Last Sunday was Creation Sunday and David reminded us of what it means to believe in God as Creator and ourselves as creatures made in God's image, with responsibility to care for his creation. Today we continue in the season of Creationtide. The readings for this Sunday are not specifically focused on care for creation, nevertheless they have something to say to us about who we are, what it means to follow Christ and how that should impact our whole lives including how we treat the environment.
Our reading from the letter of James focuses on speech and the potential damage our tongues can inflict. He has in mind both the teaching of church leaders and the speech of members of the congregation and he uses a variety of images to describe the potential effects of the tongue, both positive and negative. The tongue can be like the bits of a bridle guiding a horse, or a small rudder guiding a big ship: so good teaching can help to guide the church body. But the tongue can also be like a destructive fire or a deadly poison.
One of the points that James wants to emphasise is the need for our speaking to be consistent. This is in fact often not the case. 'With (the tongue) we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters this ought not to be so.' He goes on to use images from the natural world to point out how unnatural this inconsistency is. Can a spring pour forth both fresh and bitter water? Can a fig tree produce olives, or a grapevine produce figs? These examples are ludicrous; they contradict the natural order of things. Isn't it also unnatural and against the natural order of things that we can use our tongues both to praise God and to curse those made in the image of God?
Unlike animals, springs of water and plants which do what they by nature are designed to do, we as human beings have the capacity to accept or reject the way of our Creator.
This obviously relates to more than what we say; it also relates to what we do. One of James' major concerns in his letter is that we live out our faith in practical ways. How can we confess faith in God but then be indifferent to the needs of our neighbours? Isn't this also an unnatural inconsistency? And indeed we could extend this thought: how can we praise God our Creator, and not care for his creation?
If we are honest, we would all have to admit that we are inconsistent as human beings in all kinds of ways. We often say one thing and do another; we profess love for God and neighbor but then can be careless and cruel in our words and actions. We praise God our Creator, and then are careless with his gifts; we can be greedy and possessive and indifferent to the needs of others. We are not consistent and we often fail to live up to our beliefs, even when we have the best of intentions. There is a fundamental flaw within us as human beings. As Paul points out: 'I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do' (Romans 7:19). The image of the spring pouring forth both fresh and bitter water, or the fig tree producing olives may be ludicrous, but as human beings we are contradictory as we all fail to be as we were created to be.
This is why God entered creation in Christ to redeem and re-create us. In our gospel reading, Jesus asks his disciples who they say he is and Peter confesses that he is the anointed One of God, the Messiah. However, he is not the triumphant, warrior Messiah they may have expected, but the Son of Man who takes up the role of the suffering servant described in the prophet Isaiah, who will be rejected, tortured and killed. Our life comes through his death. The Creator God is at work to re-create his people and his world but only at great cost to himself.
But following Christ, and allowing ourselves to be re-created also entails cost to us too. Jesus tells his disciples: 'if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.' Strong words. The Greek word for 'deny' here has the sense of 'saying no.' We are to 'say no' to ourselves, to our deeply ingrained self-centredness.
Now of course the centre of our faith is not a 'no' but a very emphatic 'yes'! God says 'yes' to the world he has created, declaring it 'very good.' His 'yes' towards us is constant even if the face of the mess we make of ourselves and our world. God's 'yes' involves the sending of his Son and his costly death on the cross; a 'yes' which embraces not only human beings but the whole of groaning creation which will one day be restored in the new heavens and the new earth. (2 Corinthians 1:19-20; Romans 8:19-21; Revelation 21: 1-2).
So the centre of our faith and our discipleship is a 'yes': God's 'yes' to us and the call for us to say 'yes' to him. But part of that 'yes' to God our Creator, and following Christ as our Lord, involves us saying 'no' to that which prevents us flourishing in the way God intends.
'For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?' Jesus was no doubt encouraging those of his followers who would be killed for his sake, that they would find their true, resurrected selves. However, we can over-spiritualize these words as being simply about our spiritual salvation. It is not that our physical lives, and this physical world don't matter and all that matters is our eternal soul. God our Creator has declared our physical lives and this physical world 'very good' and precious to him. So perhaps we can understand these words as a challenge not to be preoccupied with ourselves: if our primary priority is to protect and fulfil ourselves and amass more and more power and wealth for ourselves, then however much we gain (even the whole world) we will end up losing our true selves in the process.
We were created in the image of the God who gives himself generously to his world; if we selfishly clutch more and more to ourselves we are resisting the image of that God and losing the true life he has given us... and destroying his creation in the process.
What does all this say to us about our care for the environment? We are challenged to repent of our clutching possessiveness; to resist the desire to consume and possess more and more, and to think about how the way we live affects the lives of others and the life of our planet. Concern for creation and the protection of the environment is not an optional extra for Christians but part of our Christian discipleship, our love for God and our neighbor.
After the service, Dominic will be giving a talk about climate change and what we can do to protect our neighbours as the world faces more and more frequent, and increasingly destructive, floods, fires and droughts. This may cost us something in time, effort, lifestyle and money. All forms of action to care for the environment will cost us something. We may need to deny ourselves, to say 'no' to some elements of our lifestyle, to restrain our consumerism, to think about what we buy, how we travel and how we invest, in order to say 'yes' to God and to the flourishing of our neighbours both near and far.
We are also proposing another project this Creation Season to help us think about saying 'yes' to God and his creation and 'no' to our own selfish materialism and indifference. We would like to encourage everyone to have a jar at home and put in some money every time, for example, we use the car when we could have used public transport, or buy take away coffees or water bottles. There are lots of other simple challenges to take up. I sent out the Creation Season Challenge with my recent email message, it is also pinned up on the church door, and on Facebook. So let's all join in. We invite you then to bring the money at our harvest celebration on 3rd October and it will go to Tearfund, a Christian charity which works to relieve poverty in some of the poorest countries of the world.
Hopefully alongside raising money, this project will help us think about what we do and how we live day by day; we notice every time we 'sin' by doing something unenvironmental and put in some money to help those suffering much more from the environmental crisis than we do. A simple way to get us to think how we live our lives and whether we need to say 'no' to some of our engrained patterns of behavior. Any of us who are 'sinless' and live perfectly environmentally friendly lives day by day, can donate some money to Tearfund anyway!
We may all fail, as individuals, to properly care for creation, to love God and our neighbours day by day. We are also, of course, caught up in a bigger system of consumerism, international competition and self-protection which causes damage to the environment and threat to the most vulnerable. It is the poorest in our world who are suffering the most from climate change and environmental disaster. That clutching desire to 'gain the whole world' for ourselves can have disastrous consequences when we see it on a big scale. Going for a moment beyond the environmental crisis to another issue that is surely of concern to us all, I think of the availability of COVID vaccines and the way some nations have hoarded huge amounts of vaccines and other nations have very little and their peoples are devastated by the effects of the virus. Credit to former UK PM Gordon Brown for speaking out boldly about this.
So, in conclusion, let us today praise God our Creator while acknowledging our inconsistencies in every area of our lives, that we fail to live as the people we were created to be. Let us hear afresh God's overwhelming 'yes' to his world in Christ, and the call to respond by saying 'yes' to him. And let us pray for the wisdom and grace of the Spirit to help us when we need to say 'no' to our clutching possessiveness and self-centredness. We trust that God is at work re-creating us and his world.
Helen Marshall