Deuteronomy 30.15-20, Luke 14.25-33
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 4 September 2016
Sparkford w Weston Bampfylde BCP HC
I like the Greenbelt festival. It goes where no other Christian events dare to, and often with tremendous consequences. Last Sunday morning, at Greenbelt’s communion service, in front of a crowd of around 10,000 people, instead of preaching, the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed to be interviewed by a group of young children, who were leading the service. [1]
It was a joy to listen to - and if you’d like to, let me know, I’ll share the recording with you. The children saved their most hysterical question until the end. A boy called Joshua asked the Archbishop, “Who would win in a fight between you and the Pope?”
The Archbishop replied, “For a lot of reasons the Pope would. He’s got a bigger stick than me. He’s got a bigger hat than me. He’s bigger than me. He’s better than me. He’s nicer than me. He is, he’s amazing.” Then after a lovely anecdote about what happened the first time they met, the Archbishop concluded, “The Pope is a wonderful follower of Jesus. We need to pray for him lots.”
A quite different sort of question came earlier, after a reading about wisdom. A boy called Jamie asked the Archbishop, “What are a few key things that we can do as adults and children to be more wise?”
The Archbishop replied, “Well wisdom in the bible means a huge number of things, it’s an incredibly important word, but what it basically means is seeing how the world really is and doing what God wants us to do with the world as it really is. So we need to see how the world really is, we need to see the needs, and the good things around us; and so I think we show that we are wise when we celebrate what’s good, so when we see something really good we should have a party; the church needs to have more parties and fewer meetings. And we need then to lament, to be really sad about the things that are bad, and we need to be angry about the things that are unjust, and we need to take those things to God so that he will tell us what to do about it.”
Now if, in that last statement, we substitute for the word ‘wisdom’ the phrase ‘carry our cross’, then we are into the territory of Jesus’ teachings to the crowds as recorded by Luke in today’s gospel reading. I think it’s fair to say that carrying our cross basically means seeing how the world really is and doing what God wants us to do with the world as it really is. It requires us to weigh up the costs involved and to be prepared to take the consequences.
Carrying our cross firstly means seeing how the world really is. Now hold that thought as I steer us in a direction I rarely go. Because it’s not often that a news item from the world of geology grabs my attention. But this one did, from just last week. At the International Geological Congress in Cape Town an official group of experts presented the recommendation that humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – which they are calling the Anthropocene – needs to be declared.
The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the experts argue that the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene. [2]
The geologists are seeing that today’s fossil record - the rock formations and sedimentary layers of the earth - dating from about 1950, bear evidence of the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, of plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken.
Carrying our cross firstly means seeing how the world really is. The message from these scientists is clear: we need to acknowledge officially that the recent activity of industrialised human beings has measurably and absolutely changed the world. Environmentalists have also been telling us this for many years. Bill McKibben, also a speaker at this year’s Greenbelt festival, asserts that all the evidence shows us that the world we grew up with, the world we think we know, no longer exists. The planet we’re living on now may be still recognisable but really is fundamentally changed. In his 2010 book Eaarth, spelt E A A R T H, which is the name his gives to this new planet, he writes,
The planet we inhabit has a finite number of huge physical features. Virtually all of them seem to be changing rapidly: the Arctic ice cap is melting, and the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans, which cover three-fourths of the earth's surface, are distinctly more acid and their level is rising; they are also warmer, which means the greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful. The vast inland glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and the giant snowpack of the American West, are melting very fast, and within decades the supply of water to the billions of people living downstream may dwindle. The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins and threatened at its core. The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years. The great storehouses of oil beneath the earth's crust are now more empty than full. Every one of these things is completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilisation. And some places with civilisations that date back thousand of years — the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Kiribati in the Pacific, and many other island nations — are actively preparing to lower their flags and evacuate their territory (as the waters around them palpably rise). The cedars of Lebanon — you can read about them in the Bible — are now listed as "heavily threatened" by climate change. We have travelled to a new planet, propelled on a burst of carbon dioxide. That new planet, as is often the case in science fiction, looks more or less like our own but clearly isn't. I know that I'm repeating myself. I'm repeating myself on purpose. This is the biggest thing that's ever happened. [3]
Now if we can’t accept that this is the way the world really is now, we should ask ourselves who and what are we believing instead, in who or what are we putting our faith, and why?
But if we do accept that this is the way the world really is now, then the wise thing to do, according to our Archbishop, is to celebrate what’s good, and to lament what’s bad, and to be angry about the things that are unjust, and to take those things to God so that he will tell us what to do about it.
And if we accept that the wise way is also the way which requires us to ‘carry our cross’, in the work of protest and lament and healing on this rapidly and irreversibly changed planet, then our challenge is to weigh up the costs involved, and to be prepared to take the consequences. Bill McKibben is clear when he writes,
We're not … going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilisation developed. We're like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill but half his heart is dead tissue. We’re like the guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either. [4]
There’s no going back. The question is, how will we go forward?
Let us go forward lamenting what is bad - the carbon choked-up, rapidly overheating planet, product of centuries of industrialised production and unrestrained consumption which is all that many generations, in this part of the world, have ever known.
Let us go forward being angry about the things that are unjust in this - not least that the world’s poorest people invariably suffer the most in this situation, and that the wealthiest nations - who created the problem in the first place and perpetuated it by following the idol of growth - refuse to help. Those who have weighed up the cost and are determined to dump all the consequences on others.
Let us go forward celebrating what we might find here to be good - seeking opportunities to nurture a broken planet back to health, making friends with others across all social, economic, religious and national boundaries in pursuit of healing ways.
Let us us go forward taking all these things to God so that He will tell us what to do about them.
If we do so, how will He tell us? Well, besides teaching us through Bill McKibben and other great prophets of our times, God will encourage us back to scripture. How God rejoices when our communities open the bible together and discuss its riches - for in scripture, from Genesis through Job, through so much of the wisdom writings and the Psalms, there is so much inspiration about the Earth, his good creation, so much valuable teaching about how we can care for it - there to be rediscovered for precisely these times.
Now, you may be listening to this thinking, I’m too old for this conversation. This is one for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to worry about and work on. Well, it would be if it was something due to happen further down the line, something predicted to come. But it’s not, planet Eaarth - E A A R T H - is here; [5] and as we work out how we must live on it now, we older generations have a great deal to offer. Especially wisdom.
We can help change the perception that the world must always be progressing, that the economy must be endlessly growing, we can help people begin to kick the addiction to endless consumption. We can help to encourage people accept that from now on, we have to focus on keeping what we’ve got. Maintenance and repair - not erecting new bridges, but preventing old ones from crumbling.
We can help people figure out how to reign in our overindulgence, and jettison those things which are unnecessary. How very valuable are those generations who can teach others what it means to ‘Make Do and Mend’; how precious the skilled gardeners and allotment-keepers wise in the ways of the soil whose gifts, shared with the young, are a great blessing; how special among us are those who know that there are ways out of our petrol-guzzling habits, that when the oil does finally run out the foot, cycle or horse will rescue us.
The generations who have virtually completed all the major projects which have occupied our lives - education, career, parenting - who have been through major bereavements, who have in later years learned how to give up, give away, and scale down: we are in a fine position to advise and encourage in a world which has to learn to leave a lot behind, to scale down, start over small. [6]
I’m so glad that Greenbelt let a group of children lead one of the biggest communion services in the British church’s calendar. It recalls that wonderful vision of a broken world renewed, Isaiah 11.6, ‘The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them.’
And I’m glad that the children wanted the wisdom of the Archbishop as they posed to him the questions on their minds, the questions of living on Eaarth - E A A R T H - today. I’m glad that he answered with a sense of fun, mixed with joy and integrity.
A young girl called Tara asked the Archbishop “The reading from Isaiah 11 says that one day God will make everyone live together in peace. Why do you think God is taking so long?”
The Archbishop replied, “I think because he’s very patient. He wants to give us time to start getting it right, and also because he says to us, ‘Look, I’ve given you everything you need to make it work. I give you Jesus, I give you the Holy Spirit, I give you all the resources you need, I give you everything you need, you’ve got to choose to go my way.’ And I think he gives us time to make that choice.”
Notes
[1] Greenbelt 2016 Communion Service: A Little Child Will Lead Them. Written by Andrew Graystone.
[2] Damian Carrington, The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age. Guardian, 29 August 2016.
[3] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, p.45-46.
[4] Bill McKibben, Eaarth, p.16
[5] ‘The planet already has 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’re way too high. Forget the grandkids; it turns out this was a problem for our parents.’ Bill McKibben, Eaarth, p.15-16.
[6] The ‘mature’ / ‘jettison’ points in these two paragraphs are triggered by Bill McKibben’s discussion on how we might ‘try to manage our descent’, as he puts it. Bill McKibben, Eaarth, p.99-101.
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