Over recent years I have come increasingly to appreciate St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. For one thing, it’s the letter in which Paul seems to do the least amount of telling off, although that’s probably because he has yet to visit the Church in Ephesus! But more than that, I find this letter the one in which he most systematically and holistically works through the meaning of God’s redeeming work that has been revealed in the man, Jesus Christ. He sets out a kind of relational theology, in which God’s work seems to be one of connecting things together into whole that is peaceful and ordered and allows all people to flourish. God’s plan for the fullness of time is stated in the First Chapter as one of “gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.”
And this passage we have heard from the second chapter describes a significant part of that divine purpose to connect things together. Paul is writing to Gentiles who had long been viewed as outside of God’s community. But in Christ, we hear that those who were once far off have also been brought near. The shedding of Christ’s blood has had the effect of creating one new humanity; the Cross has overcome divisions and hostility to give all people access to the Father through the one Spirit.
So in this letter, the life and purpose of the Church is to build a kind of invisible structure through the forcing of new connections, so that all people might be joined together and grow into a holy temple in the Lord. But in the age in which we live, we are suddenly having to ask a new question: “Isn’t the most important connection that we need to make, not merely the connections between human beings, but between humanity and the natural world which we occupy?” We need to think, not just about relationships between people, but about the relationship between humanity and the environment.
And this is now urgent; humanity’s greatest priority. I have recently been reading a book called Collapse by the American Professor of Physiology, Jared Diamond, who identifies twelve areas of crisis in ecological sustainability, from the accelerated destruction of natural habitats to the escalating global population. Each one, he argues, is “like a time bomb with a fuse of less than 50 years.”
Human civilisation is at a point of crisis. We have all, more or less, lived under the optimistic illusion that our ways of living are indefinitely sustainable and since those ways of living are premised on the logic of growth we have implicitly believed the absurd proposition that indefinite growth can be sustained in a world of finite resources. But we are slowly, painfully, beginning to wake up to the truth. There is only so much longer that we can all carry on consuming and exploiting the world’s resources indiscriminately while ignoring the consequences for our children and our fellow human beings around the world.
But how is the Church to respond and how are we to understand these environmental questions in relation to the purposes of God such as we read about in the Letter to the Ephesians? There are two approaches that I believe are deeply unhelpful.
The first is to say that the environment and the material world have nothing to do with the Gospel of Christ. Many Christians take this view and will ask, “What does this world matter anyway?” when our hope is for redemption in an afterlife. They reflect Western Christianity’s relatively recent perspective that God’s work in the world through Jesus Christ was to bring about simply some kind of interior redemption of individual souls. I was in a group of diocesan clergy discussing these issues where somebody said, “I don’t mind changing my light bulbs to energy savers but I’m not going to let all this stuff get in the way of preaching the Gospel.” I had visions of him preaching from a boat (like the Lord on Lake Galilee), after London’s rising sea level had finally washed his church and his parish out into the North Sea.
But an equally unhelpful approach is the opposite: an unthinking jettisoning of the Gospel as previously understood in favour of environmentalist fervour. This is perhaps attractive to those Christians who have become embarrassed about all that language about the reconciliation of sinful humanity to God through the blood of Christ and are rather pleased to have a more fashionable cause. It has been remarked that green politics is the new religion of the middle classes and there are indeed many who have become so enthusiastic in their preaching of the reduction of the carbon footprint without any serious relation to God, that one would almost get the impression that gathering in church might itself be an irresponsible waste of resources. Why not stay at home and spare the fuel and the heating? Now is the time for the Church to get serious about sustainability in all its practices but when I see a specially branded “Green Bible” being produced and advertisements for an “Ecological Eucharist” I just start to wonder whether this really has very much depth to it. Does this flow out of who we are called to be as Christians, or is this a quick way of justifying ourselves in the secular world? And indeed, if this eco-drive is disconnected from what we believe about God and God’s purposes for the world, won’t it too founder just like so much of the secular attempt to change our unsustainable way of life?
So as the Copenhagen Summit to negotiate new international agreements on climate change approaches this December, how are we to understand the environmental cause in relation to God’s work of gathering all things together in Christ? Well, the aid agency Christian Aid have been very powerfully making the case that the fostering of new relationship between human beings based on justice and peace – that overcome hostility and division – are not in any way unrelated to the reconnection of humanity as a whole to the natural world. Indeed they are now intimately related in God’s work of joining things together so that all may flourish. And precisely the same point was made by Pope Benedict in the encyclical he published last week, Caritas in Veritate. He writes:
“The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when “human ecology” is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits. Just as human virtues are interrelated, such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature.”
And this relationship, as Christian Aid is arguing, is nowhere more clearly seen than in the way in which the human inequalities that persist in our world, are allowing wealthy nations to carry on ignoring the problems while the poor are already seeing an increase in starvation and displacement from their homes because of climate change. Environmental issues are also justice and peace issues, which challenge us who benefit from how the world is currently ordered. Pope Benedict goes on:
“This invites contemporary society to a serious review of its lifestyle, which, in many parts of the world, is prone to hedonism and consumerism, regardless of their harmful consequences. What is needed is an effective shift in mentality which can lead to the adoption of new lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”
So that’s what we want to think about a little more as a church in these months running up to the Copenhagen Summit in December. The Bishop of London has committed the whole diocese to reducing its carbon footprint by 20.12% by 2012. And we have a group in this church thinking about how we could make our building and practices more sustainable. But Christian Aid are encouraging each one of us to take personal responsibility for the future of our planet by signing up to their pledge. We could think of it as part of a spiritual rule of life. You can see from the cards you received on the way in that it commits us to:
• Campaign for a fair and just deal in Copenhagen
• Lobby the richest to repay their carbon debt
• Do all we I can to reduce our own carbon footprint
• Pass this pledge on to our community, friends and family
And by way of helping us begin those first two pledges, there is a postcard to send to the Prime Minister, supporting an 80% cut in domestic carbon emissions by 2050 and calling for greater assistance for developing countries in reducing their emissions. So do please take these cards away. Sign the pledge and keep it as a reminder, and fill in the postcard and send it off. Then we will be thinking again about how we live up to these pledges and take our commitment to sustainability further as we gather at Harvest Festival in the autumn.
If our faith is to be real, then we must act on behalf of all people of this planet, but particularly for the poor and for generations yet unborn, to show that the reconnection of humanity with the natural world is part of the work of Christ in reconciling us to God in one body on the Cross. God does not just want to tinker with our hearts; this whole created order is to be the fabric of the holy temple into which God is forming us through Christ. If we are to live up to our calling, we will shape our own lives to that purpose.