There is some strange parallels between climate change and Jesus.

If one goes up to a 'normal' secular human in our society, and starts talking about Jesus, they wonder what planet you're from.  Their life is going fine.  It's under control.  The mortgage just got paid off, the promotion at work just happened, and retirement is only five years off.  Life is good and under control.  What on earth are you talking about Jesus for?

It's like climate change.  It is an emerging religion of sorts.  There's been evangelizing since the 1960's, and people are starting to listen to the new Church, science, because it has some credible authority.  It makes aspirin and cars happen.

After watching Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' you feel agitated.  But the next morning the neighborhood hasn't changed, the grocery store is still full, and there's still money in your account.  It's not 'real.'

It's kind of like getting to know Jesus in the early stages.  Your imagination is flared up, your heart has a yearning.  Some interesting things come to you.  But the neighborhood hasn't changed, and you still have to go to work.

Slowly, if you take Jesus increasingly seriously, your 'environment' starts to change, internally, and for some, they see events around them having a few strange congruencies to what you prayed for.

The more serious that you take Jesus, the more radically your life changes.  The path less chosen.

It all depends on how far you want to go with Jesus.  Religion can only give you so much.  If one gets Jesus only through the Church, it's safe, kind of like recycling back into factories to save the 'environment,' supporting the institution.  The modern contextual approach to 'saving Planet Church,' while saving yourself at the same time.

It is much like modern theology versus tradition.  Academics have done an excellent job in understanding the historical Jesus as a mystic social reformer, skipping over the layers added after His death by the Church.  But to keep the institution viable, Church tradition is so often used to stymie reform.

With climate change, we know that everything we do in modern society in some way harms Nature, the spirit of life that sustains us, but our lifestyle tradition of consumerism and the suburbs keeps us from becoming more radical, like that social critic, Jesus of Nazareth. 

Tradition must be maintained, even though everyone has anxiety about the status quo, and rush to purchase green products from smokestack factories to save the earth.  If science through business created global warming, and our great lifestyles, then science through business must obviously be able to save us.  Much like the Church, doing the same thing after 2000 years, hoping for a different result.

After all, modern society is like following Jesus through His Church.  There is no alternative outside of either system.  We dance with who brought us to the ball.  It's 'cultural,' 'tradition,' 'contextual,' the architecture of our minds, freedom and free will, within the walls of the city/Church environment.  We don't have much choice.  The individual is so powerful.  The individual is powerless.

Jesus said the Temple would be destroy.  A few decades later, it did.  But that was just coincidence.  And more of a coincidence that after taking on Greek anthropocentrism, the Church then became the official state religion.  Then civilized paganism was destroyed, while the Temple was destroyed, The Eternal City, Rome itself, by other pagans, the aboriginal Germanic Horde.  Just when the pope became de facto emperor of the western Roman Empire.  Jesus' sayings just give and give.  It just gave the Church, at the point of its greatest triumph, a disaster.

Business and science just became our official state religion in the 1960's, having finally relegated religion to the social margins.  Business and science will save the environment.

Civilizations come and go.  For the first time we have a global civilization.  Science tells us that the Temple will come down.  We balk, and continue following our traditions.  Nothing too radical.  The Temple of business keeps us alive.  Its just trade.  And look at the benefits. 

Yet people who live by the destruction of the Earth, will die by the destruction of the Earth.  We pay lip service, say a 'prayer for the Earth' when we buy green products, and that will do us 'spiritually' for the week.

Lots of really weird parallels about our disconnection with the spiritual and the Earth.  Jesus was a radical, and went into regular society and said you'd better change quickly, or your environment was going to change.  The poor of the world are 'getting it' now, but the rich are always the last to know.  They have the most to lose.  But if they don't change radically, they are going to lose it anyways.

What an awful thing for Jesus to have said.  So negative against the Temple.  If He had a positive attitude, maybe people would have listened to Him more... attitude is everything!  And we are positive to a fault, defending the status quo.

But what Jesus was really saying is... change is good... the status quo ain't.  What will our Temple look like in only a few decades? 

Have we watered down the historical Jesus to support the status quo, instead of digging deeper to discover the one thing mainline Churches have a problem with?  He was a social reformer, like the social gospel.  But He was also a mystic.  It seems a radical, spiritual great awakening is needed in this Methodist church. 

We need to dig a little deeper in our 'tradition' if the Church really wants to find out its true identity, what it really is, the radical kernel of Jesus that has kept renewing this Church for 2000 years.

Then we'll get some beneficial climate change, as Planet Church transforms into new life, just like the Earth is about to do.  It's about our spiritual environment.