At next week’s Climate Intercessors Global Zoom Prayer Meeting, we are going to feature the 1.5°C target which is aspirationally exhibited in the Paris Agreement. You will get to hear a “brief history of the 1.5°C target in four COPs.” We will admit that the IPCC Sixth Summary report still believes that it is possible “on paper” to achieve this target. And yet, we feel it is time to look at the 1.5°C target from the standpoint of pastoral leadership. How is it possible that so soon after the Paris Agreement, after the IPCC’s 2018 report on the target, after Glasgow’s attempt to “Keep 1.5 Alive,” so soon after the Resurrection of the Christ who loves all his creatures, so soon after Pentecost which empowers us to do rightly—how is it possible that we are on the verge of losing the 1.5°C target, on the verge of such resultant suffering? Why does it have to be this hard?
The reason that I think Peter and John turned reflective, whether at 2AM or not, is because of the prayers that the congregation immediately pray after all the disciples hear the report. They didn’t spontaneously burst into prayers of thanksgiving over Peter and John’s release. There wasn’t a Paul on hand to try to explain to them the “privilege of suffering for the cause of Christ.” Instead, they clung to their togetherness, they recognized the difficulty they were up against, and they soberly prayed for courage. “When they heard the report, all the believers lifted their voices together in prayer to God:
O Sovereign Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—you spoke long ago by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant, saying,
‘Why were the nations so angry?
Why did they waste their time with futile plans?
The kings of the earth prepared for battle;
the rulers gathered together
against the Lord
and against his Messiah.’
In fact, this has happened here in this very city! For Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate the governor, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel were all united against Jesus, your holy servant, whom you anointed. But everything they did was determined beforehand according to your will.
And now, O Lord, hear their threats, and give us, your servants, great boldness in preaching your word. Stretch out your hand with healing power; may miraculous signs and wonders be done through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
Then we read: “After this prayer, the meeting place shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Then they preached the word of God with boldness. All the believers were united in heart and mind.” I believe that a good argument can be made that this one single prayer, recorded here in Acts 4:23-30, serves as the crucial lynchpin between what we could call the “acts of God” in Chapters 1-3 (i.e. Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost) and the “acts” of the apostles that make up the remaining 24 grueling and fraught chapters of this remarkable work of kingdom history.
The leadership team of Climate Intercessors feels the need to shift our prayers in such a way as to fight against every single zero-point-one (O.1) degree of warming—before and during the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, or after, should it unfortunately come to that. In other words, the next degree of warming (1.2°C) is as abhorrent to us as 1.6°C, and you won’t find us giving up after—Lord, may it not be so--2.1°C. We understand the value of goals and benchmarks, particularly if one is working with scientists and negotiating an international treaty, and yet the reasons these numbers exist anyway is because they are meant to represent thresholds of suffering which breaks God’s heart and breaks ours.
The next 24 chapters of our story is going to be grueling and fraught. As per the prayer of Acts 4, we will need God to pay attention to powerful world leaders who have been as ruthless as Herod and Pilate ever were. We will have to have faith in what theologian Walter Brueggemann calls “the raw sovereignty of God in the historical process.” We will need boldness to preach a gospel that includes all of the Earth in the good news of the kingdom of God. We will openly long for miracles and signs. We will need to be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to struggle effectively against every single 0.1 degree of warming.
“All the believers lifted their voices together in prayer to God.”
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team