One night twenty six years ago, at the height of the Cold War, our ten-year old son came stumbling to us in tears. “What’s the matter?” we asked him. His reply shook us: “I’ve been thinking about nuclear weapons, and I don’t want the world to die.” Now we hadn’t been discussing the issue in front of our children. But they and their generation knew deep in their gut that the world then was in grave peril. And a number of you may be able to cast your minds back to the mass protests on the streets of Europe and North America then, with young people crying out in frustration and fear and desperate hope for something to be done. Their methods may or may not have been misguided, but they were a symptom and a symbol of a world in crisis.

Well, the nuclear peril has ebbed and receded, for the time being at least, with the end of the Cold War (though the nuclear weapons are still there). But last month in Copenhagen we’ve seen something of that same intensity of street protest again. What is this a symptom and symbol of? Let’s put out of our minds any distaste for protests, and our perhaps too easy scepticism about “rent-a-crowd” politics, so open to manipulation and confusion. Let’s ask, what is this protest a symbol of? What is this energy, this deep emotion, which is being tapped into?

Essentially it comes from the convergence of two streams: the social justice stream rising from the growing poverty of so huge a proportion of the world’s population, and the environmental stream, rising from the progressive deterioration of the world’s ecosystems. Another and more respectable symbol of this convergence is the existence within the World Council of Churches of the “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation” section and its conferences. It’s now more and more recognised that world poverty and environmental deterioration are inextricably intertwined; we can’t tackle the one without tackling the other, or the other without the one.

Now there are those who say that all this is going to be terminal for the Earth. Certainly it’s the frustration and fear and desperate hope swirling around this which was manifest on the streets of Copenhagen. To paraphrase my ten-year old son: “They’ve been thinking about world poverty and the environment, and they don’t want the world to die.”

When you start reading at any depth in environmental studies, the profound pessimism of so many writers, including scientists, is quite chilling. Not all writers, but many. And some years ago there was a timetable put out by the Worldwatch Institute, which saw the forty years 1990-2030 as the crucial period – a timetable regarded by others as relatively optimistic. Well, we’re now halfway through that.

Personally I’m not overly impressed by apocalyptic timetables, religious or secular. I am impressed by trends, and from what I can see these are proving the pessimists more right than wrong.

What’s all this got to do with Epiphany? Well, quite a lot. You see, Epiphany is about Christ being manifested as the Hope of the world. Epiphany is a season when we dare to face the world’s darkness and our need for a saviour from that darkness, and dare to proclaim “see, here there is hope”. And the darkness is real, very real.

In New Zealand we don’t encounter the absolute poverty and the massive environmental destruction in so much of the wider world. For the moment, we and privileged pockets throughout the world are protected from these realities – though not indefinitely. And if you say, “surely the real darkness is sin”, well, yes. But is there no link between sin and the poverty of God’s children? between sin and the destruction of God’s creation? Of course there is. And some of us may need to broaden and deepen our understanding of sin.

Sin touches every aspect of our existence. And our Christian hope must embrace the whole of our existence. And Christ our Saviour must save the whole of us.

“I’ve been thinking about world poverty and the environment, and I don’t want the world to die”. How would you reply? “There, there, my child. Yes, in theory it could happen, but it’s not going to happen, because God won’t let it happen.” At first hearing that sounds like a good, trusting, Christian response. But it doesn’t square with the Biblical record of how God has dealt with humankind. In the very first chapters of the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve portrays clearly how God permits us to sin and to bring suffering and death on ourselves. God seems to have a sometimes worrying respect for human freedom. God seems to give us freedom to destroy ourselves and each other individually and collectively – then why not as a species?  And if we do wipe ourselves out as a species, we still have to go on and face the judgement of God, somewhere, somehow.

How would we then answer these questions when the Lord puts them to us? “What have you done to the earth I created? Have you sought to prevent this final catastrophe, or have you consented to it? What have you done with my precious gift of life?” How would we answer these questions? 

Some years ago Jonathan Schell wrote a fine book, a noble book, called The Fate of the Earth, about the nuclear war crisis. His words can easily be adapted to the environmental crisis slowly enveloping us now. I quote:
“At present, most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope the holocaust won’t happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way to the end of the world. But if once we shook off our lethargy and fatigue and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair – a despair often so deep that it does not even know itself as despair – arousal and action would give us access to hope, and life would start to mend: not just life in its entirety but daily life, every individual life…. We would no longer be the destroyers of mankind, but, rather, the gateway through which the future generations would enter the world.”

In short, “don’t curse the dark, light a candle; but don’t deny the darkness is there.”  (In fact our greatest danger is to deny that there is danger.) And to quote words too often used and too little acted on, we should – “think globally, act locally.” Or the advice in the provocative title of a brief article Bishop Tom Wright has written: “Jesus is coming, plant a tree.” And at Epiphany, kneel, like wise men and women, at the foot of the crib.

What gifts are we in 2010 to place there? I think a living tree would in fact be not a bad symbol of the host of actions, little and large, that we must take if we are to reverse the steady ecological destruction of planet Earth. Which is undoubtedly what we must grapple with this century. Copenhagen was a disappointment, though perhaps not an absolute failure. But at best it took only a very, very modest step forward on a long journey to recovery, and some are saying that it took ten steps back.

So listen to today’s equivalents of the shepherds in the Epiphany story: the poor and marginalised who suffer first when the environment degenerates. Already there are years when environmental refugees outnumber the refugees from armed conflict.  

And listen to today’s equivalents of the wise men in the Epiphany story: the scientists – whether Christian or not – when they confront us with inconvenient truths and tell us that they cannot wave a magic wand and solve the problems by themselves. There is no technological fix; we must all change our life styles.

Dale Aukman wrote these words at the height of the Cold War: “Ours is the confidence that he” [Christ] “will lift us out of death’s abyss. Blessed are those who, in the midst of whatever may come, live in yet more ardent faith that the Risen One, at the moment of God’s choosing, will lift a resurrected earth, a new humanity, out of the shambles of the old.”

And we are to live in this faith, whether the pessimists are right, or whether there is still time if we act now.

So bring a living tree to the foot of the crib, and kneel there with shepherds and the wise men. And trustingly worship Him who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on 3 January 2010, by the Revd Canon Peter Stuart.

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