Sermon by Dr Richard Storey delivered to West Hamilton Anglican Parish 11 June 2006.

This 7-week series on caring for God's creation has taken us on a journey through ecology, economics, history and theology. We started with some glimpses of the wonders of God's creation, briefly overviewed the damage caused and current threats to the earth's ecosystems, and then probed deeper to ask - what are the root causes of the ecological crisis we find ourselves in? We looked at scriptures that describe the nature of God's creation and our role as stewards of it; we examined the links between our treatment of the earth's ecosystems and the suffering of the world's poor; and we re-examined the scriptures that describe the future of heaven and earth.

As we draw this series on caring for God's creation to a close, the question we must ask is - how then shall we live? How can we live rightly before God in this groaning earth?

During this series, many of you have asked "what can we do about these issues?" It's a question I hope will be burning in all of our hearts - as the Bible tells us, we must be doers of the word and not hearers only. So today I'm going to begin to answer this question. But there's a danger in the question too. If I gave a sermon on "10 ways you can help save the planet" we might completely miss the point. We may make a few changes to our lifestyle, feel relieved that we've done our bit to help the planet and then move our attention to the next topic of teaching.

It's tempting when we're confronted by the ecological crisis to ask simply - what can we do to fix it? And then look for a biblical justification for doing what we feel is right. This approach might produce some visible results, but it fails to recognise what is really going on. The ecological crisis is not simply a problem that we need to solve. Rather, the earth is telling us - screaming at us - that we have broken our relationship with God, with each other and with the earth He created. The goal, then, is not simply to rescue some species from the brink of extinction, or reduce our dependence on oil, or even (if we are really ambitious) to halt global warming. The goal is shalom - the total restoration of right relationships between God, us, and all that He has created. As Colossians 1 puts it, it is the reconciling of all things to God. This is the vision of God's Kingdom that the Bible describes. The work of reconciling all things is of course God's, but God calls us to be the ministers of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18) - to work out this reconciliation in a missional way that shines light in the darkness, transforms the structures of society and heals relationships with other creatures, human and non-human.

This is the reason why a simple list of "things you can do to save the planet" won't do. To be God's hands and feet on earth as He reconciles all things to himself is a huge task that must involve our whole heart and soul and mind and strength. Furthermore it is a calling that will differ from person to person. Each of us is made with different gifts and lives in a different context - we work in different jobs, live in different places, and have different relationships to other people and other creatures. Therefore each of us needs to work out for ourselves what it means to be ministers of reconciliation in this groaning world. This requires us to be on our knees in earnest prayer, it demands that we cry out to God for His wisdom, it calls us to learn about ourselves, our society and the creation, and it requires our repentance. It is a lifelong journey - as we learn more, and each time our circumstances change, we will need to return to God and ask him again to show us the way.

So, where do we begin this journey?

We begin by recognising the character of God, and the breadth and depth of His love. Who is God? Our God is the Creator, the One who made the universe and all its creatures, who called them good and blessed them. In this morning's gospel reading (Luke 12:22-34) Jesus speaks of the God who sustains all creatures, human and non-human, and makes them beautiful. But God's love for creation goes further. In the Old Testament reading (Gen 9:8-17), we heard of the God who commits himself to preserving and protecting every living creature. Five times in this short passage, God repeats that He has made a covenant with every living creature, everything that has the breath of life in it. With this in mind, it is easier for us to recognise that God's love even extends to sacrifice on behalf of all of creation. "For God so loved the cosmos that he gave his one and only son". This is the true translation of the famous passage in John's gospel, and Paul uses the same word cosmos in 2 Corinthians 2:19 "God was reconciling the cosmos to himself in Christ." What is God like? He is the Creator whose sacrificial love extends not only to humans but to everything he created. How then should we live? We should live in ways that reflect the true character of God and the breadth of his love. Should we recycle our aluminium cans? The answer is - does it reflect what we know of the character of God? In some cases the answer to these practical questions may be clear, but often we will need to know more. We will need to recognise the nature of God's creation.

What is God's creation like? Genesis 1 tells us that the creation is good, and that God's creatures have been commanded to be fruitful and multiply. The Psalms tell us much more about the creation. Psalm 24 tells us that the earth belongs to God, Psalm 19 that creation reveals God and speaks of His glory to all people across the world. Psalm 104 tells us that its parts are interconnected, depending on each other as well as on God, and that all creatures were made in God's wisdom. Our third reading this morning, Psalm 148, tells us that the creation responds to God in worship. We humans are not a lone voice in the universe. Rather, we are part of an enormous choir that fills the heavens and the earth, each voice, from stars to sea creatures to birds to kings to children, singing praises to our Creator.

Should we allow a species of bird to go extinct? That bird belongs to God, it was made in the wisdom of God and there may be other species depending on it. Furthermore, it is a witness of God's glory and itself is part of God's choir of praise. If it is lost, the hymn of praise that God enjoys will be missing a voice.

But to truly fulfil our role as ministers of reconciliation, we also need to understand who we are. Throughout the last several hundreds years, Western Christians have tended to emphasise the uniqueness of humans - the things that set us apart, and presumably above, the rest of creation. We alone are made in the image of God. We are "made just a little lower than the angels" and are "rulers over the works of God's hands" (Psalm 8:5,6). But in the process of emphasising these passages, we have come to see ourselves as utterly different from other creatures, and so we have lost sight of our mutual dependence with them, and we have lost any respect or empathy for them. And the results have been disastrous, particularly for the poor who are the first to show us how dependent we are on healthy ecosystems. But are we really so different from other creatures? Genesis tells us that we alone bear God's image, but apart from that, it emphasises what we share with other creatures. Like other animals, Adam was made from the soil, as his name reminds him - it is a word play on Adamah, the Hebrew word for soil. The breath of life, "nephesh hayah", by which God transformed Adam into a living being, is the same as that shared by all animals. This "nephesh hayah" is the word often translated as "soul" in the Old Testament. And the first command that God gave Adam, to "be fruitful, increase in number and fill the earth" is the same as the command he gave to the birds and sea creatures the previous day. There is much that we share with the other creatures of the earth.

One message that environmental science has brought clearly to our attention is that we humans are part of the earth's ecosystems, and depend on them continuing to function in healthy ways. In order to live in shalom with the creation, to restore our relationships with other creatures, we need to understand that we have much in common with them and we are bound together in mutual dependence. In that regard the Bible gives us encouragement - in contrast to some environmentalists who regard humans as a pest species, the Bible affirms that we are at home in the earth. We belong here. This is an affirmation for us, but also a reminder to us that we are subject to the processes and limitations of the earth. We must understand what those limits are, and learn to live within them.

But as well as recognising our kinship and dependence on other creatures, we also need to recognise that God has given us special abilities and responsibilities in the earth. From the very beginning God has involved us in His work in creation. In Genesis 2, God brings the animals to Adam to see what he will name them. This we may think of as God involving humans in his work of creating. We have described how the whole creation has suffered as a result of human sin, but God also uses humans to preserve and restore the creation. When God brought the flood to destroy sin, he called on Noah to preserve every kind of animal. In the New Testament, God continues to involve humans in his work of reconciling the cosmos to himself. 2 Corinthians 5:19 says that God has given us the ministry of this reconciliation. Restoring God's groaning creation is not an optional extra to the Christian life, nor is it something we do just to protect our own interests. God has called his people to a ministry of reconciling the entire cosmos to Himself. This is why the fifth mark of mission in the mission statement of the Anglican Church is "To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth."

So then, the starting point for caring for creation is recognising the character and love of God, the nature of the world He created, and the nature and role of humans in it. What can we do to act on this understanding?

First, we must continue to read and re-read the scriptures with fresh eyes, noting that the drama of creation, fall, redemption and coming kingdom involves not just God and humans, but all creatures. We need to become aware of the ways that the creation is involved in this story, and ask God to speak to our hearts, showing us how to relate to the whole creation, human and non-human.

Second, we need to develop a relationship of love with the creation. This will mean opening our senses and our hearts. Those of us who live in cities can quite easily go through an entire month making little or no meaningful contact with the non-human world. With so little relationship to other creatures, it is not surprising that we end up placing little value them and their habitats when we make decisions about building a new housing subdivision or siting a new power station. We need to develop relationships of love in order to learn to truly value the creatures around us. As with any relationship, there will be reward - these relationships will be filled with joy. But they also require time, much time spent in close contact with the ones we are coming to know. Those of us who live in the city will need to make deliberate efforts to go out an appreciate God's creation. We will need to plan bush walks, spend time in the garden, go for long walks along the beach, sit by the lake - that is, we need times when we are immersed in the world God created, times when we can become aware of the many other species that share our place with us. City life often dulls our senses, so we may need to re-learn to see, hear, smell and touch the things of beauty God has made. We may also need to learn how to see with our hearts. God reveals himself through the created world, but we need open hearts to see Him.

We may need to re-learn how to praise God - not just for His saving work in our lives, but also for His acts of creation and sustaining in the world around us. That is, we may need to learn how to celebrate creation. All of these things we can do individually, and often the quietness of solitude is best for awakening our senses and our hearts. But we also worship God together as a church, and as we become alive to the wonders of God's creation, it is only natural that we should celebrate the Creator in our church worship.

Third, in order to act wisely, we need knowledge. So we must learn about the earth, the creatures that inhabit it and the processes that sustain it. In modern language this is called ecology. I'm not suggesting that every one of us must become an ecologist, but I believe we all have a responsibility to know who and what we share our habitat with, and especially how our lifestyles affect the creatures around us. In the modern globalised society we live in, our actions can affect ecosystems thousands of kilometres away, so we need some understanding of global issues. But we will always have the greatest effect on our local ecosystems, and find more opportunities to care for them, so we should pay particular attention to our own country, region and city. As we read the newspapers, and listen to the news it should become clearer to us what are the local issues that we are part of, and what opportunities we have to bring healing.

One particular area where we all affect the planet for good or ill is in the things we buy. When you buy coffee or laundry detergent or timber for the extension on your house, do you consider the effects that your choice of brand will have for the earth and for the poor? Did you know, for example, that when you spend $10 on coffee at the supermarket, the farmer who grew the coffee typically receives less than $1? And while the price you pay at the supermarket tends to stay the same from one week to the next, the price that the farmer receives fluctuates so wildly that in the past few years, tens of thousands of coffee farmers in Mexico and Central America have been forced to abandon their farms in order to find a more secure form of income. In contrast, when you buy coffee with the Fair Trade label, you know that the farmers receive an assured price that is enough to support them and their families, and that an additional sum supports community development projects. The catch is that you may have to pay a few cents more for the coffee. So, even our weekly shopping has implications for people and ecosystems across the globe, and often we have choices that can produce benefit or harm. These choices may involve a cost for us, but it should not surprise us that following Jesus is sometimes costly.

Another area where we all have an affect on the environment is in our use of energy. Did you know that if each of us were more careful in the ways we use energy, we could avoid building new power stations (with all their impacts on the environment) and even begin to solve the biggest environmental problem of all - global warming. There are simple things we can do - switching off lights when we don't need them, putting a thermal wrap on our hot water cylinders, turning off appliances rather than leaving them on stand-by. And there are greater commitments we can make that will lead to greater benefits. Probably our greatest use of energy and our greatest contribution to global warming is from driving our cars. Why not walk or ride a bike when we are able, or use public transport? Why not car-pool to church on a Sunday morning? When we do these things out of a love for God the Creator, they actually become forms of worship.

This leads us to the fourth way we can act out our love for the creation - that is by restraining our desires for wealth and material goods. Mahatma Gandhi once pointed out that "the world has enough for every man's need but not every man's greed". Many of the ecological tragedies and wars in history are the result of powerful people coveting or taking more of the earth's resources than they need. I'm not suggesting we must become poor. Each of us must decide between ourselves and God where is the line between sufficiency and excess, but we must recover the Christian virtue of self-restraint - saying no to excess. This is why Jesus' teaching on the lilies of the field is so important for living at peace with the creation. To restrain ourselves from chasing after worldly possessions and accumulating wealth, we need faith that God will provide for our physical needs and give us life that does not depend on material goods. Practising the Sabbath is a practical outworking of this - it is a statement that says to ourselves and others that ultimately we do not rely on the work of our own hands but on God to give us life and all that we need to survive.

Finally, we must be ready to act on behalf other humans and other species. This might be a matter of joining a local wetland restoration project, or writing a letter to your local MP about an environmental issue. Or it might involve responding to God's call to go to the farthest parts of the earth to protect endangered ecosystems or disadvantaged communities. There are now a number of Christian conservation groups working in various parts of the world. A Rocha is one that has chosen to protect ecosystems in countries such as Lebanon, Czech Republic, India, Ghana and Peru where resources for conservation are most limited. This is a new face of global mission that recognises the breadth of God's plan to reconcile all things to Himself.

 

Conclusion

The ways that we treat God's creation are not separate from our relationship with Him. Rather, our relationship with creation directly flows from our relationship with God. Why do we care for creation? It is the only appropriate response to a deeply loving, incredibly imaginative and wonderfully extravagant Creator. It is an act of obedience to the One who has called us to be stewards of his Creation. It is an essential part of our witness to the world, and it is a sign of our hope in the restoration of all things. How do we care for the creation? By growing in our love for other creatures, by learning about the earth and its processes, by limiting the impacts we have on the earth's ecosystems and by acting to protect the earth's creatures. How do we act? In ways that reflect the character of God, the plans he has for all of creation and the responsibilities he has given us. We act as individuals and together as the people of God. It is an integral part of our worship.

 

Discussion questions:

1. Should all Christians be involved in caring for and restoring the creation? Explain.

2. Does incorporating "creation care" into the mission of the church make us more faithful to the gospel or distract us from what's really important? Explain.

3. As individuals:

In what ways can we    celebrate God's creation;

limit our impact on the earth's ecosystems;

act to protect the earth's creatures; and

demonstrate our hope that God will restore all things?

4. As a church:

In what ways can we    celebrate God's creation;

limit our impact on the earth's ecosystems;

act to protect the earth's creatures; and

demonstrate our hope that God will restore all things?

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