I. The universe as we know it began approximately 14 billion years ago in an event referred to as the Big Bang. How do we know this? Essentially, we track the direction and speed of stars and galaxies and discover that everything is moving away from everything else. The whole thing is expanding. By means of spectral analysis, we discover the speed of expansion, and, by inference, we know how long it took for that object to have moved away from the Big Bang center. The answer: 14 billion years. In that period of time, the universe has spread out across a lot of territory, distances that defy imagination. At 186,000 miles per second, light can go pretty far in 14 billion years.

At this moment in astrophysics, the consensus is that the universe has insufficient mass – and therefore gravity- to slow down the expansion. Given the second law of thermodynamics, it seems that the universe will continually spread out, cool off, dissipate energy, and eventually freeze. Of course, should a new source of energy/matter be discovered, it might have enough gravitational pull to eventually stop expansion and start a great contraction, beginning to draw matter back together again, the terminal point of which would be a sort of mass cosmic collision. The end game there would not be a great freeze, but a giant explosion. Apparently, a steady state, where things stay as they are, is not an option. Neither a deep freeze nor a collision due to contraction is a particularly welcoming or encouraging vision of the universe. The only consolation is that it would take a long time.

If we limit our observation to our solar system, the news really is not much better. In about 4 billion years, the inevitable life process of our sun will cause it to become a red dwarf type of star, expanding greatly in size and frying all the planets that now are content to revolve around it. 4 billion years is a relatively long time, but the fact that earth and the whole solar system ends disqualifies it for any kind of eternal life with the divine.

However, and it is a deciding however, however limited we may in the scope of both time and space, this is our time and space, our place to be happy, our place to be responsible, compassionate, loving human beings. And that gives ultimate value to how we care for one another and for our common environment right now.

II. Over the span of many millions of years, plants and animals thrived on earth. The organic chemistry that was the essence of this life is based on carbon molecules. As time went on and living forms died, much of the carbon was buried beneath the surface, and, under pressure and over time, those molecules became what we know as coal and oil and gas, the fossil fuels that currently are at the churning of modern civilization. Burning these fuels provides the energy for industry and manufacturing, transportation and entertainment, at least for those lucky enough to live in the right place. The problem of course, is that in taking the fuels out of the ground and burning them, i.e. combining that carbon with oxygen, we have transformed harmless carbon into carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not some evil substance, but one of its characteristics is that it is comparable to a one way door when it comes to sunlight. The gas allows the solar radiation that produces heat into the earth’s atmosphere, but doesn’t let it out. The earth heats up. The pace at which we as human beings have taken carbon out of the earth and burned it has been increasing for perhaps the last two hundred years, and today we are beginning to pay the price. We are all familiar with the results: the environment heats up, ice caps melt, sea level rises, island nations are submerged, coastal cities are flooded, weather becomes more violent, food sources are disrupted, drought hits one area while flooding hits another, and so on. The earth’s environment, taken for granted for so long, can no longer be assumed to remain hospitable in the future.

It would be wonderful if elected representatives from around the world could come together and agree on a course of action, but that is not the case. People with vested interests in continuing to burn carbon- big oil and big coal, for example- deny that we even have a problem, despite the fact that the scientific community is nearly unanimous. The problem is compounded by the incredible success of the new technology of fracturing (fracking) oil and gas wells, offering to the world another 100 years of cheap and abundant carbon to burn. For the first time in a long time, the USA is poised to become a net exporter of oil rather than an importer. The president of ExxonMobil is ecstatic. Gasoline at the pump will be cheap again. The politicians need make no difficult decisions about energy, decisions that would alienate the corporations (ten years ago I might have said “voters” here) that put them in power. But the atmospheric temperature continues to rise.

There are some who are greedy and irresponsible, and they tend to be those profiting from the current system. But the problem lies deeper. As each person develops through the course of their life, they inevitably become parochial. We see things from our particular perspective. Everybody does it. Period. Inevitable and universal. We are not evil (except for a select few), but we are both blind and bound. We are not reasonable beings in control of our minds. Freud pioneered that discovery long ago. And so it is that the wealthy begin to assume they have a right to their riches. And Westerners believe they have a right to their standard of living. And the poor are led to believe that their poverty is their fault. And the powerful, of course, know they must exercise their power. And men are fully aware that they are more important to civilization than women are. And so it goes. No one is acting from evil intent (again, except for the select few); they honestly believe what they think. Nero fiddles, and Rome burns.

In the midst of all this one might well ask: What has happened to the Christian prophetic voice? the voice that says: no, you can’t do that. Christians lately have a tendency to accommodate culture, either by draping the cross with the American flag, or by pretending that new philosophical/theological theories are the answer to the world’s problems. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible had a different take on the divine will. They walked into the king’s court and the king’s chapel, and proclaimed what they believed was the word of God: you cannot do that! We may not like to use the word sin anymore, especially when thought of as “original”. So let us put something else in its place. We are parochial, we do create our own little world, we do put our interests above those of others. And it will haunt us. The eternal now is upon us, and it is time for the Church, progressive and otherwise, to join those prophetic voices that the the world so desperately needs to hear, those voices that cry out: you cannot do this!

Jim Kim, president of the World Bank and former president of Dartmouth College, recently spoke about the ebola crisis. His point was simple: the unequal distribution of wealth across the world has coddled the wealthy west into ignoring the problems of the poor, the other, the African. Their plight just didn’t “fit into my world”. Until a week or two ago, that is. The same is true of global warming and climate change. It’s not just the problem of somebody else. We are all in it together, and, for the moment, there is no other planet with a gated community.