Andrew Boyle Season of Creation 2 13 September 2009
Proverbs 1. 20-33 James 3. 1-12 Mark 8. 34-37
Last month I wrote about the momentous decision made by our Uniting Church Assembly to adopt a preamble to the church’s constitution. This preamble
acknowledges the aboriginal peoples as the first peoples of Australia and recognises that they in their way, before we late-comers arrived, acknowledged
a divine being who created and ordered the world. There were some reports about this decision in last month’s Crosslight and there is further news and letters
about this watershed in our relationship with the indigenous people in this month’s edition also. There was a long lead up to this decision being made and
there will be further consultation in the church over the next months and maybe years as we discuss and explore the implications for us as a church
as we recognise this in the ways in which we shape our life together.
At the Synod meeting last September we were invited to consider and discuss the proposed pre-amble. As the document was introduced we were invited
by Vince Ross, the state chair of the United Aboriginal and Islander Congress, to discuss how we felt about such a preamble in the table groups of ten
or so that our synod meetings are now held in. Vince invited us to reflect on how we felt about the preamble. Well, no sooner hard the starting gun been
fired than those at my table; one a former general-secretary, another someone who works within a community where there are aboriginal people,
immediately began to redraft the wording of the preamble. Trapped in our legalistic minds we had no idea what it meant to say how we felt about the document.
I wondered why we could not hear the invitation as it was extended to us or why we didn’t view a feeling response as a legitimate response.
This week the group Grand Stand for the environment held the first pilot event of what we are calling TableTalk. It’s an opportunity we hope, as Chris
explained last week, for people to be able to talk honestly about how they feel about Climate Change. We had a debrief in the afternoon after the
first event on how it went. The strangest thing; the most difficult thing for the group seemed to be talking about the feelings. It was clear that we are not
very experienced or comfortable talking about difficult feelings when we get together. Our hope in launching TableTalk is that people may be able to get
in touch with how they feel about the immense challenge of what is before us. The trouble is that, as the spectre of climate change threatens to overwhelm
us so, if we are really honest, might our feelings. Ultimately when things get ugly in the world people’s behaviour is driven by their feelings.
Feelings that have become seriously distorted but nevertheless feelings.
One of the greatest challenges which faces us as people in this time is trying to make sense of our lives and our situations in an utterly globalised world;
somebody sneezes on the other side of the world and we can know about it instantly. Some of you I know talk to grandchildren on Skype. You see the first
tooth the day it emerges; you can view loved-ones holiday snaps they day they are taken and loaded up onto Travelpod. We can watch Eurovision, if that’s
your particular style of kitsch, as it happens across Europe.
We are entertained out of our tiny brains; titillated at every turn by the minutiae of other peoples lives; buried under an avalanche of news that we can do
nothing about and makes little or no difference to our lives. And we are ear-bashed by the eternal media commentary on news items, sport, celebrities lives,
politician’s failures, the economy and public figures peccadilloes. And we expected to process all of this; we have to somehow incorporate all of this
information and therefore what it means to be citizens in a globalised world. It is actually too much; too much to bear; too much to have feelings about
all of it, or to acknowledge those feelings.
No wonder contemporary western society is characterised by unprecedented depression and behaviour which, in psychological terms, is called diversionary
behaviour. When we need to divert our attention from pain or difficult situations we usually take on addiction of some sort; usually personal but collective as
well: alcoholism, drug abuse, addiction to sex, shopping and an insatiable acquisitiveness, eating disorders, self abuse – which in various ways is in
epidemic proportions amongst young people, fundamentalism and our war-mongering – projecting onto others our fears and our insecurities.
In this globalised world we are snowed under with a perpetual avalanche of information. It’s a world where everyone has an opinion and commentators
perpetually commentate on everything from spin-bowling to stem-cells. The trouble is that somehow we have come to believe that commentary equals content.
That information equals knowledge; that wisdom results from just living a long time. Leadership is granted to those who shout the loudest; betray the greatest
number or have the fattest wallets.
In this context we are faced with an unprecedented challenge to our existence and we have got to a place where we lack the emotional resources in order to
be able to respond to what needs to be attended to. We are in parlous state.
The writer of proverbs asks:
‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?
Not much seems to have changed.
I was overcome a couple of weeks ago by a sense of utter hopelessness that humanity has any capacity to avert the current course that we are set upon.
I felt like I should just go with the flow and embark completely on the course of eat, drink and be merry; and consume. [Sue’s story] Someone came through
the door of my office as I was feeling like this and we discussed our mutual feelings about the situation. He said that he thought that humanity is just a plague
on the face of earth. We tell ourselves all sorts of sophisticated stories about our intellect, our creativity, our capacity to control and synthesize matter in all
sorts of extraordinary ways; but the reality is that we are like a sort of plague.; walking, running, riding, driving, sailing, flying over the face of the earth.
Difficult idea to contemplate when we gather here to affirm that we are somehow formed in the image of the creator. Is this just, as Voltaire said: God
making man in his image and man returning the compliment? Is our claiming that human attributes are also divine attributes just an exercise in projection
and self-deception? IS this what the story of the Garden of Eden is at heart about – that we have grasped this knowledge in order to be like God but we don’t
know how to handle it; it’s just too hot for us; a poisoned chalice.
We live in world which has been utterly transformed by the results of a scientific approach to the world. We say this in different ways: look what science has
done for us; hasn’t science made our lives immeasurably easier; where would we be without science?
I’ve been wondering about science this past year. Our attitude to it; the way we talk about it; what we attribute to it; and the ways in which we call it into
question.
I’ve been wondering because there are some, emminently unqualified people – like Andrew Bolt and Steven Fielding, who feel somehow qualified or entitled
to comment about and discount what science is revealing about the state of the planet and the predictions about where we seem to be heading.
Many talk about science as though it is a body of knowledge which if we just discover its secrets will give just about anything we want. We have quite a
consumerist attitude towards it today – as a thing which will give us things, as though it is just another consumer product for our edification. When I studied
philosophy during my degree at La Trobe there were in one of my classes some students who were doing the subject as part of a degree to do with the
philosophy of science. What I realised working alongside these people is that at its heart science is a way of approaching the world; what is called a
methodology; a method of thinking about the world.
Science is not just about some people’s opinions; or some disparate bits of information gathered to make a case for or against something. But it’s about
rigorously testing a hypothesis about something that we observe in the world or which we might sense might be so. Ultimately it is a way of approaching
the world and discovering things about it. This is what Darwin did. He developed a hypothesis, or a theory, about how the world had developed and he set
about testing that theory by observing the world in an ordered and rigorous way. It’s 200 years this year since he was born and the effects of his Theory have
been monumental.
In wondering about science I have realised that faith and science are really not that far apart; because they are both ways of approaching the world; both
ways of being in the face of reality. As Christians we live with the hypothesis that there is a divine being and that love is the thing which constitutes that being;
in a similar way those of us who accept the Theory of evolution live with a sense that the world is evolving – sometimes in not altogether friendly
ways – yet evolving. Both are ways of living toward a reality which we affirm, while neither can be conclusively proved or disproved.
Unfortunately we in the church have inherited, what is becoming clear to me as, a rather ridiculous battle between faith and science. The assertion has been
that you cannot affirm both. Creation science and Richard Dawkins anti-faith stance would be examples of this unwillingness at its extremes.
What I’m realising is that for the life of faith to have integrity and for the project of science to have a true integrity, requires both to approach the world with
a sense of wonder – seeing things as they are and wondering about them. It requires a willingness to abandon our fixed ideas, or attachments to a way of living,
maybe our previous learnings and experiences and to embrace what new thing might be emerging for us.
When faith is regarded as something which we can possess or which will defend us against life rather than it being about an an approach to life, and when
science is seen as simply a useful body of knowledge which will make our lives more comfortable or give us more control of our existence, then both are
travesties of what they are meant to be.
Where this brings me to in this Season of Creation is the body of scientific findings over Climate Change which have been gathering momentum over the
past decades and how they are being responded to. Some seem to be questioning the science; People who seem to be imminently unqualified to do so
yet they speak with some seeming authority as though they are well informed in order to do this.
The primary body of research on global warming is being collated by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. This body is a joint venture between
the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organisation. These people have no particular ideological or political or economic
barrow to push. They are scientists and people professionally concerned with observating the state of the environment in their particular part of the world.
Currently the IPCC is compiling its fifth report on Climate Change. The group began their work in 1992. The method of their research and reporting is that
to date more than 500 climate scientists have contribute to the collation of data about changes to the world’s climate. This work is then reviewed by more
than 440 other scientists who assess the scientific method and veracity of the 500 scientists’ work. It is a normal scientific process of checks and balances
and peer assessment. These people as I said don’t have a particular barrow to push and are simply observing what is taking place.
Now it strikes me that if we want to embrace the benefits of science then we also must embrace the challenges it places before us. What it is placing before
us is ultimately an ethical challenge: that the way that we are living is too costly for the planet. Humans are destroying it. And rapidly. We have a global
challenge on an unprecedented scale before us; and if we are to avert the danger then we must respond on a global scale.
The question for me is – and I do believe it is a question which we must all struggle with is: how do I, how do we, find the motivation for changing the way we
do things. For us as Christians especially there is an ethical imperative for us to be willing to face the evil before us face on and ask: how then must I
respond. Because, respond we have with enthusiasm and passion: to all the opportunities we have received in order to be able to live more extravagantly;
we have come to believe it is our birth-right. But now it seems to be our birth-right at the cost of many other’s birth rights; generations as yet unborn,
but others nevertheless. As Christians in this globalised world we are called to respond with an awareness of this global reality yet in ways which are
local and communal; we are called to love neighbour as self and as we inhabit a globalised world realising that our neighbour is both beside us but also in
all places and so our response must in some sense be global.
I come back to the question of feelings with which I began though. How do we feel about all this? How can we have a feeling response which is somehow
adequate to the globalised world to which we are continually asked to respond? Do we throw up our hands in horror; in despair; with a sense: let others worry
about it, it’s too much for me; I’ve lived my life.
One of the things that strikes me about the getting of wisdom is an ability, maybe a willingness, to integrate what we know, what we learn, the things with
we experience with an authentic feeling response response. Allowing our selves to feel the full impact of what we have learnt or experienced. An inability to
respond to reality just as it is lies at the root of the psychological pathology at the heart of much of our western existence. We are the most technologically
advanced and yet emotionally miserable people of all time.
In the midst of all of this the followers of Christ are called to march to the sound of a different drum. As we are called by our Lord to take up our cross we are
invited to walk the path through suffering which leads to life. We are entering a period of time where there is going to be much suffering – hopefully a clawing
back on our extravagant living, but more importantly the loss of life due to lack of water and food and the displacement of people due to climate change.
These things will be hard to face without retreating into defensiveness and isolation or aggressiveness on the part of the powerful. We as Christians will need
to reach across the world to those who suffer and embrace them in defiance of the dominant value that we are engaged in a mythic battle of the survival of
the fittest.
If you were here last week you would have heard David Small read from chapter 2 of the letter of James: My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of
favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in
faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?
Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
This was written maybe to small community of Christians somewhere in the Mediterranean 2000 years ago yet it speaks to us across the years as we face
this global challenge. Do we with our acts of favouritism really give glory to our Lord Jesus Christ? We are called to embrace with passion God’s preferential
treatment for the poor; to give voice to the voiceless and to reflect God’s justice as found in Jesus Christ. This goes not just for the poor people of the world but
for the poor animals and the defenseless matter which makes up our home, which are victims to our insatiable appetitive for progress.
May God give us grace as we face this challenge and respond out of a deeply transformed sense that we are part of God’s good creation.