A sense of direction: the road to less harm

Linda Bongiorno
Wednesday 11 December 2024

Preacher: Revd David Coleman, Chaplain, Eco-Congregation Scotland
Readings: Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6

There’s always some agenda….. for why we hear readings together: the acerbic forthrightness of John the Baptist presented as fulfilment and continuity with that irresistible reformer predicted by Malachi, and both of them sent not to destroy faith or its institutions, but to repower and repurpose them.

Because what is good can be made better.

John and Malachi both were holding fast to their place in God’s people. Not departing from that identity.

But transforming  the landscape of what that means here and now. Like the glens of Scotland transformed

into hydro power stations. At cost, yes, but also with benefits.

From Luke today, we hear a preamble to John’s subsequent compassionate tirade; to his preparatory Gospel of  ‘do less harm’.

A Good News which scandalously and militantly included moral outcasts implicated in oppressive abuse. That good news of warning ticked enough boxes for Luke to recycle the authority of Isaiah, with John, identified as powerfully vocal for the transformation of landscape.

Every landscape that is, which has become an obstacle to the sustaining benefits of the Glory of God. And this not just for us for our church, nation or species, but for all flesh. Not just in poetry, but in reality.

The flesh that the Word of God became.The flesh which in each of those cases could have been more narrowly defined as human, because the vocabulary was there. It’s been dominant cultures of interpretation that have prohibited this liberating insight, and played down the significance of Sabbath and Jubilee for the refreshment of the living Earth in their entirety. Including the wildlife we’ve eradicated in your lifetime.

The more seriously we take the Incarnation [ -yes, hello Christmas! ]- as an article of faith, the more we recognise Christianity as a relationship of mutual care with fellow creatures.The holiness and the sentience of the diversity we’re content to write off as less than human.

Where are the carols which celebrate that other than in an attempt at devotional hyperbole? “Joy to the World?”   Maybe!

In the six years of the chaplaincy thus far, it’s been inspiring to see how, globally, more and more mainstream prayers make the leap to recognise that the World that God so loved that he sent his only son, cannot be restricted to human society, but embraces the Earth whom Pope Francis, – recycling Saint Francis – describes as like a mother who sustains and governs us.

Of all the spiritual gifts confronting our churches, the idea that we are governed by the Earth is the one most meticulously, most ingeniously ignored.

That’s one more symptom of the enduring pandemic of human supremacism, which so bedevils our relationship with the prophetic personalities of Creation, both in the wee book of Scripture and the Great Book of the Earth.

Though having said that, I’ll still need to point out that God’s purposes in Creation are not exhausted in providing a picture-book to teach us. The creatures are teachers, but like everyone who teaches you, they’re entitled to    a work-life balance!

I’m told that Malachi – God’s messenger – was a pseudonym to protect the writer from lethal kickback against the unwelcome truth of their message.

That makes sense. Not all very nice sense. Some of Malachi’s less savoury messaging, inciting the abusive persecution of mixed marriages is a brutal reminder that if we are to value and find guidance in Scripture, then we’re obliged to be mindful that raw, or even translated Texts only become Scripture in a partnership of repurposing. A partnership with that wild wind we also call the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit who serves us only as we serve God.With justice, with love, with alertness and responsiveness.

What and when do we take what’s challenging or offensive to us with a pinch of salt, and when do we actually take it to heart?

Discernment. Discernment. Discernment.

But through all those layers, it’s of interest that this sometimes scatologically vicious writer [Malachi] is active in a society with rather low expectations from their religious leadership. And indeed, institutions.

But they call us to account in the fundamentally hopeful conviction that there is an account to be called to. That the communities and even rituals of faith do have potential to be that offering of justice that Malachi longs to see. And if, for now, they’re not, then landfill is not the answer.

And the same is true of our own use of these traditionally prescribed Advent readings. As last week: with Jesus’ talk in Luke of

“signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.”

The embarrassingly wild and scary words of that terribly sensible man Jesus merging with the news reports of climate crisis. Suddenly scripture speaks of realities.

What a surprise!

In the midst of all the accumulated agendas and slants and prejudices which inevitably accrue in translation and interpretation, and especially in the domination- obsessed atmosphere of our persistently colonial

spiritualities, which, like John the Baptist’s pharisees love to present themselves as globally definitive…

…despite all that, we are gathered here at the least to be      going through the motions of the trust that there is a spirit to ask what is the Spirit saying to the church, to our particular place and purpose on Earth today?

Malachi does live like us, in a time when divine wisdom and spiritual leadership is sorely needed, not least as a remedy for the despair that is rational, given well-authenticated facts of the crises of nature and climate. Sometimes that wisdom and leadership is forthcoming.

Encouragingly, around COP26, we saw the beginnings of faith traditions unearthing                                                treasures from their respective fields, and one of our loveliest in Christianity concerns hope with eyes wide open.

– I’m not speaking there of head-in-the-sand optimism; I’m not insulting you by passing redemption off as “everything’s going to be all right”, In the midst of these Crises which are denied or evaded only by idiots or someone possessed by the demons either of short-term profit, or their close cousin, ‘prudence’….

Once more: Hope-with-eyes-wide-open does not need the permission of a watertight rational pathway to be hope beyond hope.

Though it may benefit from the companionship, thanks to George MacLeod, of courage, faith and cheerfulness.Yep. Cheerfulness.

One of the most frequent criticisms of my own ministry is that I’m not gloomy enough; too much Barnabus, not enough Jeremiah. That I don’t spend all day every day in abject lament for the abuse and enslavement of the living Earth.

Well, if lament’s your thing, fine. But lament was not what John was looking for. Nor Malachi, for that matter. Action, not navel-gazing or hand-wringing.

Lament is a valley of sorrow to pass through, not a sustaining habitat, not a place to dwell.

Change of heart and mind … and of life, and perhaps of the nature of our economy is a path to joy.

Even if, sometimes getting there is what mountaineers call ‘type 2 fun’.Tough going.

But rather than being mired in lament, there’s more sustaining energy in the Hallelujah anyway of folk who endured oppression and slavery with little

prospect of liberation, or in the irony of the joyful Hosanna of Palm Sunday. Crying with subversive joy “God help us!”.

Things are not simply going to be all right. God help us! Which is why even the contribution of your life and your prayers, in God’s hands, are sufficient and valuable.

I hope you can join me in this prayer: God help the church to be the church, right now. For the good of all the Earth. Whatever God chooses church may mean. Amen.

God who can – and likely – does make of the stones beneath our feet, children and heirs of Abraham. And prophets too whose voice is heard in the rising seas, the melting glaciers, the disrupted migrations, the turmoil of growing seasons.

That probably does not mean we’re the only creatures sent by God to be part of the healing of all flesh, but for God’s sake let’s step up to what we can be. What we are here for, even if it isn’t to solve every problem. Even if it isn’t to be “in charge.”

Let’s embrace that martyrdom, that recklessly splurging witness rather than saving for a rainy day when it’s already raining cats and dogs.Transforming those landscapes in spirit and in truth.

At this point in the age we live in, I’ve seem more than one Christian denominational survival programme for the next few years with no mention whatsoever of the overarching context of these crises, which is strange, since what more appropriate occasion could there be for prayer than global existential threat, precipitated by knowing and chosen injustice, which is already disrupting the cycles of life on which our life depends. Injustice exacerbated by mega-funded misinformation.

Mission statements without mention of climate. If you find one today, have a word. Especially with whoever wrote it. We want that sort of work to be the best it can. Repurpose, don’t throw it out.

Because there is no sense in which such irresponsibly deficient outlooks can, as they stand, be presented, even economically, as an offering in righteousness. An offering doing justice to the glory of a healthier interdependent partnership with our neighbours in Creation, fellow stakeholders in God’s Rainbow Covenant between God and the Earth.

At the lively and encouraging rally outside the supreme court in Edinburgh against the continuation of work on the unlawfully approved Rosebank oilfield, we knew that both those outside and those inside were completely aware that new oil and gas,

still, as it were in our pipeline, is the choice not, as Jesus said, to love your neighbour, including the human ones, but to kill them.

We’re well beyond the time when there was reasonable doubt about that causality, rather than disinformation bankrolled by corporations whose greed urges them, knowingly and culpably, to invest in extinction.There is no remaining grey area. Only a moral imperative to just transition.

It was therefore encouragingly good to see the statement from the Scottish Catholic Bishops, issued during COP29, supporting the campaign of fossil-fuel non-proliferation. But even there, perhaps in their attempt to reach a wider audience, you have to dig deep to find something distinctively Christian, rather than merely wise and compassionate.

How can ecological wisdom be more obviously identified as a hard-wired response of faith?

Our friend Rev Dr Stephen Holmes in Perth began a series of lectures on Creation theology with questions as to why faith statements on environment are so frequently devoid of theology, indeed, when folks reach for a non-theology they strangely think they have to indulge in as if we weren’t immersed in theological and Christological possibilities.

That’s why churches in Scotland do and will struggle to mobilise worshippers in admirable net-zero aspirations.

Is it a fear of theology that hands over the language and body-language of faith to those who reshape it as a refuge from climate change? Putting the green stuff away at Christmas to do the proper business of the church, unhindered by treehugger concerns for that Nature with whom Jesus Christ lived in constant contact…filled with affection and awe…..

At least, if at this time of year, you bring a tree into the place of worship, honour them for everything a tree can be. A delight to our eyes, a breath of our life, wood for the manger and also the cross.

And a tree, whom God made….Tree. An offering and a branch of righteousness To God’s glory. AMEN..


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