It is a privilege to be here as part of the input to this discussion and also to go first.
When Archbishop of Scotland Richard Holloway wrote a book called 'Godless Morality' it caused a stir. His point was this. If I start from my faith position and say 'God says...' then all you have to say to disagree with me is 'I don't believe in God'. Our conversation ends. Christians, he argued, can be informed by their faith position, and need to be open that this is what they are doing. As a Christian my faith informs my opinions. But I need to go into the market place of ideas arguing each position on its merits.
So, some brief insights from my faith perspective with which I hope most of us will not take issue, whether we have faith or not. Three things to say to open our evening:
1. The stewardship of the world is our responsibility.
In the book of Genesis, one of the two stories of creation suggests that looking after the planet is God's first charge on humans. If we don't do the stewardship, no other creature will. The second story of creation, a little more culture-bound, suggests that work being drudgery and relationships unequal is a consequence of selfishness.
Rowan Williams said: 'In the Bible God calls the world good before human beings are on it.'
2. Later on in that creation story God asks what happened. The man then blamed the woman and the woman blamed the snake. Selfishness. The Bible knows that our natural tendency is to blame someone else. Them. But I am one of them.
Whilst big change will come from big movements changing countries and organisations the change of heart happens in us as individuals. Romans 3 says 'All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.'
A newspaper once ran a letter competition to ask what was wrong with the world. It awarded its prize to the shortest letter:
Dear Sir,
I am,
Yours faithfully
And the good news?
3. Redemption is possible. Romans 12 says we should let God transform us by the renewing of our minds. It is a passive sentence. Seeing the possibility of turning things around is something we can allow to happen to us; not something that has to be forced upon us.
We are very slowly discovering that hearts and minds can be changed. It is now anti-social to smoke in someone's house. It didn't used to be. It is now anti-social to leave dog excrement around. It didn't used to be.
What will our grandchildren find remarkable about what we do? Maybe that we value the oil companies based on the assumption that 90% of the world's oil will be available to them. Economist Paul Mason reminds us that the survival of the world depends on 90% of the world's oil staying in the ground.
Why did we ever use plastic straws, they will ask. Just as we ask 'Why did people have slaves?'
Why, they might say, did you all have your own lawn-mower? Good question.
The American satirist P.J. O'Rourke said:
'If Martin Luther were a modern day ecologist he would have to nail 95 T-shirts to the church door in Wittenberg.'
He has a point. We can be too T-shirt slogan minded and not heart-changing enough.
There is a danger that in embarking on a new wave of political populism we are also seeing selfishism. A populist government in Brazil sees local economics as more important than rain forest. A populist president in the USA sees 'nice businesses' as more important than climate change.
So, to summarise, I need to campaign and put my recycling bins out properly. Shout and listen to the voices that don't understand what I am shouting about. Demand change and try to be the change I am demanding.
And members of Christian churches should be the first to sign up, because sin, selfishness and stewardship are huge themes of our holy book.
Steve Tilley July 2019
Sources:
Post-Capitalism (a guide to our future) - Paul Mason 2015
All the Trouble in the World (the lighter side of famine, pesilence, destruction and death) - P.J. O'Rourke 1994
The New International Version of the Bible 1978 (now updated to a more inclusive language translation 1996)
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