“The Climate Crisis - An Opportunity for Which the Church was Born”

Dr Richard Smith

Readings - Ecclesiastes – Prologue (Geering trans.),   Matthew 19:16-24

On winning the 2007 Federal Election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, proclaimed Climate Change to be the Greatest Moral Crisis of our Generation – a crisis which grows more intense with each passing year. 

In 2017, in response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, the National Synod of the United Church of Christ passed a motion naming the climate crisis: “an opportunity for which the church was born”. What then is this opportunity and how should the Church be responding? What guidance do we derive from our scriptures and faith tradition?

Our OT, based on the Jewish Scriptures record the many Moral Crises faced by the Hebrew people as they settled where three continents join. They were successively enslaved by the Egyptians (from the West), the Assyrians and Babylonians (from the East), the Greek and Romans (from the North). As they struggled with their many Moral Crises, they wrote their story for posterity, for in their struggles, they experienced revelations of God.

They organised their writings (Our OT) into four streams, three are historical and became the foundations of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism (based on the Torah), Christianity (based on the minor prophets of the Messianic Era), and Islam (based on the Great Prophets). A fourth stream called the Wisdom books, would over time, give rise to Science from the Latin Scientia meaning Knowledge and the concept of Nature, from the Latin Natura– by birth. This Wisdom stream borrowed from other cultures and Jesus’ own authentic sayings and parables belong in this stream.

From these four streams I recognise four dimensions to the Moral Crisis of Climate Change (You might recognise others). Crises defined by our concern for: Future generations, Nature itself, sharing of the incredible Wealth from the industrial revolution, and to Truth itself. I will briefly expand on each.

On future generations:Leviticus 25:23 tells us “… the land is mine; you are but aliens and tenants”, similar to the Aboriginal belief that “The Land owns us, and not we the Land”. This belief inspired a 16-year-old Swedish school girl, whose concern at the impact of Climate Change on future generations, turned her life from suicide to a prophetic mission, inspiring 6 million young people around the world to Strike for Action on Climate Change. The documentary, “I am Greta” tells her story.  As a true Prophet, she was widely mocked by shock jocks and leading politicians around the world. Jesus reminds us “the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:13-16).

Our Second Moral Crisis is our relationship with Nature: 

Ecclesiastes concludes with: “Stand in awe of Nature and do what it requires of you, for everything we do Nature will judge us”. Nature’s Laws exist to maintain the integrity of life on Earth and shows no mercy – as many of us can testify when we unintentionally defy the law of gravity. Nature on the other hand, offers us unlimited generosity and mercy through the gift of life, means of sustaining it, and enriching us with unlimited beauty and love, Jesus reminded his disciples of this in Matt. 6:25-34. So, the concepts of Nature and of God are deeply entwined – since one reveals the other.

This Moral Crisis inspired David Attenborough’s recent documentary – ‘My Life on our Planet: My witness statement and Vision of Hope for the Future’ – where he tells of the dramatic changes that have happened in his and also our lifetime. His hope for the future lies in turning from a fixation on eternal economic growth, to sustainable living, that reduces our impact on the planet and makes way for the energies of nature to restore biodiversity and photosynthetic biomass. He terms it rewilding the planet.

As the world is given to us in trust, we have a moral responsibility to discharge that trust attentively and faithfully.

The third dimension of our Moral Crisis is Wealth.

The Industrial revolution has bequeathed us wealth and electronic gismos beyond imaging, bringing many out of poverty, slavery and back-breaking menial work, but we have misled ourselves like the Rich Young Ruler. He saw the Ten Commandments in their prescriptive form – which he had obeyed to the letter. However, Jesus in his wisdom, points him to the Commandments as the Ten Principles that required him to share his abundance of wealth with the poor. Similarly, the Rich like us, who fail to fully realise that the climate impacts of our daily lifestyle falls disproportionally on the poor. People in countries on the other side of the world are affected and as Greta demonstrates, impacts future generations. 

The Government, in bondage to the International fossil fuel industry conspires to propagate our ignorance and have us and the poor pay the cost of their environmental destruction.

We are often misled by politicians who say Australia is doing enough, since we contribute only 1.3% of global CO2e emissions. However, like the argument of the Rich Young Ruler, they conveniently exclude our Scope 3 emissions from our exports of Coal and Liquified Natural Gas, which brings Australia’s contribution to 5% annually from just 0.33% of the world population – making us among the wealthiest of countries and greatest polluters in the world.

The fourth dimension of our Moral Crisis is upholding the Truth in what has become a Post-Truth world. A Trumpian world of Alice in Wonderland, where the truth is ‘whatever I choose it to mean’. Compared with the Bible which took Centuries of learned men and women to formulate, ‘Fake Truth’can now be propagated by social media to billions of people around the world, with the speed of light. Over the last 4 years, Trumpism has taken the most advanced nation by storm. Early Christians declared the Truth was to be found in the life and wisdom of Jesus as the Way and the Truth (John 14:6 and in much of Johns Gospel), but even this has been lost under an avalanche of ‘Fake Truth’. However, the Scientific method of determining Truth has stood its ground as a community activity requiring the highest standards of honesty, transparency of peer review and the open sharing of knowledge – even in the study of scripture. COVID-19, is teaching us this lesson. What we need is the Moral Will to follow the science, to bring about Jesus’ Kingdom of the Common Good.

We are all together in the same boat and together we must put our hands to the oar as best we can, individually and collectively, to address the Moral Crisis of Climate Change.This is the opportunity for which the Church was born. 

In the words of climate activist Greta Thunberg: ‘Where there is Action, Hope Abounds’. 

Amen

Reference

Lloyd Geering, 1918, Such is Life: A close encounter with Ecclesiastes. Polebridge Press.