The author or authors of the New Testament document known as the "Gospel according to Luke" crafted about as cautionary a tale as is possible. It concerns a character known as Dives (from the Vulgate's translation of the first sentence of the story -- Homo quidam erat dives, "dives" meaning "rich" -- "There once was a rich man."

The story goes on to say that said rich man wore splendid garments and feasted every day at a groaning table. The hint is that he ignored the presence of Lazarus, a starving beggar, just outside the gate of his manor.

The denouement is that both Dives and Lazarus die. Lazarus is gathered into the arms of Blessed Abraham, there to dwell forever in the comfort he never knew in life. Dives finds himself in the eternal flames of hell but sees Abraham across the great divide and begs for rescue. Abraham declines, saying Dives has had his turn at the banquet table, that now Lazarus has taken his place and will enjoy the good things to which Dives had become complacently accustomed to having.

There is no satisfying end to the story for Dives.

This parable flashed in my mind as I read a lengthy piece about the melting of polar ice due to greenhouse gas emissions, which brings about the warming of Earth and resultant climate change -- change that would not be occurring were it not for human carelessness.

Consequently, the oceans are rising at an alarming rate with coastal soil in many Third World nations becoming acidic, if not being washed away altogether. Consequently, the growing of crops for food subsistence has become ever more difficult in many underdeveloped countries. The very much nonpolitical, fact-pursuing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is flatly saying that a global catastrophe is almost assured in the foreseeable future.

Putting it another way, Lazarus lies outside the gate, which we would know if only we paid attention.

Beyond the immediate inconvenience of killer storms, unreal hot weather, major floods and other directly climate-related disasters lies the all-too-real risk that Earth's food supply is in danger. Not that your neighborhood Costco will soon be short of parsnips or potatoes, though their cost will surely go up. The threat is of massive hunger leading to starvation in places where the Lazaruses of this world live.

If there is any good news, it is that $100 billion in food aid provided by such wealthy nations as the United States would stave off such a calamity -- for longer if industrial countries would get serious about cutting dangerous emissions, and only briefly if they don't.

Guess what government of what country has balked at the $100 billion figure as "unrealistic." Guess what political party of what country continues its crusade to shred environmental protection regulations as its spokes-tools pooh-pooh what they call the "myths" of climate change and global warming. Guess what some of the 1%, who are probably closer to the 0.1%, are thinking about the tax increases they would face in order to contribute their shares to their country's share of the $100 billion.

Withal, Dives knew that Lazarus was out there on his step. Likewise those with as much as half a brain know that Earth is talking back to us about our profligacy and negligence through its increasingly temperamental behavior on land and sea.

Luke's authors were speaking to us as well, telling us that time eventually runs out for rich and poor alike and that, regardless of political theories, it is a moral imperative for the former to care for the latter while both are alive.

America is the most self-consciously religious nation in the Western world with millions of professing Christians. Churches everywhere. Is no one in them reading, studying or preaching Luke -- and, in particular, Luke's parable of Dives and Lazarus?

A great many churches are not embarrassed to threaten their constituents with hellfire. Why do they not mobilize their hell-fearing congregations to come to the aid of the Lazaruses who are helpless as hunger, malnutrition and starvation bear down on them?

Why do preachers not use their sermons to bring moral pressure to bear on a recalcitrant Congress to strengthen, not weaken, the Environmental Protection Agency? Why should not the priests who hand out bread and wine every Sunday make urgent appeals to the Administration to get itself behind the $100 billion project that would provide bread and milk to those who are soon to find it beyond their means to provide either for themselves?

In the imagination of those who gave us the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the former became aware of his tragic omissions when it was too late. Charles Dickens could well have had Dives in mind when he depicted the grievously penitent ghost of Jacob Marley crying out from the netherworld: "Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business."

Herewith, then, assigned readings to be performed by a Greek chorus in the attentive presence of the politicos in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Beijing, Moscow and other major capitals:

• Luke 16: 19-31.
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Stave I: Marley's Ghost.
• The March 2014 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.