Ezekiel’s statement that “the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (v. 2) could hardly be more appropriate to our environmental, economic, and political situation today. What the parents have done tastes edgy (bitter? unpleasant? downright unacceptable?) to the children and they are left to clean it up.
This has not been the view of interpreters through the ages who understood the proverb to mean that God directs one generation’s sins to become the sins of the next generation. In other words, the children won’t enter the kingdom of heaven because they will be guilty of the sins of the parents. Such thinking is in line with the notion that “the sins of the fathers [and mothers]” fall upon their children, saddling the children with the same sinful reputation.
But there is another way to read this proverb. It is not about what God will do with the sins of one generation (i.e., “unfairly” make the next generation “pay”). Instead, this proverb describes––rather than prescribes––the results of sin. Whatever it is that the parents do will change the world and confront the next generation with the results. We have seen the results in our time of what many generations have done.
Because today the children’s teeth are “set on edge” over climate chaos, a legal organization called Our Children’s Trust sued the State of Montana on behalf of sixteen children, arguing that “by supporting a fossil fuel-driven energy system, which is contributing to the climate crisis, Montana is violating their constitutional rights to a clean and healthful environment.” Back in 1972, several months of research and debate by 100 Montana citizens appointed for the task, ensconced the language of care for creation in revisions to the Montana State Constitution. Voters then ratified the revisions, including constitutional language that required the state to guarantee care for Earth: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”
The sixteen children represented by Our Children’s Trust looked at the situation today––fifty years after the Constitutional Convention––and saw their lives and the lives of all creatures endangered. The forces that deny climate change had successfully thwarted policies over recent decades that would keep air and water clean.
Today’s children have the most at stake because they will be affected the longest by our continually denigrating Earth. “The parents have eaten sour grapes…” No wonder the childrens’ “teeth are set on edge.” The children, the Earth, and the Montana Constitution won the lawsuit. Held v. State of Montana can go forth now (even though it’s being appealed by fossil fuel interests) to influence the policies of others states and even nations.
The lawsuit itself proclaims what the Lord commands Ezekiel to say: “all lives are mine.” All of creation belongs to the Lord. Ezekiel’s message is “Turn, then, and live.” It is not God who visits devastation on our seas, rivers, forests, cities, villages of people whose islands are shrinking as oceans rise. We do not have to imagine that the damage resulting from reckless environmental policies is God’s action. We have created wildfires, drought, floods, and increasingly violent storms all on our own. Biblical theology shows us again and again that the results we can expect from violence and thoughtlessness are due to our choices, and not to God desiring that we die.
The Matthew reading and Philippians 2 point us to the way forward from the horror of this climate crisis. In keeping with the previous Sunday’s Gospel story of the landowner giving the same payment to the first- and last-arriving workers, Matthew 21:31–32 puts the known sinners (those we might deem last-arriving) ahead of everyone else in the reign of God. Everyone is treated with what human beings tend to consider unfair grace, unfair forgiveness. Because the tax collectors and the prostitutes (people commonly considered beneath everyone else) believed what John came preaching, they get major favors from God. Those to whom Jesus is preaching in this text lose out because “even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.” Let us substitute the prophets who have been crying out for decades now about impending disasters as kin to John the Baptist calling out “Repent and be baptized!” The climate prophets cry out: “Wake up and change your ways.”
The author of the letter to the Philippians offers a way for us to imagine answering the wakeup call: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look. . . to the interests of others.” (vss. 3–4) Becoming “obedient even to the point of death” with regard to talking about climate is to take sometimes serious risk of dismissal and ridicule and even violence. But we are not left without the means to tackle the problem for “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (v. 13)
The difficulty lies in how exactly we are to listen to the word of the Lord which now we can see as the reality that confronts us daily about the lives of our fellow humans and polar bears and songbirds and all the other creatures struggling these days. The word of the Lord is saying: “Turn, then, and live.” “Change your minds and believe.”
Hearing God’s word as it comes to us from the cries of Earth and of those who are keeping watch (doing research, collecting data, writing articles, being interviewed by journalists, calling us to help, inventing fixes) requires discernment, however, and that is not easy. Discernment asks from whom a voice is coming to us. It weighs the value of what is said in terms of how it will affect our lives. If we change how we are living in order to take heed to what we hear, we may be ostracized by our family and neighbors. We may fear losing credibility. We may find ourselves catatonic before the enormity of how Earth is responding to our parents’ sins and our own.
The most important thing about discernment is the gift of bringing us together in community, for as it asks what is the best possible direction for me, it simultaneously points to what is best for others. By testing that discernment, we learn whether others will confirm our decision. This is a route out of the temptation to despair because it pulls people together to look at and listen to Earth and to the prophets of our time, to weigh the value of a livable planet against using economic considerations as paramount, to discern a course of action that is the best for each of us and then everyone, and to know that this work is God at work in us for good.
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Hymns to consider in ELW:
#447 O Blessed Spring
#699 In Deepest Night
#740 God of the Sparrow
In the new hymnal supplement to ELW, All Creation Sings:
#922 When We are Tested
#1004 Faith Begins by Letting Go
#1078 There Is a Longing in Our Hearts
Melinda Quivik
Twin Cities, Minnesota
Melinda Quivik, an ELCA pastor (who served churches in Montana, Michigan, and Minnesota) and former professor of worship and preaching, is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal Liturgy, a writer, and a preaching mentor with Backstory Preaching at backstory-preaching.mn.com. Her most recent book, Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays, is a response to Lenny Duncan's Dear Church. She calls all churches to learn why worship ways differ in our various traditions as we seek to be more welcoming.