13 th July: Proper 10

The Three-fold Cord: Faith, Community and Environment

Today’s readings from scripture remind us of the extent to which the message of the Bible is grounded in the natural environment.

Imagining the exiles returning home to Jerusalem from Babylonian captivity, the author of Isaiah 55 sees mountains bursting into song and dry, unproductive wastes becoming fertile land. The transformation of the land goes hand-in-hand with the saving work of God in freeing the Hebrew exiles from foreign captivity.

The psalmist speaks of God’s care for creation, tending it like a good farmer, and once again, creation responds with an outpouring of productivity and joyful praise.

In St. Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks about growth in the Christian life, placing the simple image of a seed at the heart of his parable, and encouraging us to be good soil in which the Kingdom may grow.

What the Bible gives us is a holistic spirituality, grounded in the earth.

I would like to put before you another image: three strands of cord woven together to make one strong rope. The first cord represents the individual person. The second represents our life in community, and the third represents the natural environment. We live in a web of interdependence. We can never unravel the three cords. Our individual spiritual health, the health of our wider community, and the health of the natural environment are deeply connected. Individual spiritual impoverishment, community breakdown, and environmental collapse go hand in hand. A crisis in one is a sure sign that there are problems in the others. In this way, sin is not just an individual spiritual state of one’s alienation from God; it’s also a deeply divided community life and a ruined natural environment. Conversely, salvation is not just individual redemption from sin, but the reconciliation of whole communities, and a flourishing creation.

The ‘grounded-ness’ of our texts in the earth, and the holistic nature of our faith, makes it fitting to spend a moment considering the environmental crisis from a Christian perspective. The crisis is not unrelated to failures of our community life in the form of violence, compassionless inequality and exclusion, nor is it unrelated to the spiritual poverty at the heart of modern individualism.

The priest and ethicist Professor Michael Northcott reminds us of the fragility of our environment:

The surface of the biosphere which sustains the only life forms known in the universe is no more than twelve kilometres from bedrock or ocean floor to airless space beyond the upper atmosphere. The damaging effects of pollution are recorded on this fragile ‘skin’ from receding and polluted water aquifers deep underground to changes in the gases of the upper atmosphere’ [now known to be related to global warming]. ⁸

In one of his most famous poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins observes that the

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Yet

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. ⁹

Our state of alienation from the environment –about which Hopkins speaks –was reinforced for me by a debate in the Australian press last year. It was sparked by the fact that a mathematical formula had been developed by conservation experts to determine which endangered species should attract funding. The logic was one of scarcity. There are many species at risk of extinction, we have limited resources, and so we need to work out the most deserving. The proposal involved

…working out the benefit in dollar terms of an endangered species surviving, multiplying it by the likelihood of a conservation programme succeeding, then dividing that figure by the programme’s cost. The koala, for instance, is estimated to be worth A$1m (£553,906) a year, in tourism dollars, to New South Wales. ¹⁰

Of course, tourist income was not the only concern, but also the flow-on effect the extinction would have within the wider eco-system. All this was reported in the same week as another expert warned “that humans are on course to wipe out three-quarters of the Earth’s species in the next 240 to 500 years” –the first mass extinction event to be caused by the conscious actions and inactions of one particular species. ¹¹

The reason for raising this example is not to criticise the scientists who conceived the proposal – they have a passionate concern for the environment and they’re doing their best within the imaginative constraints of the current political culture. Nor is it to fall victim to a romanticism of nature –an ‘all things bright and beautiful view of the world’ –forgetting that extinctions are part and parcel of the evolutionary process. The reason for drawing attention to this example is to highlight the fact that Christians can never be satisfied with the sort of logic that accepts the decimation of species as an acceptable cost of human greed, nor the reduction of God’s creation to a monetary figure. When the only language we have for prevention of mass extinction is monetary value, then there’s been a failure of imagination. Lament, protest and prophetic words need to be voiced.

The only conclusion we can reach from the state of the debate is this: not only is our environment sick, but our community is sick, and we, as individuals are sick. We are, as St. Paul says, under the ‘law of sin and death’. We need a different language to speak, a new calculus, and a more expansive imagination.

St. Paul’s words from Romans 8 come to mind at this point:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

We, together with creation are longing for a break-through, a new set of relationships and a greater hope. We, with all creation are longing for salvation.

There are two things to keep in mind as we engage with environmental issues as Christians.

The first is that creation has a value independent of its usefulness for us. Remembering back to Genesis 1, we find that each manifestation of God’s handiwork is judged ‘good’, and that’s before human beings are on the scene. It’s judged good ‘in itself’ –in its existence as an expression of God’s creativity –before it is judged to be good for the use and benefit of humans. We need to recover the sense of reverence for creation that our ancestors had; a sense of humility before nature, and a renewed seriousness in our stewardship responsibility, which –if it means anything at all –cannot mean unsustainable exploitation for short term profit.

The second point is that we shouldn’t lose hope. God has acted, and continues to act, to address the brokenness in ourselves, our communities, and our natural environment. Paul says there is ‘no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus’. As individuals, we come before the throne of grace with joy because we are forgiven. As a community, we are reminded that Christ has broken down the dividing wall among alienated human groups (Eph 2.14). Finally, in the Book of Revelation, we hear of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ and we’re reminded that God’s saving intentions are for the renewal of the whole creation, not just the human part of it (Rev 21.1-5).

God loves creation and Christians are to love what God loves. Given that our survival as a species is bound to the earth, the least we Christians can do is join with others of good will to ensure that the generations after us inherit a world for which we’ll be blessed rather than cursed.