Message from the Chaplain
The American philosopher, Kermit T. Frog, once asked, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what’s on the other side?”
I suspect it is because humans are creatures of hope. We love to look forward.
But we don’t mind doomsaying and doomscrolling either.
Unsurprisingly those most invested in looking forward to the future are those with the most time left to enjoy it.
At age 16, climate activist Greta Thunberg, addressed the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in 2019,
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. […] We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Martin Rees, a former president of the United Kingdom’s national academy of science, suggested “that there is only a 50 percent chance that civilization as we know it will make it through the present century”
An eco-apocalypse has replaced previous generations’ fears of a thermo-nuclear one.
Is there any hope?
The Bible’s answer is yes.
The very first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God created the world, and we are only its stewards or trustees. When we see the world as a gift from God, we will do our best to take care of it and use it wisely, instead of poisoning or destroying it.
We don’t worship the earth; instead, we realise that God gave it to us, and we are accountable to Him for how we use it. After creating, the first human, the Bible says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). God didn’t tell them to exploit the world or treat it recklessly, but to watch over it and use it wisely. Like a good ruler, we should seek the welfare of everything God entrusts to us—including the creation.
God’s desire is to work in partnership with us to create beauty out of chaos and to be good stewards of this beautiful world.
God continues to give us that choice – we can choose to work in partnership with Him, or seek to define for ourselves what it means to steward the environment. Humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the mistakes we have made since, including environmental ones, show what our decision making has been like. Not always great.
Interestingly, God’s response to this is a plan that would restore all the world and redeem it into its state of glory. Throughout the Old Testament, we see time and again God promising to redeem all things through his people – including promises of a redeeming figure one who would possess the very Spirit of God who brings life from chaos. Jesus, the one who came to restore us and creation into its original glory.
When it comes to the environment, if we have no hope that things can be better, then we have no reason to try. But we can hope, because this is God’s world, and Jesus came to restore the environment and to work with and through us to restore it too.
If hope does not show itself in action, then hope is useless. I find Charles Wesley’s words helpful in thinking about our responsibility to God’s creation:
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Hope doesn’t replace action; it is a catalyst for it.
Have we made any progress?
Well, when I was at school, Sydney had a brown smudge blanket of air over it from leaded petrol and industry. An old boy from my school started Cleanup Australia Day because of how polluted with rubbish our waterways like Sydney Harbour were. My harbourside primary school was near a former uranium processing site which contaminated the area. There was no such thing as a recycling bin. And there was a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer caused by chlorofluorocarbons from fridges and aerosol cans.
A lot has changed. Petrol is now unleaded; our harbour is a place where people freely swim and fish; 64% of our rubbish is recycled; and the Montreal Protocol proved that nations can unite around environmental issues, when CFCs were phased out of use by treaty allowing the ozone layer to recover by 2040.
Some progress has been made. There’s more to come.
At the end of the flood account in Genesis, Noah is told by God,
“Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” (Genesis 9:16)
On the other side of the rainbow is the promise of renewed creation, which we sing about in the words, “we have new life, a new hope, a new future”, as we look forward to beholding the lamb of God at his return. In the meantime, we are called to live out our stewardship of the environment in the choices we make and the actions we take, knowing that this too is part of how we love God and our neighbour.
Reverend Rod Farraway