Prophets in Paris?
Climate Change in the Church
St Peters Nottingham, 3rd before Lent
4 February 2007
Isaiah 6: 1-8; 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11
The Paris Report (and Avian flu)
Well, I don’t know how you have reacted this week to the latest extremely depressing report on climate change and the very pessimistic prognosis for our planet over the next century if we do not make major changes to our lifestyle right across the board. The problem I have, having virtually nil ability in the science field, is making head or tail of conflicting arguments that still seem to be flying around about it all. But the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, presented in Paris on Friday seems to me to carry enormous authority, and is in the true sense of the word, prophetic. It is, with the huge knowledge and wisdom of this significant group of scientists, reading the world around us – all the signs and warnings that have led to such a wide range and increasing number of natural disasters over the past years, and which, as they look forward with all their expertise, they demonstrate is going to get worse and worse. They point to an overall average rise in temperature of 4′C, which will in turn lead to loss of food production of some 10%, increased flooding, with cities like New york, London and Tokyo being hard hit, as well as Calcutta and Karachi, and Bangladesh virtually disappearing. The ice caps will melt, disease will thrive, up to 50% of animal species will disappear, fresh water supplies will be hugely diminished in southern Africa and the Mediterranean, and hurricanes will increase dramatically in force, causing enormous damage to basic national and international infrastructures. And now Avian flu as well – not a good week….
The Church in politics
It is depressing. And the language being used is apocalyptic, and not at all far from the sort of stuff that we find Old Testament prophets saying 2 -3000 years ago. And there is every sign that people at every level today from major national and international governments and institutions down to you and me are just as deaf to today’s prophets as were the people of Israel of old in their day. If we can find and promote the voices that speak the soft words, the things we want to hear, we will ignore the scaremongering of Dr Susan Solomon and her co-experts. But, we are being told, it is all in our hands. It is our responsibility. If we change our ways the sort of destruction predicted may not happen. But humanity has caused the problems, and if we continue to cause them as in the past, then we are condemning our children and our grandchildren to a very very hard future. Will we listen, will we learn?
And will we, the people of God of today be any better than our forbears at discerning the Word of God amidst al that is happening? I know there are many, many people who still hold on to the extraordinary idea that religion should stay out of these essentially political matters. Well, put aside the question of when does a political issue become an issue of fundamental morality. And forget for a moment the fact that as Christians (alongside our Muslim and Jewish sisters and brothers, and in slightly different narratives most of those of eastern religions as well) we believe that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is’ and that we have simply been commissioned to be stewards of the earth. Remember the famous outburst of Archbishop Desmond Tutu – ‘When people say that politics and religion don’t mix, I wonder which Bible they are reading’. Or the equally famous words of Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife – ‘When I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no bread they call me a communist.’
We, the church, the people of God, have as much right as anyone and more than many to pose the questions to political leaders and to community leaders, as well as to one another and to ourselves about the great issues of the day precisely because of our beliefs and because if we are responding to the call to be witnesses, we recognize our responsibility both to God and to our fellow citizens to demand answers where there is prevarication and to demand action when we see inaction. And if we do not, if we excuse ourselves because it is not quite the way we behave, or because we don’t really want to involve ourselves in politics, and if we fail to challenge one another to live appropriate lifestyles, then we are carrying a very heavy burden, and it is my grandchildren who will be left to pick up the pieces in 50 years time. It is as raw and personal as that.
The world of Isaiah of Jerusalem
The world in which the call of Isaiah of Jerusalem takes place is a very different world from ours. The world view is much narrower, the concerns are the concerns for one people amongst many; but the sense of crisis on the one hand and of the lethargy and deafness of the people to whom he is speaking is a common strand that ties us to eighth century BC Israel. We need to understand the significance of the death of King Uzziah. He had been a very strong king, defending the nation against its aggressive neighbours, and the accession of his son Jotham, a weak and vascillating man opens the doors to terror from the north – the Assyrians are coming! The destruction of Israel is imminent if the people are not quickly energized and action quickly taken. That is threat enough surely. In a sense, you would have thought that such an immediate threat (unlike the threat of today which is slightly esoteric and certainly contestable) would have roused the people from their slumber. But it is more than that (and perhaps here there is another strong link between our context and theirs). The crisis they face is a crisis of cosmic proportions. The very name of God is at risk – the description of Isaiah’s vision in our reading is not just incense-induced ecstasy. This is the nature of God being hinted at, and the words that follow, put into Isaiah’s mouth, powerfully and ironically dramatize the huge gap between the vision of God that is proclaimed and ritualised in the Temple and the actual faithlessness of the people. They cannot comprehend. They keep on looking but don’t understand. Their minds ARE dull, their ears stopped, their eyes shut.
Isaiah is called and commissioned, not just as a nice added extra for Sundays, to challenge the people in the context of a political leader, the King, who is weak and incompetent and who will lead them to destruction; but the King is more than a political leader. In a week when we have marked the feast day of King Charles the Martyr, we perhaps can connect a little with the sense of near divinity that is attached to the idea of kingship in ancient Israel; so when the king fails, it is not just political failure, but the whole structure of belief, literally God himself who is undermined.
The Prophecy of Isaiah
The history to which the Book of Isaiah bears witness (though it represents the writing of at least three different prophetic figures from different times) is precisely of the disobedience and unresponsiveness of Israel to God’s love and faithfulness, and the consequences of that – invasion, destruction, the end of the nation as they knew it, and decades back in slavery and exile in Babylon. One person could n ot have written the whole book, and the evidence is that, at a much later date and primarily as an ongoing warning to the restored nation, the writings of the three and more Isaiah figures were gathered together to show in a very powerful way, the whole story – the turning away, the consequences of that, and the continuing and unswerving faithfulness of God even in the midst of total disaster, which eventually prompts repentance and restoration to the promised land and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Prophecy today
So the roots of the prophetic role of the faith community run very deep indeed. The church, we, the people of God, can choose to get on with our lives and ignore what is going on around us, or we can choose, unlike God’s people of three thousand years ago, to open our ears and understand, to open our eyes and see, to look and to understand. We can sit back, passively, and leave others beyond our boundaries to be the prophetic voice of our day, or we can respond to our calling and commissioning – whoever we are, and whatever the context within which we operate – to raise our voice alongside the scientists and many others, not just about the risk to our environment and our grandchildren, but for God himself, who is creator and sustainer and redeemer of all and whose creation we are supposed to be caring for but are actually destroying.