I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience:

Atheists, agnostics or secularists taking the ‘Dawkins’ line of telling you what they think you ought to believe, and having set up this particular straw man, expecting you to be intimidated as they proceed to attack and dismantle it?  

It’s important to be able to say with confidence, that you don’t believe in the useless, petty,  and obnoxious god they don’t believe in! 

Nor in the fluffy bunny!

Nor indeed, in a faith hostile to and domineering with regard to  life and natural ‘resources’. Though such assertions frequently go unchallenged.

You don’t believe in that...

But do you?  Or do you think you ought to?  Is there some voice in the back of your head?  

As a grassroots minister, I  sometimes wondered if I were continually at war, in preaching,  with the Sunday-school teachers of half a century or more before, themselves passing  on, with less than reflective obedience, what they had received.  Please, if, today  you are introducing children to Christianity, immerse them in Creation, and in wonder!

But for now:

Was there ever a time when the narrative of the danger to life of avoidable human destructiveness had more coherence? Or indeed, the peril  of idolatry: the lethally misleading worship of false gods?

Catastrophe repeatedly seems to be built into the way the world works, when pushed too hard, and  disaster, unsurprisingly,  frequently linked to human behaviour, stupidity, greed and injustice. 

Surveys of prehistoric  Britain show that  ecological collapse through defoliation has been well within the capability even of less technological societies.  We’ve done it before.  We should take note. And I might speculate (wildly) that the importance of sacred  trees to the spirituality we dimly glimpse from afar to the ‘druids’, described by writers from the hostile,  invading,  Romans, and even mentioned (by attribution)  by such as St Columba, should not be underestimated.

Returning to more easily attributable thoughts....

A sense of ‘you have been warned’ pervades the whole of Scripture. (And, incidentally, not just in Christianity, but we’ll keep the word-count down for now.)  I can’t think of any instance where a bolt from the blue arrives because God had a bad hair day, though the Book of Job - and indeed much of the teaching of Jesus - goes out of its way to disconnect genuinely ‘natural’ processes from any sort of ‘no smoke without fire’ argument.  The planet always has its own agenda.

Creation becomes the  more alarmingly irrational when we pretend that it came into being for us, or that we are the centre, the pinnacle and purpose of the universe.  Mainstream Christian  critics of ‘anthropocentricism’ concur.  Maybe  even that  “big word” isn’t strong enough: ‘anthropolatry” - the idolatry of the human might be more like it, though even that, it seems, is a mask to the idolatry of the injustice of the Market, ( mammonolatry) itself a human invention.

Not that human beings are at all neglected in the stories of our faith. Humanity has and evolves a place and purpose in the management of the Garden. 

Is the Incarnation “for us”? Or just the Cross? And how wide or how exclusive is the “us”? Every time  I try to pin down provision reserved only  for human life, it involves a mental pruning of the wide web of Life. Of the thicket, the brush, the forest of intimate connection with the rest of Creation.

There’s realism in  the poetic Book  of Job: the processes of the earth are not determined by humanity, though we are now effectively  at war  with “laws that cannot broken”.  I wonder if this might seem ‘gloomy’, but it looks as if living well and with justice is not automatically “rewarded” by prosperity, (for  that is the fallacy of ‘Prosperity Gospel’ ) though self-destructive behaviour and pig-headedness and complacency, with regard to warning signs, lay cataclysmic foundations.

God the Creator also repeatedly does time as God the Mitigator: what matters is not the wrath or anger of God expressed through cataclysm, but the safeguarding of the seeds of life, in partnership with faithful, and invariably far-from-perfect people. We find God picking up the pieces after tragedy, rather than bringing it on.  But also in the tears of Christ, seeing it coming.

Do you find, in the Garden of Eden story of Genesis, a vindictive overlord, or a God creatively limiting damage?

Do you find in the story of the Great Flood someone who has thrown their rattle out of the pram, or who  in the face of damage done to the planet holds on to life through partnership with people who will listen?

Do you share in the terror of Isaiah that God cannot be contained either in temples or ideas, but rather that God’s glory fills all Creation?

And are you able to  hear, in John 1:14  That the Word  became flesh, rather than, in the first instance, only human?

Ah well, this is a speculative blog, rather than a PhD thesis. But if you’ve begin to question some of what imprisons and enslaves  us as Christians, and liberated from the feeling you need to defend what turns out, in the end, to be inauthentic, then it’s worthwhile .

I believe.... we should pray and think about what we believe.

And maybe, as Abraham looked up and found in the thicket, confirmation both welcome and disillusioning,  that a God worth believing in does not require sacrifice of what we should love, a way forward may be found. 

“...The church is big and influential enough to be a significant part of the solution to the current crisis.”

This was the recent  banner headline for the recruitment webpage for a ‘sister’ Christian organisation. 

I do have a problem with this. 

The language still conveys a less-than-fully honest confidence in a “fix-it”  ‘solution’, rather than a creative  approach to an enduring  and already ongoing  crisis.  

Relying on  this sort of strapline, we won’t be transforming ourselves as the church into what we need  to be for the damaged  world, because we’ll just be buying into doing things the old imperial way.  

It’s in our weakness, our differentiation from “might is right” that our strength, and our prophetic ability to speak truth to power, will lie.

We don’t defeat empire by being empire, because empire is seductively expert at co-opting.  

(As an example in passing: if you ever get invited to a Royal Garden Party, see how republican you feel by the end of it! Wow, what graciousness, what  wonderful tiny sandwiches....)

And yes, when we, as churches, do  engage with the mighty industries which already plan to continue selling us extinction and climate catastrophe, we need to do so with the spiritual and moral authority we have as churches, rather than as pathetically insignificant shareholders.

And we need to be honest about our own  hypocrisy and imperfection: we fly, drive, drop plastic, and all the rest of it. The distance of repentance we ourselves  have to travel should not be allowed to silence us. Because if we waited to put our own house completely in order, there would be no voice to speak that truth.

That we, as “people of unclean lips”, can nonetheless engage with  people of unclean lips, is hopeful and wonderful.

Whilst hope, and its sustaining, is a vital part of our work as churches and as Eco-Congregation Scotland, misleading ourselves and others about the magnitude of what we face, is not. 

Not, as in distant memory,  the ‘Band of Hope’  but the The Brand of Hope we’re after is a deep and durable one.  We are a passionate, -  and yes, joyful  - movement, because realism sets us free to the profoundly defiant power  of joy. 

(I’ve already had a piece I worked hard  on for a church ‘pulled’ for being ‘gloomy’, but this blog is a place for free reflection. For being realistic, not ‘gloomy’. And if the blessing of “dark humour” is part of it, then bring it on!)

We are perhaps  the first age of humanity which has swallowed, hook, line, and sinker,  the assurance of Satan to Jesus that ‘angels will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone’.  We have already jumped off the parapet, and wonder what’s keeping those angels. 

I’m not ruling out the odd branch sticking out of  the cliff on the way down, though.

We are a  culture cherishing  a wholesale denial of cause and effect, grounded not even in a twisted, naive faith in God,  but in the blinkering tyranny of unlimited greed and growth. 

I’ve already noted the ‘greenwashing’  of the job-title of the UK “Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth”.  

For it’s the idolatry of growth, and the enforced lie that business as usual can continue with a bit of ‘green’ tinkering, that continues to break the “laws that never shall be broken”.(cf Psalm 148).  If we’re attentive followers of Christ, then we do not pretend Sky  and Earth will not  pass away. 

The promise to Noah was that if rising waters destroy, it’s not God’s doing. Again, naive and decontextualised reliance on that sort of promise, is putting God to the test.

Our species (and perhaps the asset managers of some Christian organisations)  have presumed to disagree with the God who in conversation with Job, cited the invincible strength of Creation in the Leviathan and Behemoth: and something obscene and blasphemously out of balance has resulted, where other species die out, not in God’s good time of ‘seedtime and harvest’, but wholesale. 

(Of course, since we’re not creatures like the other creatures, we might be sad, but we’ll be safe - or will we?)

It’s the most perverse reading - if they bothered to read - of  Jesus in Matthew 6: 34 

’Do not worry about tomorrow’.... 

because it disregards the  “- κακία -“ (genteel translation) “troubles” or perhaps, given the way language often  works, the ‘crap’ (speculative translation) we’re up to our eyes in today. If you don’t deal with today, there won’t be a tomorrow.

 Whether we’re also living out the gullibility of Adam and Eve, that ‘you will be like God’ needs more reflection. 

I looked at the selection of medieval gravestones in St Andrews Cathedral recently:  pretty well all of them had some variation on the words “memento mori” “remember that you will die”. 

That’s not gloomy, but part of what we need to know to live well. 

To know that everything we know does have an ending, which would be fine. 

How would we behave if we were more conscious that this “day” could be  our last?  

Guess what....?

Some, perhaps, would react  with despair, some with hope and compassion. Which itself transforms every situation. 

We seek a Life Appropriate to the Age, and the church, not the empire, that God call us to be, for God’s glory and the good of Christ’s beautiful, crucified, creation.  In joyful faith, we seek the Way, because the solution  is not yet  in sight.

Hallelujah anyway. Amen.

[Image: a happy bird feeding on the Tree of Life, surrounded by runic script, quoting the poem] .

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Once before I have mentioned  the Ruthwell Cross, which, in stone, and with the clout of history, presents the fellowship of Jesus with wildlife in the wilderness. 

It’s an even more fascinating pile of rock, in that, incised on one of the faces of a cross, presented very much as a tree of life, and a habitat for God’s creatures, is a quote (for Celtomaniacs, wow: it’s in runic script!!!!) from the moving Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The dream of the Rood(the Cross)’.

The poem has been part of my own journey to faith. 

Before I came back to Christianity in my twenties, this poetry, completely unexpectedly,  reached out to me. 

It’s doing so again, after the retreat I co-led on Iona.

 Studying Anglo-Saxon as a subsidiary  in my German degree, ‘The Rood’  had leapt out at me with an unexpected power, not only in the contextualisation of Christ as a ‘Young warrior’,( though crucially, one who powerfully resisted all pressure to destroy his enemies) but also the predicament of the ‘Forest -Tree’ itself:  viciously torn from its forest home and coerced into being an instrument of torture.... 

....Which is what humankind does daily with the ‘resources’ of Creation. We use good things badly. And neglect even to use bad things well.

In ‘The Dream’, The central words and image of the unity of Christ with the Cross itself (Crist waes on rode) ironically achieved by human evil,  let alone  the weeping of all Creation, (Wēop eal ġesceaft) - for human mourning cannot be sufficient...... these are staggering ideas.  

That violence, both against Christ and against Creation, drives these closer together, to the extent that we cannot evade the concept of the ongoing  Crucifixion of Creation. 

Whatever/whoever suffers, is the concern of Christ crucified. 

This  adds powerfully to a theme of how, through the instrumentality of human action, and perhaps despite it, God’s will might nonetheless be seen to be done, in the one who was welcomed by branches and nailed to the tree.

In the nailing of Christ to the Tree, we find we have nailed the Tree to Christ. We cannot henceforth contemplate them in isolation. We cannot follow Christ and neglect the life of the Earth.

In the final lines of the poem, the solidarity of the ‘tree’ with Christ continues,  searchingly, after the resurrection, in the question of who might be prepared to put their own life on the line in response to the harm that is done to the world.

Perhaps the ‘Sheep and Goats’ speech from the Risen Christ, of Matthew 25 takes us, with the logic of preaching, a little further. And science, apart from mediating  the warning voice of the Earth in climate crisis, also confirms the extreme level of kinship of all life, including us, down to a celular level and beyond.

Thus, when you see the Creatures of God in distress, and respond, you respond to Christ. Whether you know it or  not.

After Easter, keep it mainstream!