Can Christians ignore climate change?

"It is well past time for those of us still at the carnival of climate denial to exit the gates and allow the love of God to help us see and face the truth about climate change or global warming and the need to act. Once we do, we will discover that overcoming global warming presents us with tremendous opportunities to love God back and create a better world. Let me clarify things right up front: climate inaction is no longer an option for those who have the love of God in their hearts."

- Rev Jim Ball, Leaving the Carnival of Climate Change Denial
to Join the Next Great Cause of Freedom.
H/T Liz.

Inaction on climate change is no longer an option for faithful Christians. So says Jim Ball in this brief and polemic piece addressing various barriers to action that rich Christians may face. While somewhat simplified (it is only a short piece), identifying such barriers is a good exercise. Where are you stuck at?

Perhaps we could even suggest a few more: ignorance of what actions to take; distraction by other good things; despair over the inadequacy of our possible actions. Indeed, back here I considered nine such barriers and suggested ways in which faith in God, love for Jesus and hope from the Holy Spirit open new paths for us through them.

It is encouraging to see a Christian leader in the US publish such an article in a widely-read forum. Ball has also written a book that I haven't got to yet, called Global Warming and the Risen LORD: Christian discipleship and climate change. He is not a lonely voice; an increasing number of books have come out in the last couple of years offering Christian accounts of ecological responsibility. Yet there are still plenty of Christian leaders all too willing to speak up on behalf of the fossil fuel companies, and too many followers of Jesus who haven't yet heard the good news of Jesus applied to an increasingly damaged world.

Lent: Simplicity and contentment

Lent is a time for the deliberate discipleship of our desires through refraining and focusing. Often this is portrayed as a somewhat arbitrary burden to be carried, as though the carrying of a burden were itself good. But fasting (or refraining from some regular activity) is not an end in itself, but a means to sharpen our hungering and thirsting for righteousness, for God’s justice. Such disciplines as we accept for this period are not meritorious works of supererogation earning divine brownie points, nor do we seek out pain so as to enjoy the relief from it all the more at its end. We are, in Rowan Williams’ evocative phrase, setting out on "a journey into joy". Lent is a time of preparation for the good news of Easter, but in the light of the cross and resurrection, we discover that the very disciplining of our desires is already good news, not merely preparation for it. The gospel does not add ethics as an appendix, the fine print of obedience you sign up for when you accept the gift of forgiveness. No, ethics is already good news. The disciplining of desire is also the liberation of desire; by learning self-control, we become free. We are learning to love rightly and so learning to be more human.

I submit that a key aspect of this joyful journey for many western Christians is an exodus of liberation from consumerism, the state of bondage in which we are consumed by what we consume. Our toys so often own us. In such a context, learning to delight in less is an affirmation of a life with more of the things that matter. The simple life is not only a matter of justice (living simply so that others can simply live) – though it is certainly that in a world of ever more apparent ecological limits – the simple life is also the good life. Receiving all God’s gifts with thanks enables us to let (many of) them go and to let go the desire for more that makes us discontent. Let us instead become discontent with our discontentment, which robs of us of peace and perspective.

The pursuit of justice, insofar as it is woven within the Christian good news, is also part of this same joyous adventure. It is not a fight, but a dance. We do not create it or establish it; we share from what we have ourselves received. Our goal is not the spread of consumerist “wealth” to every member of society and every corner of the globe. Our goal is that in walking the way of the cross, all may discover it to be the way of light.

Not yet concrete enough? Go and sell your possessions, then come follow Christ.
Originally posted at Theopolis.

Ecological responsibility and Christian discipleship III: Recycle or repent?

The final piece of a three part series blogging a sermon preached at St Paul's and St George's 9 am service on 30th January 2011.

I. Human planet: Welcome to the Anthropocene.
II. The Community of Creation: Genesis 1.
III. Recycle or repent? Our response.

Recycle or repent? Our response
Mentioning Jesus reminds us that we're in a series on discipleship, on what it means for us to be called to be Jesus' disciples today. A disciple is a dedicated pupil and if we are to be disciples, it means devoting ourselves to learning everyday from Jesus, learning not just about God, but also about ourselves and our world. It means letting Jesus set the agenda for our lives, seeking to follow in the path that he pioneered. This isn’t a hobby or one aspect of life. Following Jesus requires every minute in our schedule, every pound in our wallets, every relationship, every thought, every breath. This doesn't mean that we spend all our time doing "spiritual things", but that we learn to see all that we do as spiritual.

And that includes our relationship to the created order, to the increasingly fragmented, polluted, scarred, strip-mined, deforested, acidifying, destabilised planet and its life systems that God still promises us is fundamentally good, fundamentally of value in itself, not just in what it can offer us. This too is part of Christian discipleship and demands our attention and reflection, our commitment, repentance and love.

We’re not just talking here about recycling and changing light-bulbs. We're not just talking about planting trees or cycling or taking public transport or flying less or shopping locally or eating less meat or switching to renewable energy companies or buying MSC-certified fish.

By all means, do these things – they are no-brainers. But behaviour modification barely scratches the surface. We need a heart change, which Holy Scripture calls repentance. Lying behind so many of the trends towards ecological degradation are our consumerist lifestyles and their export into the developing world. The whole world can't live at our levels of consumption. So out of justice, out of love, out of what it means to be human and a creature of God, we cannot go on living at our level of consumption.

We need to be turned upside down by the good news that Jesus died to reconcile all things to God. How can we preach the good news of liberation from sin without also proclaiming and pursing a life that turns from selfishness and respects the goodness and integrity of God’s world? How can we love our neighbours without considering their well-being as a whole: physical, emotional, social, spiritual and ecological? How can we pray that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven and not pay attention to the earth for which we pray?

So composting and turning off the lights when you leave a room are just the tip of the iceberg. The good news of Jesus invites us into a whole-of-life creative resistance to ecological destruction.

First, be thankful. Christian discipleship starts in joy, not fear. It flows from peace, not anxiety. It is a liberation to do what is best, not being forced to do the minimum out of guilt. The world, however marred, is still good and worthy of our thanksgiving.

Second, repent of consumerism. We are not defined by what we buy. We do not need the latest fashion or the shiniest gadget. You don’t need meat every meal or international travel every holiday, we don't need to earn more and spend more. God gives us every good thing to enjoy, and so there is no need to hoard. We can learn contentment, which is grounded in step one: thankfulness. Smashing the hollow idol of endless consumption is not only good for the planet, but also necessary for the soul.

Third, embrace life. We belong to the earth. We are each members of something bigger than ourselves, bigger even than humanity: a creation awaiting its Sabbath rest in God. And so keep learning about the world, opening your eyes to the wonder, mystery and beauty – as well as the tragedy – around us. Find out what is happening to our planet. Mourn for what is being lost. And join with others in creative resistance. And then, perhaps, on a planet with all too many human scars, we may, by God's grace, become humans worthy of the name.
Readers with sharp memories may recall that I've ripped much of this post from the end of my related series on Why be green? Ecology and the gospel. What can I say? I love recycling! If you feel you've really missed out as a result, then try reading the expanded version: twelve easy very difficult steps to ecological responsibility.

On refusing to vote

"[Refusing to vote] reflects a new recognition of the nature of power. In reality we all have “a say in our future”, every day, with everything we do and everything we don’t. Privileging government as the only means of social change is a concept the gospels call into question. The assumption is that power is concentrated at the top, and the only way to change anything is to change the government or its way of operating.

"This, it seems to me, stands in stark contrast to the way of Jesus. One of his early temptations, in fact, captured in the wilderness narrative, is precisely to this kind of topdown political power. Significantly, it is the devil who offers it to him. Jesus refuses."

- Simon Moyle, Why I don't vote.

Most elections do not change things. The idea that political responsibility means voting once every few years is a bit like thinking that a healthy lifestyle consists in being checked by the GP every few years. Voting is not to be sneezed at (and in the end, I disagree with Simon Moyle, though respect his position, which also represents the considered position of some good friends of mine), but it is not the main game in politics, far less the main game in changing the world.

Williams on Augustine's Confessions

"The Confessions provide a unique testimony to the fact that it is God and God alone who can give shape and meaning to a human life. The struggles of men and women to make their own lives and build their own securities end in despair, and this is equally true for the believer and the unbeliever. Conversion does not signify an end to the chaos of human experience, it does not make self-understanding easy or guarantee an ordered or intelligible life. What is changed in conversion is the set of determinants within which the spirit moves; and there may be as inaccessible to the mind as they were before. Thus the confidence of the believer never rests upon either his intellectual grasp or his intellectual control of his experience, but on the fidelity of the heart's longing to what has been revealed as the only satisfying object of its desire."

- Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross, 84.

This is an important point that Williams highlights in Augustine. Christians can often give the (false) impression that the good life of obedience and trust to which we are called is an easier, simpler one, as though the painful ambiguities and frustrations of life could be exchanged for uncomplicated simplicity. The evangelist then appears as a shonky car dealer offering an unbelievable product at discount prices. The desperate are taken in; the discerning, suspicious.

But the desire to build our own securities - whether we pursue it in a militant atheism safely unruffled by rumours of God, in an isolated individualism sheltered from the demands of real relationship or in a shallow Christianity that thinks all the answers are written down in the back of the book - will "end in despair". Life is not safe. There is no escape from this fact either in God or in flight from him.

The eager expectation associated with Christian belief does not come from discovering an exhaustive explanation of life's mysteries, a satiating of desire in ultimate answers, but from an encounter that deepens, affirms and subverts our desires.
For those confused, concerned or cross at reports of comments made by Williams about sharia law in the UK, check out Faith and Theology for some intelligent comment and discussion.

Williams on celebrating creatureliness

"Arguably what is going on in the work of redemption is, as St Irenaeus first put it, the reversal of Adam’s mistake. Adam’s resentment at not being God is transfigured by Christ into the free acceptance of not being God. That’s what Philippians chapter 2 is all about. The one who is in the form of God delights to be no longer in the form of God but in the form of a slave, and in that slave form of humanity, joining in our unfreedom, our suffering, our tensions and our struggles, the finite created form of humanity is glorified from within. Adam resents not being God and so Satan has leverage upon him: ‘You shall be as gods,’ says Satan to Adam, knowing that the essence of our fallenness is resentment at being creatures (just as the essence of the fall of Satan himself, in church tradition, is the refusal to worship). So Jesus, in not clinging to the form of God but accepting the humility of the incarnation and the death of the cross, restores the glory of creatureliness. The incarnation affirms that creation is good, not that it is nice or beautiful, but that it is good because it is in this relationship of loving dependence on the self-giving of God. And the mystery that we seek to understand when we think about redemption is that restoring of the glory of creatureliness can only be done by one who isn’t simply a bit of creation – the Word in whom creation hangs together, in whom alone is that full freedom which can accept the otherness, the suffering, the death of the created order and fill it with life. ‘He who ascended, is it not he who also descended?’ (Eph 4:9)

"So we in Christ rejoice at not being God. We ought to give thanks daily to God that we are not God and that God is God; we give thanks to God for God’s great glory. And the secret is that only in that rejoicing that we are not God do we come to share the divine life in the way we are made to do – the paradox that only by our completely not wanting to be God can the divine life take root in us.

"Discipleship in the body of Christ is in one sense simply a matter of constantly battling to be a creature, battling against all those instincts in us which make us want to be God or make us want to be what we think God is. There, of course, is the catch. And that’s why discipleship challenges at every level those unrealities which distort humanity, which distort creatureliness. That’s why discipleship challenges those enterprises in our world and our culture which feed the illusion that actually we could be God if we tried hard enough.

"What are those things about? Well you many find them in the deep unease so many in our culture feel about ageing and dying. You find it in our denials of death. You find it in our passion for absolute security, our desire never to be at risk. You may find it in a defence programme, you may find it in the technological exploitation of the environment. At level after level, our temptation is to deny that we are finite. And when I read, as sadly I sometimes do in discussions of our environmental crisis, that we can be confident technology will find a way, my blood runs cold, because I hear in that the refusal of real creatureliness. ‘These limits are temporary, our skills will find a way, we shall at some point be able to get to the stage where we are safe’. And the gospel tells us you never on earth get to a place where you are safe; but you will get to a place where you are blissful and united with your Father in heaven. In the immortal words of C S Lewis, ‘he’s not a tame lion, you know’.

"The outworking then of created wisdom, created Sophia, is this joyful embrace of being created, of not being God, the acceptance that we shall die, that we are fragile, that we are fallible. And it is ‘here on this lowly ground’, in John Donne’s phrase, that we come into contact with the transfiguring, transformative life of the eternal God. ... [O]ur holiness is not the denial but the acceptance of being creatures."

- Rowan Williams, Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness:
the Wisdom of Finite Existence.