Mainly talking about poverty. Click ‘full post’ for text.

LUBH 8: The Second Great Commandment

We are looking today at the second great commandment and I am sure that all of you all remember the most important commandment “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul”, second, “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. The great teachings of the prophets tend to be centred on two things which Jesus was summing up when he gave his two commandments. The first is precisely right worship, having nothing else in the place of God and the second is right relations, love your neighbour as yourself, but really what it is about is poverty. It is about making sure that no-one gets left behind. Now this is not a marginal part of Scripture, something like two thousand verses in the Bible refer to poverty, that express God’s concern for the poor. If you go through, for example, the prophets and take out all the bits that deal with poverty, you have taken out rather a lot. The Old Testament is saturated with it. One in ten verses in the Synoptic gospels, that’s Matthew, Mark and Luke, deal with poverty and in Luke it’s one in seven (I didn’t know that before doing a bit of research on this). But you can see it’s quite a significant part even through to the New Testament which is primarily about Christ and who He was. It’s fair to say it’s impossible to be a Christian and not be concerned about poverty. This doesn’t if you like enforce a right wing or a left wing political point. There are still all sorts of debates about what is the best thing to do about poverty. What it is saying is you can’t be a Christian and be unconcerned; it has to be a major concern in the Christian life, to be concerned about the poor, so it’s about our general priorities and our scale of values.

A quotation for you, from Deuteronomy 15: “Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart (this is the poor) then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to, there will always be poor people in the land.” This is what Jesus is quoting. “There will always be poor people with you, therefore I command you to be open handed towards your brothers and towards the poor and needy.” How much poverty? Well the good news is that on the whole poverty has been getting less throughout the twentieth century. This is using the United Nations definition, less than a dollar per day adjusted for what’s called purchasing power parity. So it’s not simply a dollar, a dollar will get you more in China than it will get you in America. So it takes that into account, but the equivalent of a dollar a day, so at the moment about 50, 55p. And you can see in particular the dark green line which is East Asia the most significant thing that has changed poverty around the world in the last twenty years is China’s embrace of market reforms and this dark green line, 60% of the Chinese essentially living on less than a dollar a day in 1981 comes down to less than 20% now, it’s nearly 15%. A huge shift with all sorts of ramifications which we are all aware of as China becomes much more of a market economy, much stronger economy.

But of course the one where we can have more concern is this pale blue one which is sub-Saharan Africa, that’s really where the main problems lie, it has been getting worse in Africa. This is a picture of what’s called the human development index, so it’s not just about money, but it’s taking into account all the factors like child mortality, prevalence of disease, I think literacy is included as well. And really what you can see again, you can pursue it what the different colours mean, darkest green is the richest, best off, and the black and dark reds are the worst off. And again you can see it’s sub-Saharan Africa which is where the problems lie. OK? That’s where the poor are in our world and where they are getting poorer as time goes on. And again this is just reinforcing the same point, the numbers of people with insufficient food and the change in the last ten, twelve years, you can see Eastern Asia, China it’s got much, much better, so the green lines represent progress, the red lines represent a setback. And again you can see sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia which means places like Bangladesh and Southern India. So sub-Saharan Africa is the main problem. You have heard of the Millennium development goals? The aim is to by 2015 drop the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day. The red line is the goal, the pale blue line is where it was in 1990, the dark blue line is where it is in 2001. So again you can see sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are really where the problems are. The major problems.

I want to say a brief word about oil because that was the initial context, for sparking these meditations. As the oil supply contracts, which it has begun to do, last year there was a decline, what will happen is that the market will ensure that the oil goes to those who can pay for it, which of course means that the oil will be purchased by those who are comparatively well off and those who are not well off will be taken out of the market for oil, and therefore out of the market for easily portable energy. Now this has already started to happen this year, sorry in 2006, stretching back a little bit into 2005, where entire swathes of the African economy are being taken out of action. There was a very interesting article in the Financial Times a couple of months ago by the President of Senagal describing how when petrol goes up by 10 pence a litre it causes grumbling in the West, but it means that those who live on 600 dollars a year they suddenly cannot afford the oil at all, and therefore all the economic links flowing from that start to break down, and he was expressing a great deal of concern that unless this changed through 2007 into 2008 there would be a massive refugee crisis, basically as the population pursued any form of energy in order to heat, to cook food and so on. So all sorts of problems will flow from that.

And it’s about things which are really trivial in many ways to us, and one example I was pondering, you know occasionally I do even less justifiable uses of the car, but taking the boys swimming in Colchester the other day, which is a sort of twenty mile round trip, is not something I particularly think about but magnify that around the population as a whole and that’s drawing up a huge amount of petrol for something which is not essential to life, it is something which makes life more pleasant. But as a result of choosing to make our life more pleasant, it’s actually causing severe deprivation to those who are poor. Now this is not something, and this is really the underlying point, I’m not really wanting to say this is a matter of individual choices. I think there are lots of ways in which individual choices can make a difference but actually I think there is something systemic here. Our Western economy has been built up around cheap oil and we can’t simply stop it. Because to simply stop the Western economy would also cause a huge amount of suffering. But I do think our Western economy is going to be profoundly changed and altered as the cheap oil gets taken away.

Now the imbalance that I’m talking about, things that are very marginal to us would have a huge impact on especially on what you might call the Fourth World or the destitute world, sub-Saharan Africa. It is profoundly unjust as a system, not necessarily every individual person within it is choosing to be unjust, but as a system it is unjust. Now I mean that in biblical terms and I want to read to you a story I ponder a lot which I am sure you are all very familiar with which is Dives and Lazarus, because there is a very important point in it.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell where he was in torment he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue because I am in agony in this fire.” But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony, and besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.” He answered, “Then I beg you Father, send Lazarus to my father’s house for I have five brothers, let him warn them so that they will not also come to this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.” “No, Father Abraham”, he said, “But if someone from the dead goes to them they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Lots and lots of things in that story, but the point I want to draw out from it this morning that there’s no hint at all that dives the rich man does anything actively against Lazarus. He simply ignores him. You know there’s no sense that Dives is horrible to Lazarus, that’s it’s because of the things that Dives has done that Lazarus is poor, it’s simply that the rich man ignores the beggar at the gate, and it’s that ignoring that the testimony of Scripture as a whole is criticising and saying renders us liable to judgement. But of course there are lots of other things in Scripture about poverty and riches. I’m sure a verse you’re all familiar with: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.

Now one way of thinking of what Scripture talks about in these terms, is to think in terms of social justice. Because Scripture is not actually against material blessing. If you think of the vision of the Promised Land, it’s the land flowing with milk and honey. It is a materially wealthy environment which is God’s intention for us. And nor is it strictly speaking against absolute poverty, in the sense that the embrace of poverty is not something which is alien to God’s intentions for us. I’ll say more about that as we come on. It is against – and very, very strongly against – the idea that some people get left behind. OK, so to use modern language, the Bible is less concerned about absolute poverty than about relative poverty. It’s about people not being able to share in the community and it’s about not leaving people behind, not letting some people suffer while other people enjoy great wealth. It’s the imbalance that is being criticised. OK, hence “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” You don’t separate love of neighbour and love of self. You are part of the community. It’s a very communal attitude in Scripture.

Now I want to mention an article which I read, must have been about 1988 I think, in the Economist, which was comparing the reaction of the British and French governments to the decline of the coal industry in both countries, where to sum up, the British government has said “Let market forces decide”, and therefore you have the spectacle of entire communities being destroyed across the North of England, where the main source of income, the pit, suddenly closes overnight and you have the majority of the working people laid off, and not very much was done about it. The mantra was, “Market forces will decide.” And the Economist article was comparing this to the approach in France, which was also recognising that continually subsiding coal mining was not a very good idea for all sorts of reasons, but they basically said, they are going to take these coal mines out of commission over a period of twenty years so that the communities have time to adjust. In other words there was a concern on the part of their governments about the human impact of allowing market forces to lead the discussion, to lead the decisions. And of course, that means that we can still see the differences twenty years on. I just think that captures for me a different sense of priorities and what Scripture is very clear about is that one of those sets of priorities is much better than the other.

Now just to reiterate, this isn’t really a party political point, because there might have been all sorts of ways in which this situation in Britain could have been addressed without, if you like, top down government intervention. The issue was that there was no concern taken. If you read some of the biographies of Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, who was admirable in all sorts of ways, there is this very telling bit in the early 80’s when she talks about, “These are not our people”. And that’s really what I’m trying to get at. The sense that “these are not our people”. That’s the heinous sin in biblical terms. You know, it’s not to say that this particular solution is the one which has to be chosen, it’s to say we must be concerned, we can’t say these are our people, those are the others and we are not going to worry about them. Come back to Dives and Lazarus. Dives doesn’t do anything active against Lazarus, he just ignores it, ignores him, and it’s that process of ignoring and not caring which is the concern.

Now three tools just to reiterate, which we are using in each section, idolatry, wrath and apocalypse. So look for where there might be an idol, consider what happens when idols are removed, and the language of apocalypse or to be more precise, eschatology. What is it like to live in the kingdom, where are we going, assuming that God is in charge, that he will accomplish his purposes, how can we live in the light of what’s coming. OK, just to reiterate.

Now I think the idol in particular which we need to be concerned about is growth. Understood as economic growth, which as an ex-Civil Servant, I have read many, many politicians speeches, I would be delighted if I never have to read another politician’s speech in my life, but you will see, if you look at politician’s speeches how there is lip service paid to economic growth so often. Now this is something which has been building for a long time, the economy has been growing for a long time and if you remember our third session when I was talking about exponential growth rates, you will see slow growth for a very, very long period of time and suddenly it starts to accelerate and zooms upwards, which is what has happened with Western economies. Now one of the reasons, in many ways is a very sane reason why such a dominant political concern is the experience of the 1930’s when growth reversed, there was very large scale widespread unemployment, huge social misery which was only really alleviated by the shift into the war economies through the 40’s. And the reasons why that happened to the Western economy, and there are still all sorts of academic debates about it, but this is something which the political classes are very committed to ensuring doesn’t happen again. Now I’m sure that’s one of the underlying reasons, it’s a question of fear, they are afraid of it happening again.

Now that, there is a group of six bars or eight bars covering different areas, you can see hidden underneath it, the exponential curve, since the industrial revolution here, growth, physical growth has taken off and it has shot up. We are astonishingly wealthy as a community, as a world society, we have more wealth than we know what to do with, but the systemic problems are that it all gets accumulated, you know,”to those who have, more will be given, and from those who have little, even that will be taken away.”

Now of course, Jesus has a very explicit instruction, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Mammon is the god of wealth. So if you are concerned to worship the god of wealth or economic growth, then you can’t also serve God. Now what is growth, beyond a certain point of having enough food to eat, clothing on your back, shelter from the wind and the rain, what does growth actually mean, because for the vast majority of our society, we left behind that level of need quite a long time ago. Alright, even if after the war we had rationing and so forth when we were much better fed than we are now, you know the sense of being afraid of famine in Britain is not really what is driving our economic growth. It’s more and more stuff. And we have to buy stuff in order that people can be employed making stuff. And they need to be employed making stuff so that they can buy stuff. And so you get more and more stuff and you get stuffed. One definition of cancer, OK, is growth in a part of an organism which takes no regard of the health of the wider organism. It’s one bit which has run away growth without respect to the wider context.

Now our human economy, our human ecology, involves many, many more aspects, you know human civilisation has much more to it than the accumulation of stuff, but the stuff growing has been growing without respect to the wider human context, and so when you hear politicians say we must have more growth, we must ensure that the growth of our economy continues to give jobs etc., try and add in each time you hear politicians say growth, the phrase “of our cancer”. Because what’s going on is that the economy is becoming more and more separate from the human concerns which are actually its base, that the economy is becoming more and more distorted and damaging. This was the sense in our last session talking about the environmental impact, that essentially what needs to happen is that the economy, you know the monetary flows and industry and so forth, needs to be reintegrated with our human context. And let us be human is our motto.

(The quote is from Isaiah Chapter 3, “The spoil of the poor is in your houses”, which my ethics tutor at university delighted in quoting to me. I’ll come back to that.)

Mammon soldiers, I want to say something briefly about this because it’s not just a governmental point, it’s not just about governments. Think of a listed company which has a certain legal personality and certain legal duties in terms of maximising the value for its shareholders. You have an institution which is geared up in pursuit of very defined aims, and those who work within that company, if they do not pursue those aims, they can either be liable, or they can be sacked or even taken to court. OK? Is that generally understood? But what you have, if, and again, it begs a lot of wider political questions which perhaps we can go into in the discussion later, because it is not a monochrome situation, but what you can have developing then, and I will give you an example, is a situation where an entire company is oriented on something which is destructive of wider humanity. Because they are doing what the whole company is designed to do, the company is designed to pursue economic growth for itself, and that is reinforced and strengthened by everything surrounding it in terms of its legal structure, its corporate ethos and so forth. And the issue is that this is not necessarily something which is healthy for the wider human context.

I think a good example is Exxon, and its financing of climate denial. For the last ten, fifteen years, Exxon has funded at least a dozen, what are called think tanks with very impressive academic sounding titles, like the Institute for Climate Research, for example, and of these many different think tanks which they directly fund, they often had the same people working for them, and all they do is push out – and this was a conscious strategy, there is documentation to prove this – there is a conscious strategy to persuade the media that there is debate in the scientific community about the nature of global warming. It wasn’t even to prove that global warming is wrong, the aim, the conscious aim was to ensure that the media portrayed it as a debate. Now for those of you who went to see Al Gore’s film, “The Inconvenient Truth”, there is this wonderful moment when he surveys I think the last fifteen years of published scientific papers on global warming, of which not 1% denied the reality of global warming, and it compared it to the articles in the media, discussing global warming which were split pretty evenly between those who said it was true and those that said it was false. In other words Exxon’s strategy had succeeded.

And they are doing the same with oil, about peak oil, I won’t talk about that too much now. The thing about what Exxon has done to change the way that this debate is framed and understood in the media, is a good example of something where a company has pursued its own interest at the expense of the wider community. And within the terms of what the company has set up to do it is entirely rational, it makes perfect sense. This has meant that they can have a better return on their investment for their shareholders. Does that make sense? And so I think we can think of them as mammon’s soliders, because they are working for mammon.

Now partly I think it’s a cultural thing and if you like the health or if you like morality of a company is not detachable from the health or morality of its wider society, OK. The Anglo Saxon companies tend to be a little bit more short-term for example than say the Japanese companies, which tend to go more for long-term market share, so you can’t detach, it is not purely a question of the legalities and so forth, it is something that reflects on the wider culture. But really, the point I’m trying to make is that business logic is different to Christian logic and the church and Christian community should feel bold enough to say that this is not acceptable, you know simply because something makes money and preserves jobs and so forth does not make it immune to criticism, that there are more important things than that. Like for example, avoiding catastrophic climate change. So that’s the idol, mammon.

God’s wrath, remember I was saying God’s wrath is simply when we experience the consequences of our actions. When you worship an idol the idol gives you what it promises, but takes life in return, so the idol of economic growth will give you economic growth but will take your life in return. So for example, although most surveys of economic growth concentrate on what’s called GDP or Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Product and so forth, which is looking at how much stuff is done, the last ten/fifteen years there are lots of ways in which the assessment of our economies has been done differently. So for example, looking at the human quality of life which gives a value or assessment to things like clean air, literacy rates, and using these, particularly in the States where it’s clearest, there has actually been, although there has been a monetary increase, you know there has been economic growth, there is more money going around, there has actually been quite a significant decrease in the average quality of life for at least twenty years. Mammon is giving economic growth, but it is taking life in exchange.

Anyhow, idols always collapse in the end and we can be fairly specific about it in the context of peak oil, physical growth will come to an end, just as a purely physical law you can’t continue to expand the physical process when you have a significantly contracting energy base. Hence the thing about oil. What won’t necessarily cease, and one of the things we can hope for, is actually human growth, human development doesn’t have to cease. And there are lots of ways in which the economy can shift away from something which is so dominated by the physical to a situation which emphasises the exchange of creativity. These things are not directly affected by the problems with oil and energy. So there is no reason why human civilisation cannot be rich in a civilisational sense, even if we haven’t got quite so much stuff. You know, think of Ancient Greece. They didn’t have half so much stuff but they had a rich society. So I’m just thinking in terms of the physical basis is going impacted. You will see the truth of our present situation. It’s one of those things that is so big and so vast, it’s often not addressed, it’s ignored. The question of how our whole society is structured around preserving growth. That when growth is taken away and chances are at least for a generation or two it will never come back, then suddenly we will see the ways in which our society, our community needs to change, it will see the truth and the truth will set us free. God will destroy what I think of as the systemic injustices.

There will be various consequences to this, not least of which human suffering, where as I say, it has already begun, it’s already started to happen and I think it has been happening for ten, twenty years. A graph which I put up when we looked at the catastrophes which looks at available energy per capita, which peaked in about 1979, which means less energy per person in the world ever since, and I think it’s sub-Saharan Africa which has been, if you like, where the problems started and of course it’s spreading. How far it spreads is still to be determined.

And the result of this will be as the President of Senegal warn in his article, human movement, mass migrations, you know. When people start starving, can’t feed themselves, they will move. And watch Mexico. Mexico’s oil production, well Mexico’s economy is heavily linked into the production of oil by the state-owned national oil company called Pemex. OK, Petrol of Mexico. And they have, just off shore, the largest oil field in the Western hemisphere, called Cantarell which is huge, the third largest in the entire world, largest in the Western hemisphere, and it is what has been sustaining the Mexican economy for twenty, thirty years. Vast flows of money coming through from it, and the production from that well is crashing. It was up to I think just over two million barrels a day, it went down by about two hundred thousand barrels per day just in the last six months. And that rate of decline is going to impact on everything to do with Mexico’s society. OK? And watch what happens when the people in Mexico move. You know, I have mentioned this before, President Bush signing the bill to pay for a wall to be built, and the walls are going to start going up. Anyway, it is something to watch. And something we will talk about a little bit more next week is what will the governments in these countries do when they see such problems and destitution?

Eschatological imagination, again, just to refresh, where are we going and how can we live in a way that’s in sympathy with it now? How can we live now according to the Kingdom that’s coming? How can we change what we are doing now so we are in tune with God’s final intentions for us? In a phrase, voluntary simplicity. Simplifying our lives. Not being so caught up in the great cycle of stuff. Stop passing new stuff on. Or a different way of putting it “most of twentieth century culture isn’t worth it”. I haven’t actually watched any but all the articles and fuss about Big Brother. It’s calling for a fundamental change in our values. OK? That we give value to different things. That we embrace the things that actually enrich our human lives. That we don’t simply accumulate. The spoil of the poor is in your houses. And it’s a bit of weird movement, marching to have less, not saying we want more of x, y or z, but actually quietly stopping marching if you like. Dropping out to use a sixties phrase.

And of course there is lots of backing for this in Scripture. St Paul, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have”. How about that for a radical sentence? That’s someone who is not wanting to accumulate more stuff. “I know what it is to have little, I know what it is to have plenty, I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty, of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me”. He has got his relationship to God right. Everything else then falls into place. Or in 1 Timothy, “Great gain in godliness combined with contentment, we brought nothing into the world and we take nothing out.” The idea that he who dies with the most toys wins. I think not.

So in some ways a slightly underwhelming conclusion, I will come back to this theme but just for today to finish with this. Stop buying stuff. I’m taking to myself here as well. But I do have a New Year’s resolution which I am going to try and keep because my besetting sin is buying books, you know, and I have got at least a year’s worth of books accumulated to read and I think this is scandal, I need to stop, but I am aware of what it is to compulsory purchase. At least Tom Wright’s earnt a lot more recently!

So purchase stuff for the long term. Purchase stuff which will last or which can be fixed. It is getting more and more difficult because of course, things like a toaster, OK, they are not designed to be fixed, they are designed to be thrown away, if they go wrong. This is insane! We have got an economy which is structured where that makes sense in economic terms. It’s barking mad! But is makes sense in economic terms. This is all common sense really.

The three R’s. You might have heard this. The three R’s are reduce, reuse and recycle in that order. You know recycling is a good thing but it is not as good, it’s not as important as reusing things or simply not purchasing them or using them in the first place. That’s the hierarchy, reduce consumption comes first. I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “Walk lightly on the earth,” or “Live simply so that others might simply live.” This is not new stuff. Concentrate on being human, one of the most important distinctions I think to hold on to is the difference between the tool, which is something that you use, often that you use for your labour, and possessions, which is just the stuff that accumulates. Which is why I don’t feel quite as guilty as I might about my books, I am sure I have quoted this before, I had a conversation with my ethics tutor on this very subject when I expressed even twenty years ago my concern about purchasing too many books, he said, “Well actually, your theology books are your tools.” And it’s true. These are the things that I work with, even there though I think there are options for minimising and restricting.

Are people familiar with Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”? He has some very telling things to say on this subject, about comfort. And he says, “Comfort begins as a guest in the house, then it becomes the master of the house, and then it becomes a tyrant who makes a mockery of our flesh.” Because we get used to being couch potatoes.

Now one thought which is part of the reason why I was wanting to have the film shown in here, going into so many people’s houses, people have DVD libraries. I’ve got one, my favourite films, but actually so many people have got copies of exactly the same films. Why shouldn’t we share? For example, why couldn’t the church invite people to share their DVD libraries, sell all the duplicate copies off and give the money to the poor, and actually operate a little library, free library, not something they have to pay for, but just where the people of this community share something. But of course, that raises all sorts of cultural questions. You know, “It’s no longer mine!”
“Aaah”. “What if it gets broken?” “Aaah”.

Final quotation: “If you wish to be complete, go and sell all you have and give to the poor” . I’ll stop there.

[Inaudible question] No it’s not true. The price of oil has come down for two reasons, one is that swathes of the Third World have been taken out of the buying market, they are simply no longer buying so there is less demand, but the other is the very, very mild winter. People are not needing to purchase as much gas or oil for heating. I think there is also a third reason which is that the price was pushed up by speculation over the summer and when it was realised that we weren’t going to have quite such a bad hurricane season, those positions taken by the speculators have unwound, and that’s given a bit of acceleration. But I think the main reason is we are going to have a very mild winter across the Northern Hemisphere. Across the Northern Hemisphere is the mildest winter for you know decades, I can’t remember the exact figure, but it is a very, very mild winter, and I am sure you have all noticed. Someone was telling me this morning there has only been three frosts so far, but that is the main drop in drive, the demand has been less. Much less than expected for this time of year. So hence the price drops.

I asked my Bible group yesterday, we were talking about anger, “When was the last time that the church, not individual members of the church, including individual leaders of the church, but when was the last time the church as a whole, corporately, either Church of England, or an ecumenical thing, officially expressed anger at injustice?” And if it hasn’t for a while, because we couldn’t think of an occasion, if it hasn’t, why not?! Come back in two weeks and I will be saying a bit more about that.

I think this is very much something which churches should engage with. I think the root of it is about raising the concern. I think one of the good things which the Christian community has been involved with over the last few years is the Jubilee campaign. Which was precisely about this, I haven’t talked about debt today, it raises lots of issues, and debt in terms of international relations and so forth, but also debt within our society. I think debt is a great hidden problem and that’s something where I think the churches should be doing something. You know the Bible is pretty clear about the evil of usury. It is much clearer about that than it is about some of the other things that we get agitated about. But the ways in which families get destroyed and when loan sharks move in and you get these 25% at best interest rates, there’s no way that can be justified from a Christian perspective.

There is an issue and I have tried to make it clear earlier. I think there are things which we as individuals can do, and there are even more things, and even more important things which we can do corporately, together as a church community. But I don’t think we can solve these problems. And I don’t actually think that we should try and labour ourselves, and weigh ourselves down with the expectation that we can, because actually I think God is in charge, not us. And much of what is coming is God, we can view it as God acting to dismantle the things, we call if you like, the structures of oppression. God is going to act, God is going to take these things down. A wonderful Johnny Cash song, “Sooner or later, God’s gonna cut you down.”

In the last session, I have started drafting this already, I am going to finish up with a dozen pledges, things that we can commit ourselves to as a community and number one is prayer. I think that the thing to do is to move towards the kingdom, move in the right direction and not worry too much about the fact that we are embedded in sin and we cannot escape from the sin. You know, this is what Jesus died on the cross to set us free from and therefore we don’t actually have to get too het up about it. We must do our best to move away from them, we must do our best to bear the fruits that befits repentance and so on. But not feel it’s like mortified that for example, I take my kids swimming. We live in the society that we do and the society as a whole is itself is enmeshed in sin. And simply by existing in society, by shopping, by eating food, we cannot avoid sharing in a sinful community. But you know, we should do what we can and keep pressing on in the direction of the Kingdom, but not get too het up by the fact that we are not going to be pure, because we’re not. We are never going to be pure this side of the second coming.

Transcript of my sixth talk exploring the issues around Christianity and Peak Oil. This is about 7600 words, click full post for the text.

Good morning and welcome as we renew our sessions this morning talking about the end of the world, a suitably judgemental theme for Advent. The genre of apocalypse; the best examples in the Bible are the book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the book of Revelation in the New Testament, the end of the biblical sequence as a whole, it was a very influential genre between around 200 BC to 200 AD OK? It was very much the flavour of the thinking of those times and it has its roots in particular political events going on at that time, in particular the rule of the Roman Empire on the Promised Land, and the sense within the Jewish people that things weren’t going as they had been promised and so the sense of hope and expectation got transferred into something a little bit more cosmic rather than focusing down on the concrete historical expectations. Maccabee, are people aware of the Maccabean revolt which was successful for a while in the second century BC, that was very much the political side of this environment, the Maccabee’s led the revolt of the faithful but they ended up getting slaughtered. They had a kingdom for about twenty, thirty years but the Maccabeans, who were seen as righteous ended up getting slaughtered and you started to get a sense at this time of a future hope for the faithful which wasn’t wholly bound in to the present history. So you had the adoption of the Resurrection becoming more prominent now.

Now apocalyptic as a genre has different forms, as you can imagine from reading Daniel and Revelation there are all sorts of visions going on, lots and lots of symbolism, all these beasts with various horns and things sprouting out of their heads and it is very much something which is politically applicable. So the beasts for example are normally gentile kingdoms, and the horns coming out of the beasts are the rulers of the different gentile kingdoms. So you can map quite closely, not perfectly, but quite closely a lot of the symbolic language in something like the book of Revelation on to the environment of the first century, the political environment of the first century. So that’s that.

Now there are two different forms of apocalyptic – they can be vertical and the gnostic apocalypses are examples, very good examples of this and this is really where someone is lifted up into the realm of the angels, into the cosmic heaven and they see the truth, and we were talking a little bit about the gnostics before – about gnosticism is all about gaining access to the heavenly realm through understanding the truth and leaving the world behind. That’s not actually Christian apocalyptic but there are elements of that which come in. So you have a vertical sense of apocalypse, which is going up into the heavenly realms, but you also have a horizontal realm of apocalypse which is much more biblical, so for example, Isaiah 24 is an example of this, where God brings the present structures of the world to destruction in order to accomplish his purposes within the world. So it is very much embedded in the historical narrative. Does that make sense as a general distinction?

So various themes in apocalyptic, that history is coming to a close. There is a cosmic cataclysm and there is a consummation of God’s purposes and a recreation, and this has its roots in the prophetic criticisms of the status quo. You can see how it grows out of the prophecy, especially in the Old Testament. As I mentioned Isaiah 24 to 26 is a good example, but Ezekiel that definitely counts as one of the visionary sorts. So it has its roots in the prophetic literature. The one thing to be aware of which I have quoted in a couple of sermons recently, don’t need to listen to it really, “within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, in other words 250BC to 200AD, within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, covering a wide range of styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space time universe. There is abundant evidence that they knew a good metaphor which they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events”. (Tom Wright)

Apocalyptic was a genre that was spread more widely than the Jewish people, and so you had the further Eastern apocalyptic literature which was much more about the end of everything. The Jews were much more concerned in having their roots in a prophetic side about criticising the unjust political arrangements and seeing God’s activity as breaking into the world to act to bring about his purposes. So going back to the differences between the vertical and the horizontal, Jewish apocalyptic was much more concerned with the horizontal, God acting in history, not so much about leaving the world behind, destroying the world and being lifted up into the heavens. Alright, there’s a very, very political thing.

Now, TEOTWAWKI, “The end of the world as we know it.” One of the things of the internet you get all these acronyms and this one comes up quite a lot. There are lots of ways in which, I’ve gone through the list here, but I realise we can add in the fear of nuclear war, which was much more prevalent say in the sixties or seventies. There are all these different ways in which we as a society, or elements within our society, fasten onto to something which forecasts imminent doom. And there is a particular if you like mental structure which fastens on to these things and says this is why we are doomed, no this is why we’re doomed, or add them all together and this is why we are doomed, and what’s going on is that we are actually echoing the cultural shape of apocalyptic. In other words even if we are not aware of it we are interpreting events and information through the lens of apocalypse. OK? And people might say this is something that I have come across a lot in terms of debates and so forth, and they say, “Hang on I can’t be influenced by apocalyptic because I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe in that sort of stuff.” Well it’s a little bit like saying, “I’ve never read any Greek literature, I’ve never read Plato, therefore my thinking isn’t shaped by it.” It is something which is diffuse throughout our civilisation, OK. It is part of if you like the bedrock of our thinking, the river bed through which our thinking flows like the water.

So apocalyptic is very, very influential in the way that we, our culture understands, there is if you like an historical memory of this promise that the world is going to come to an end, and so there is a bit of us as a community which fastens on to these things, saying this is why we are doomed, and it starts to replay this process of apocalyptic.

Now it has a common shape. The world is wicked. Which is not really up for dispute, but the world, our present social arrangements and structure is wicked and God’s wrath is coming to destroy it through this doom, this apocalypse. And the righteous will be redeemed and the wicked they will be punished, and what you then have is a new creation, OK? And there are lots of examples of this, I wonder how many of you are familiar with the ‘left behind’ sequence, which I have talked about sometimes before, which is semi-Christian version of this. The one which is fairly clear is about peak oil, you get, I have mentioned before, these people called doomers, and they say that because of peak oil, because of the contraction in available energy, because of the way that people react when they go hungry, they start to kill each other, civilisation throughout the world will collapse and in order to survive you have got to go off on all these survival courses, learn how to live off the land, go and live in a hut somewhere in the mountains, wait for all the cities to destroy themselves and then you will inherit the earth. And these are rampant atheists who develop this argument and can you see that the shape of what’s being described – you’ve got a wicked world, you have got the righteous who will learn their survival skills, you’ve got the wicked who will be destroyed in the cities, there will be a great doom and collapse and then the righteous will come down from the hills and inherit the earth. In a new creation, a new garden of Eden. It’s the shape that I am trying to get at. Does that make sense?

And you can see it on global warming, that’s another one, James Lovelock, making these predictions about the world’s going to come to an end, everyone’s going to be flooded, oh, but the British Isles won’t be a bad place to live, and we need to hang on to our science and technology, because obviously that’s what’s is going to save us and then after the cataclysm then there is this new world within which we can live. This isn’t the Christian vision of apocalypse.

Quote from James Allison “The commonly held understanding of hell [i.e. this punishment of the wicked] remains trapped within the apocalyptic imagination, that is, it is the result of a violent separation between the good and the evil worked by a vengeful God. It seems to me that if hell is understood thus we have quite simply not understood the Christian faith.”
A challenging quotation.

Drawing on what I said last week about wrath, let’s have a think about what is Jesus saying about the end of the world? Jesus having his agony in Gethsemane, quotation from a particular song that I like, “Everyone’s having a good time except Jesus who can’t help talking about the end of the world.” Because Jesus uses this language. But what is Jesus doing with the language of apocalyptic? Well, as I say he was living in the midst of the time when this language was prevalent. When everyone accepted this apocalyptic framework, that was if you like the common language of his time, but he is subverting it. He is subverting it, he is doing something different with it, if I can put it like this, he is not a doomer, he had something much more positive and inspirational to share.

Now the trouble with apocalyptic, what you might call the doomer perspective, it that it is dualist. It’s all about splitting up, you have got splitting up between the good and evil. You have got a split between heaven and earth and you have got a split in time between now and the future. OK? And what Jesus does is overcome these dualisms. And just to work back, I’m going to talk mostly about that one, but that, do you need much persuading that Jesus is overcoming this division between the righteous and the wicked? You know he comes to sinners, not to the righteous, he spends all his time having meals with the prostitutes and the tax-collectors and the religious authorities criticise him for it. He is trying to overcome this division between those who are pure, who keep all the purity laws and so forth and those get excluded for various reasons, because they haven’t got the right number of limbs, or they can’t walk, he spends all his time with those who are wounded, not with those who are righteous. Make sense? That’s the thing about that. That’s if you like just a social side.

And this one, the great division between the realm of heaven and the realm of earth, symbolised by the curtain in the temple which gets torn into, the one word rejection of that is incarnation, you can’t get more fundamental to the Christian belief. So at the heart of Christianity is an overcoming of these dualisms, these splits – think of that as being incarnation, think of that as Jesus going to the wounded, and I am going to spend most of my time thinking about between now and the future. Because what Jesus is doing is if you like bringing the end of the world to bear on how people live in the present moment. That’s his agenda if you like.

Now a way of describing it, and I’m sorry to use long words, a way of describing it is to say that Jesus shifts our perspective from apocalyptic to eschatology. Eschatology is simply the study of the last things, the eschaton is the end, it’s the full stop. It’s the last moment the last judgement. So eschatology is the study of the last things, and the last things are of course the major theme in Advent as we look forward to Jesus second coming.

And so a phrase we might think of if is that we live in the end times, in other words Christians are called to live in the light of the end of the world, in the light of the last judgement. Now most of the time when Jesus is talking about this, he uses images that are sudden. They will come like a thief in the night. OK. Or think about the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, or the story about looking after your house, he emphasises suddenness, the immediate nature of it and so we have to live always as if it is about to happen. I saw a tea-cup, a mug the other day which said “Jesus is coming, look busy”. Which captures something. And there is a phrase, I’m sorry to use the jargon, but it captures things, there is a phrase which Christian theology uses to talk about this perspective and its called a realised eschatology. What that means is that the end of the world in breaking in an applicable way now. So we live in the light of it now. It is not something that is happening in the future to which we needn’t pay any attention.

Think of a bus driving along a mountain pass, imagine that the driver has absolute certainty and conviction that he will get to his destination safely. And that if for example he should go off the edge of the mountain, there are these wonderful angels who will lift the bus back on to the road. OK? That bus driver will view things rather differently than the bus driver who doesn’t have that certainty but expects something dangerous to be possible and therefore pays attention to that present moment and lives if you like consciously and attentively to ensure that he drives properly and doesn’t go off the edge of the cliff. Apocalypse is the first bus driver who has got a certainty about where things are going and therefore doesn’t need to worry too much about what happens in the meantime. That’s the ‘left behind’ understanding. OK? That’s the understanding that says, “Yes let’s have a war between Israel and the Arabs because that will bring about the Second Coming.” It is that ideology.

But realised eschatology, what I am describing, says that we have to concentrate and live in the light of it now. We actually have to pay very very close attention to each moment in time because the judgement could be just around the corner. Does that make sense? Right. And we have a different way of describing it, we talk about it as being living in the Kingdom. You know, lots of standard Christian language and doctrine has its roots in this perspective. So we talk about as being living in the Kingdom. And I want to talk about it slightly differently about imagining a different future. This is Stanley Spencer’s “Cookham Resurrection” as if you like the vision which structures Christian ways of thought that that which was inaugurated on Easter morning shapes and conditions the way that we live here and now, OK? This is the foundational moment for Christian life and we live in the light of that.

So I want to talk about the nature of Christian imagination, but certainly this applies to me, I suspect it applies to others as well, there is this temptation to long for an apolcalypse in the way that I have been describing which is a little bit gnostic and dualist. And it is rooted in a hatred of the present system and a desire for judgement. For all these wicked oil companies who are exploiting the world, pumping out carbon dioxide, which are going to cause lots of destruction in the world, it is saying this is wrong – aaaargh! It is a very human response that those who are suffering or those who care about those who are suffering to long for God to act, for there to be same cataclysm and to say aaargh destroy it because it is causing so much pain. That if you like is the psychological root of the desire for apocalypse. And it is closely tied in to this sense of judgement and discrimination. It doesn’t even have to be I am innocent, so much as they are guilty, God destroy them, God damn them, OK.

But of course this is not the Christian perspective, because we are taught ever so clearly and directly that we are not to judge. And what this means isn’t just I’m not going to blame someone for something, it’s a let go the whole game and business of judging, of blaming, that whole game is what actually drives apocalypse, it drives lots of other things as well but we are to let go of this business of judging. Not in the sense of letting go of discrimination, of seeking to discern what the will of God is, but to stop playing the game of them and us, to stop playing the game of this lot are the righteous, we keep the rules, we keep the law, and that lot aren’t. It’s to accept that everyone is in the same boat, that we are all sinners, like it or not, we are all liable to judgement, and therefore giving up on judgement as a whole, not just sort of other people, but also ourselves, if you like we are set free from the curse of the law as Paul puts it. That’s what Paul’s talking about. We let go of this business of judgement.

Now Jesus says we must be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect and it gives this wonderful image of what that perfection is. He says the Father sends the rain on the just and the unjust, there is no judgement on the rain, it is not the wicked have this dark cloud above them pouring down rain and thunder and lightning, there is something much more generous and open-hearted about the perfection which we are called to follow. So this is very much at the heart of the Christian vision, that we let go of this process of judgement, of seeking to separate out the good and the evil. Think of what original sin is, when you bite the fruit you get the knowledge of good and evil, and what Jesus is doing is overcoming that original sin, He is taking away the consequences of that knowledge of good and evil and therefore “I’m good, you’re evil”, or even “I’m evil and you’re good.” Both of them are actually quite a long way from the Christian point of view, you need to let go of this process.

And the heart of it is a settled acceptance of the Father’s will. This is the Gethsemane moment. Not my will but thine be done. And therefore allowing God to be in charge of this process of judgement. And therefore being obedient. Obedience is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Not being good, it’s all about obedience. And it is to have our imaginations shaped by who Christ is and what He shows. To follow in the steps that He has laid out for us. Which brings us to how we hope because hope is a fundamental Christian virtue. It maybe the Christian virtue. Faith, hope and love, put them all together.

The fundamental claim that roots all of Christian life and behaviour is that the Kingdom has begun. Now I have talked to you about everything being rooted in the Easter morning event. This is the good news, the evangel, that there is a new King. And remember this is what the original evangelists were, they were the heralds sent out after a battle to proclaim that a battle has taken place, there has been a victory, there is a new King. That’s what an evangelist is. OK, and Paul takes up this language and uses it to talk about Jesus, there has been a battle, there has been a victory and now there is a new King. And if you like the whole point of being a Christian is to live under this new King, this new authority.

And the Kingdom is breaking into the world as we speak, it’s not something that will be accomplished all at once at the end of time, it is something which is beginning, we are engaged in this process of starting to live by the rules of the Kingdom before we get to that point. That’s what the Church is. The Church is that community which lives by the rules of the Kingdom. In other words the Church is all those who accept that Jesus is Lord. Think of it like that, and live by it. That God is in charge, that His purposes will be accomplished. It is not up to us to achieve the salvation of the world, the world has been saved. We don’t have to save the world. You know: we don’t have to stand up giving talks about peak oil in order to save the world.

And a phrase which I am very fond of: we are resident aliens, if you like, we are immigrants within this community, we have ways of life which don’t belong to the world, we have ways of life which belong to the Kingdom, which is coming but not fully here yet. So we belong, our ways of life, our hearts are set upon a different Kingdom. And one of the crucial things about Christian hope, I said it’s a virtue. The point about virtues is that they are rooted in a decision, a settled will and they are practiced, they are a habit. It’s not that we feel hopeful. Christian hope is not a feeling, it doesn’t rest upon our emotional make-up. It is a decision to act according to this information about the new King. It’s a decision and a way of life. It’s not an internal emotional state.

I want to read a passage to you, this was a photograph I took on the beach this morning and I don’t know if you can see, there is a man here working on the beach digging up some crustaceans, mussels I guess, can you see it? And you’ve got his reflection, his actual body is here but his reflection is there. The point about the photo is that it’s before the dawn, the sun hadn’t come up but it is light. I think it’s a very good metaphor for where we are now, that we know the sun is rising and we can see as a result of that light but the sun hasn’t actually dawned yet. So have that as an image and this is John Chapter 3 verses 14 –21. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life, for God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” This is the verdict. The verdict if you like is the crisis, this is the judgement. “Light has come into the world but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

We’re all working here in the darkness, and before we know about Christ we don’t really know whether our work is good or not. Once the light starts to dawn we can see the nature of the lives we are embedded in, and once the light comes up and we can start to see, that is when the crisis comes, that is when we have a choice to make. Do we stay trapped in the works of darkness or do we go towards the light? I love this bit. “They will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” What’s that fear? It’s the fear of judgement. It’s the fear of being condemned. And it is the removal of that fear of condemnation which enables the walking into the light. The whole point about the good news it is that the process of judgement doesn’t have to apply. And the way it does apply and there is some very good, interesting parables that Jesus uses that talk about this, think about the parable of the talents, “Out of your own mouth, your judgement comes.” But if you believe that you are going to be judged and condemned for what you have been doing, then you resist what’s coming. But if you trust in God being benign, you are enabled to walk into the light. That is really the kernel of Christian hope, that we can change from how we have been. That we can turn towards the light and start to welcome it, as it comes, and that is a theme that runs throughout John’s gospel, it’s just particularly clear there I think.

So, the Christian imagination, it’s actually not about imagining the apocalypse because that’s the worldly vision but Jesus’s imagination is rather more rooted in love, it’s not about wrath in the sense of God getting very angry with the wicked, this is what I went through a couple of weeks ago. But the revelation, the light which is coming in, is about the truth of who we are. And it is to say it doesn’t have to be like this, this world which is not set up in the way that God intends us to live, this is not God’s intention. But the light which is dawning is revealing what God’s intention is, and it exposes the truth about who we are and how we live and therefore it sets us free from these processes. We now have a choice. Whereas before we were simply in darkness and we did not know, now we have the choice because the light of Christ is dawning. When Jesus says “I come not to bring peace but a sword”, this is what He is describing. That whereas before there was if you like a peace in the darkness, now that the light has come up the choice comes, the choice can be painful and there will be a clash between those who turn towards the light and go towards the light and those who stay in the darkness and don’t want people to go to the light, because it threatens their comfortable darkness. This is why those who turn to the light will be persecuted. That’s the way of the cross.

And it is profoundly political, small “p”, profoundly political in implication because it’s all to do with the structures of our lives, it’s about how we live, the choices that we make from day to day. And the wonderful thing is that the Kingdom is breaking in. Now. That’s the realised bit, realised eschatology. And we can share in it now. This is what the life of the Christian community is for. That we share in this Kingdom life which is the light, which leaves all the judgement and condemnation behind, because that is all about the apocalypse. Not about Christ’s vision of the end.

And this wonderful word “Metanoia” which gets translated as repent, which is fair enough, but it’s about changing our hearts, setting our hearts on the light, turning our hearts away from the darkness and turning to the light. Hence you have Jesus’s first words in the Gospel of Mark, “The time has come, the Kingdom of God is near, turn your hearts around and believe in the Good News.” That was true then, and is just as true now, it will remain true for as long as there are Christians, until He comes again in glory. Amen, come Lord Jesus.

I’ve got some other things I want to say, but I am going to pause there for any questions, comments. Does it make sense?

What is Y2K? The year 2000 the computer bug, not a bug really the way in which the computer systems were built up just to have two digits, so ’98, ’99, they realised that when it got to year 2000 the systems would be reset and because all the banking systems were built on this old technology they thought aaagrh this is going to cause a financial collapse, economic collapse, end of the world as we know it, blah, blah,. I hear varying things about Y2K, that some people say, oh it was all nonsense we got through it, and I read other things about people who were actually involved in reprogramming computers for banks who say actually we came very close to something very nasty happening, but because it was a problem with a deadline that was clearly understood, they could actually solve it and sort it. And there was a huge amount of effort put into solving it and sorting it, but those who I have read about and read stories from who were involved in the reprogramming said, Oh it was serious, thank God that we actually managed to solve the problem in time. Of course everyone thinks of the Y2K problem of being this great panic and illusion. There we go.

Redemption or salvation is the overcoming of those divisions, within us as much as anything else, that’s what the healing of our hearts is, that we are no longer if you like terrified by the darkness we’ve got and through not being terrified of it, through not thinking this darkness within me if going to expose me to terrible judgement and hellfire, through not being afraid of it we are healed of it and therefore that darkness gets redeemed and turned into something good. The problem is precisely the fear, and I keep quoting this, the command repeated most often in Scripture is “Do not be afraid.” To sum up the Bible, “Do not be afraid.” It’s a bit like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic.” Bit of a sacrilegous comment!

Yes, I think the last judgement is rooted in that passage from John I read, that it’s not something where someone is angry, it’s not driven by anger, or wrath in that sense, it’s driven by – do you turn to the light? It’s like it is self-imposed, those who turn to the light are leaving judgement behind, but those who resist the light are embracing judgement, does that make sense, so Jesus is the judge, He is the arbiter, all judgement has been handed over from the Father to the Son. He is if you like guideline, but He doesn’t judge people, when you look at how he relates in His ministry to all those who are excluded or wounded, think of the Samaritan woman at the well, for example, He doesn’t judge or condemn, He invites. It’s either you leave behind this process of being caught up in the game of sin and judgement and separating out the good and the bad, or you actually turn to Him and allow Him to shape your life. So there is still a judgement but it’s not, this is the point to the James Allison quote, that hell is not to be understood through the apocalypse in that sense, through eschatology. It is the end of the world, it is a judgement but it’s not about wrath, which is what I went into a fortnight ago.

The way, it’s interesting how it’s translated, because I can’t remember exactly the Greek word, it’s the same word for judgement crisis and decision. So you could say that the last judgement is the last decision. That’s your last chance to turn to Christ. To turn to the light. The crisis is something which applies each and every moment that we are alive. That’s really the point that we live under that judgement every moment, and therefore how we live, we are exposed to judgement now and we make that choice here and now, we make that choice about whether we stay in the realms of darkness or we turn towards the light. I will go on to the next just handful of slides, because it will make the point clearer.

It’s not about moralism. To give a one sentence point, it’s not about, Christianity is not about moralism. We are halfway through this sequence of talks and I thought it might be a good moment to just review where we have been and set out where we are actually going, because we began by talking about Jeremiah, because I think Jeremiah is a very appropriate prophet for our day. He was living at a time in the twenty, thirty years before the exile and he said to the authorities we are living in a time of judgement and you have not been obedient to God, you are trusting in your own strength and power and therefore terrible things are coming, and of course then terrible things did come, Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was torn down, all the leaders were taken off into exile, there was huge slaughter and so forth, and I think we have much to learn from Jeremiah and that scriptural strand of thinking that he represents. I then spent two sessions talking about the world problems that we face, at the beginning about peak oil, this is what I am particularly interested in and I think it’s the one which is really shaping our current world events in a profound way.

But then really stepping back from that specific problem and talking about the problem of exponential growth, in terms of human population, use of resources, availability of land, soil, farmland and so forth, water, that these are all together, they all wrap up, these are all common symptoms, of I believe a spiritual problem. But really this is if you like, the context of our judgement that we are going to experience. And then I am doing three sessions setting out in theological thinking some theological tools, if you like, which will then be applied.

Now the first theological tool was idolatry. That we can’t put anything in the place of God, and that if we put our trust in something else, because I talked mostly about science as a technique, but idolatry can apply in all sorts of ways, it is about how we structure our lives, and that if we structure our lives around something which isn’t the living God, then we are actually embracing death in a very literal, concrete sense most of the time. So that’s the first tool, idolatry, discerning where there is idol worship.

The second tool is the language of God’s wrath and I was wanting to disentangle if you like the pagan sense of wrath as being an angry God who has had his pride offended and therefore jumps up and down in anger and wants a sacrifice to appease, and a more Christian and Jewish sense from the temple period, where God is benign, acts only from love in order to redeem the people whom he loves, and therefore the ways in which our language of God’s wrath can apply is only in terms of us as a culture, as people, experiencing the consequences of our actions.

So for example, in the trivial sense, if you put your hand in a fire, you will be burnt. This does not mean that God’s angry with you, it means that this is the nature of the creation he has bestowed upon us. And that creation is consistent and established on certain rules and structures, and if we go against those rules and structures, like putting your hand in the fire, then we will experience pain as a consequence. OK, so that’s what I’m wanting to say that that’s a Christian sense of God’s wrath, not the pagan sense of a God leaping up and down because his pride has been hurt.

And then today talking about apocalypse, distinguishing again a more pagan sense of apocalypse as something which is certain and doesn’t actually have a daily application now to what I think Jesus is talking about as something which is bearing in upon us each and every moment of our lives, and that we have to change our lives according to that vision of the end of the world, and we have to change our lives now: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand”. OK, that I think is a crucial theological resource for understanding things. So does that make sense? That’s the first half and these are the tools. What I want to do is go on and apply those tools in particular contexts. So next week I am going to do a talk called The Green Bible, because the Old Testament in particular is full of commands and advice about how we are to live in the world. And we have systematically gone against those commands because we have been worshipping idols. And therefore because of the way we have damaged God’s creation, we will experience God’s wrath as the consequences of that idolatry. OK? But because God is not wrathful and opens up this vision of the future for us, it’s not final. So it’s not doom, it’s eschatology to go back to what I was saying earlier. There’s a whole session next week, hopefully over time as we go through each one you will see how these theological concepts which I have been outlining apply and make a difference.

The one after that, I’m really going to be talking about social justice, poverty, world-wide poverty and the way in which this is so radically going against God’s commands. You know there are two thousand specific verses in the Bible about poverty and about poverty being abhorrent to God and our culture is built upon the widespread acceptance of poverty, think about the story of Dives and Lazarus in Luke’s gospel. The rich man enjoys all the fine things while there is a beggar at his gate and it’s not that the rich man has done something active against the beggar to cause him to be poor, it is simply that the rich man ignores him, and the rich man is then plunged into hell. OK, so that’s the theme for that one.

Then I want to talk about, specifically about Islam and terrorism and if you like why the Islamic perspective sees the West as the realm of Satan, because actually I think there are some very theologically astute criticisms made from that perspective which we need to listen to. But also to talk about the way in which foreign relations are dealt with in the Bible, because in the Old Testament especially, there is a lot about how the rulers of a society are to behave with regard to international affairs, and then finally I want to talk about worship. About the New Covenant, about how we are called into a different way of worshipping and how there are different ways of worshipping within different religions, within Christianity itself, but I want to really come down to the roots of what the New Covenant is about. OK, applying those concepts still.

And then the last handful I am going to be talking really about the Church, beginning with one of my favourite verses from Hosea, “With you is my contention O Priest.” Hosea Chapter 4 has this wonderful description of the way in which the idolatry of the community has led to environmental devastation. “Therefore the lands mourns and the fish die.” I mean how appropriate can a Biblical verse be in an environment where our fisheries are collapsing through so much rapacious greed being applied to how we fish as a community and society. And he goes on and says, “With you is my contention O Priest.” In other words it is because the religious authorities got it wrong that the world has gone wrong. And so I will have a bit of a rant.

Then penultimate session about discipleship, if you like the contention bit is going to be about all the bad things about the church and the discipleship bit is about describing the positive vision of what the church is for. Jesus doesn’t say go and convert everyone to Christianity in a sort of intellectual sense, he says go and make disciples of all nations. The church’s business is the making of disciples, and disciples are people who live in the light of the Kingdom. They live according to the laws of the Kingdom, they live according to the practices and customs of the Kingdom, not of the world. And so in that session what I want to do is spell out what it means to be a disciple, and how the church needs to function in order that what the church does is make disciples.

And then the last session I’ll sum up and gather the different threads together. So this is half time, done some necessary spade work, and hopefully over the next three or four sessions you will see it being applied and that will hopefully really help to make the concepts work and make sense for you as you see them being applied to different contexts.

Hang on to the image of the bus driver that I used where a faceless bus driver says he is going to get to the end no matter what, whereas I think the Christian bus driver is paying very close attention to every moment, because at any moment a lorry could come round the corner and knock him off, for example. So I’m not fatalist but having said that I do think there is something important about accepting that God is in charge and that God will achieve his purposes in the end. Let me give you an analogy, this is something that my theology tutor gave to me many years ago which I think is wonderful, that God is the perfect dancer. Think of “Strictly Come Dancing” or whatever, and we are the bride, we are taking the female part of the process and God is groom taking the male part of the process, and therefore God leads, and our purpose is to follow God’s lead. But the thing is we get things wrong, we’re not really that good a dancer. But God is so good a dancer that he can take our mistakes and incorporate them into the dance so that his purpose, his dancing is accomplished. We still have the ability to make mistakes, we still have the ability to experience God’s wrath falling down upon us, but God remains in charge, God remains the one leading the process and his purposes will be accomplished in the end, which I think gives a good balance between our ability to choose and God’s sovereignty. Does that make sense?

I think we are on the dance floor already, I think that’s what … we are embedded in the work of the world already. The invitation to the dance is the invitation to turn towards the light. I think there is that but it’s – you know do we actually join in with the dance, not worrying about whether we are going to get the steps right, or do we refuse to go onto the dance floor because we are so terrified that we are going to make a mistake and be condemned for it? This is why The Lord of the Dance is such a good hymn. A lot of it is tied up in it. The dance goes on. Shall we stop there? Thank you very much for coming. Next week the Green Bible, all of God’s commands about looking after our environment.