In the Hebrew Bible, earth (Hebrew erets) is both the whole creation (Gen 1), and the land of Israel (Lev 26). The creation of earth was the creation of space. The waters above were separated from the waters below, and dry land was gathered so that agriculture could begin (Gen 1:6-10). The creation of earth was also the creation of place: where you work, where you play, what you dig your hands into. It is a place in which and for whom we can be the image of God. Earth is both womb and tomb. We are born from it (Gen 2:7) as humans from the hummus. We rest in it in death (Gen 3:19). When Christ returns, from it we will be reborn (Rom 8:22-23).

What does it mean to pray for the kingdom to come on earth in my neighbourhood? What if the earth is buried beneath a concrete jungle? What if my neighbors no longer reflect the diversity of creation, but instead the ruthless logic of mammon, colonization, and the imposition of sameness? For the earth to be my neighbour, I must learn to love it as it once was, is, and will be.

I must learn its Indigenous names and uncover the landscape before Europeans arrived. Learn its species and seek out where they still are. Learn of the violence and dispossession of the people, plants, animals, and ground itself. How has the earth been reshaped? What songs are no longer sung and cries heard? What ceremonies no longer happen? I must honour those who were its custodians before the era of dominators. How did they live on this land? What stories did they tell of it? How do those stories inform my own biblical, scientific, and personal experience?

READ: People of Faith Know What Must be Done On Climate Change

For the earth to be my neighbour, I must learn its intricacies. Walk it and discover its ways, appreciate its beauty. Even the weed and the pest are my neighbours. And though my responsibilities to them and the whole community might be different, I must acknowledge their co-creatureliness. Part of loving the earth as my neighbor means protecting our shared places. Park land is not a luxury, it is a necessity for our health and well-being. Our shared places should not be dominated by an empire of malls, parking lots, advertising. There’s no space for a sense of place when space is just for profit. For some places, this also means returning them to those whose lands they first were, which is a form of reparations.

For the earth to be my neighbour, I must learn to love what it will be. This is both hopeful and realistic. In Romans 8 we read of a creation set free from bondage. Our neighbour earth longs for the resurrection of the children of God. It hopes for what we hope for. We share the same groanings, the same longings. We are saved with our places and not from them as heaven comes to earth. We must seek forgiveness from our neighbour earth and all of its creatures.

Praying for God’s kingdom to come in my neighbourhood as it is in heaven means embracing the whole of my neighbourhood, and learning to love it. Our responsibility to God’s image-bearers can’t be separated from the places we inhabit, for they too are part of the coming kingdom.

We are burning.

It isn’t as if Australia is the only country that has suffered extensive fires. However, we are a warning to the world, with about 10.7 million hectares (26.2 million acres) of land having burned, nearly twice that of last year’s Amazon fires. At least 26 people have died, as well as billions of individual animals, potentially pushing some species to extinction.

Last year was Australia’s warmest and driest year on record, with most of the country recording its highest forest fire danger index on record. These changes were predicted back in 2008! Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen 24 parts per million (ppm) over the last decade to 412 ppm, so we are shifting the climate to make extreme fire events more likely.

The climate change denialist machine has accused the left of interfering with hazard reduction burns. This is untrue, with fire experts pointing out that hazard reduction burns are not a magic bullet. Such burns are part of the solution, and need to partner with Aboriginal practices rather than just trying to appropriate the techniques in typical colonial fashion.

One prominent pseudo-Christian and sportsman has been quick to ascribe the fires to God’s judgement on what he thinks are the most grievous sins in society. Christians of a more apocalyptic mindset might see the current events through the lens of 2 Peter 3, and I want to give this idea qualified agreement.

It would be easy to directly equate the fires of 2 Peter 3 with the fires that are occurring now. But there is a problem with this understanding, mainly the dualism that affects the church. Heaven is more important than earth some say, ignoring that fact that all things will be made new, and there will be a renewed heavens and earth that are joined together when Christ returns (Revelation 21). Creation groans now waiting to be renewed when we are resurrected (Romans 8:19-23). The very fact of resurrection should smash the dualism of the soul as more important than the body. The soul is actually all that makes up who I am, not just some ghost in the shell.

Dualism is read into 2 Peter 3 by assuming that the fires mean a literal, physical destruction of the Earth, denigrating the importance of matter. A Hebrew worldview sees an ordered creation as very good (Genesis 1:31). Peter’s comparison with the biblical flood is telling. The order of creation was overwhelmed by the release of chaos in the flood. The waters which were separated at creation come together in an act of ‘uncreation’ (Genesis 7:11; compare Genesis 1:6-7). The world returns to the formlessness of Genesis 1:2. If we think about this as material destruction, we are missing the point. The Earth was washed clean of the corruption and violence that led to God bringing the Flood in the first place (Genesis 6:11-12).

The corruption was washed away and the world was both recreated in a functional sense, made new to work properly, but also renewed because there was continuity: order was bought out of the disorder of the initial creation. Creation begins anew with a remnant of humans and animals, a new blessing to fill the earth (Gen 8:15-19, compare Gen 1:22, Gen 1:28).

So, when Christians read 2 Peter 3 as a literal burning, they are not reading like a Hebrew, but like a Greek Stoic who believed in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great fire. Of course, some Christians read this as a once and only fire, but this still misses the point. What then burns?

In 1 Peter 1:6-7, Peter talks about believers having their faith tested by fire in the same way that fire purifies gold. Then in 2 Peter 3, fire is about disclosing what is done on earth (v. 10). The point of the fire then is not the literal destruction of all things, but the revealing of sinful behaviour. Earlier in verse 7, Peter says that the fire is kept for the destruction of the godless, not the creation. Now the language is all inclusive, but the significance narrows down to human evil, precisely because of our impact on the earth, not a doing away with creation. In this sense, fire is not about literal destruction of all that we see, though it is cast in that dramatic, mythic language so typical of apocalypse.

Therefore, these fires are portents of judgment — but not on sexual behaviour, or not voting for Trump. Instead, it is judgment on our entire worldview. Since Francis Bacon, knowledge has been seen as power to wield against nature, to bend it to our will. The non-human creation groans in birth pains under this weight (Romans 8:19-23) and is now striking back reflexively with fires, heatwaves, floods, droughts, and rising sea levels. We have exceeded our limits in the quest for endless progress in a Babel-like way, and God is revealing judgment on this.

Along the way, women and indigenous people have been reduced to less than fully human, less than the image of God. Climate change impacts are gendered, and the attacks on Greta Thunberg reveal the misogyny of climate denial.

Underlying climate change is the idolatry of greed. At the heart of the Anthropocene, human domination of the planet, is colonialism. (See, for example, how mining trumps Aboriginal rights in Australia, or the right to clean water for the Sioux is less important than an oil pipeline.) The myths of modernity and capitalism have also led scholar Jason Moore to prefer the term Capitalocene. (And before you say it, he critiques Marxism, too, for simply offering the other side of the coin of the same growth mythology. )

What needs to burn then? Misdirected human desire for power and accumulation, the worldview that gives it narrative, and the systems that support and manipulate it. It isn’t an either/or personal sin vs. structural evil. It is, however, my frustration that, having bought into the Enlightenment view of the individual, and oftentimes being part of the Babylonian Captivity of the mind of identifying Christianity with Western politics and economics, evangelicals revert only to the personal sins.

But we need to (figuratively) burn down the fossil fuel industry, as well as the military-industrial complex that is used to secure other people’s fossil fuels, suppress freedom, and wreak havoc on the environment.

We need to burn down our economic systems for a sustainable, non-growth approach. Ideas of doughnut economics, restorative economics, or Sabbath economics are all pointing in a similar direction.

We need to burn down oligarchy, and idols of power and control. So much needs to burn and be purified, and no individual or human institution can remain the same.

So, let’s burn down this house, in order to see a new creation unfold.

A friend of mine recently somewhat facetiously lamented that there wasn’t a day for people like him – short, fat and balding. He’s a bit of as self confessed redneck, and thought that if minorities got a day to celebrate, so should he. Some people of a conservative bent seem to think it is unfair to celebrate some people over others. How much more the idea of World Environment Day?

Those who are used to singing from the justice hymn book realise that part of justice is giving voice to those who go unheard, or who lack power. In Australia we celebrate National Reconciliation Week because we recognise that this country was stolen. Our first peoples were subjected to massacres, robbed of their children in an act of social engineering, and are still denied a full say in how their native lands are used; for example in the case of the highly unnecessary, climate and landscape destroying Carmichael coal mine. There are also still significant gaps in health, lifespan, education and economic well being between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The Earth too deserves a voice, and it often the case that it’s voice is heard in concert with others. The Wangan and Jagalingou people groan with their lands and won’t be silenced by the Adani company, or by the state government who approved the mine. Likewise, neither the weather nor Californians can be silenced by Donald Trump about the drought.

Some of my ecomodernist Christian friends (see here for an Ecomodernist manifesto) baulk at the use of the term, environment – claiming it is used by “environmentalists” in a variety of inappropriate ways. To be sure, terms do matter. But “the environment” is our environment, and our economies are wholly owned subsidiaries of it. Both ecology and economy come from the same Greek root, Oikos meaning household. This is captured well in the idea of donut economics, where both planetary boundaries and human needs are considered.

But call it environment if you will, it is also creation – groaning in the birth pains of human mismanagement and misrule. Just as the city of Rome had to pipe in water due to a polluted Tiber River, had poor air quality due to cooking fires, and malarial mosquitoes and a harbour that silted up due to land clearing, we now have species loss, climate change with associated heat waves, droughts, forest fires, etc. Creation is still groaning, and we can and should join in with others both inside and outside of the church to hear creation’s voice, and respond. This year, the focus is on wildlife trafficking.

But in election years in both the US and my home of Australia, we can think too about creation in the way in which we vote. Donald Trump wants to undo Obama’s advances on climate. The Australian government at various levels continues to push fossil fuels over renewables, and even had a hand at censoring an UNESCO report on the state of the Great Barrier Reef.

Let’s be clear, far be it from me to tell you how to vote, but you vote for or against the environment or creation whether you do so consciously or not, just as you might do on any number of justice issues. So if the Lord desires us to do justice, then we might think about how our decisions about the Earth are just in their impact on it and other people around the world. Our own elections and associated politics don’t stop at our borders given that we are involved in one household – a global economy and one Earth. The God who made this world allotted the nations so people would seek after him, not so the Earth might be trashed while some of those nations prospered on the backs of others. Happy World Environment Day!

Recently, over $100 million has been spent by the fossil fuel industry on Republican campaigns, trying to make us forget, deny or not worry about the connection between energy and climate, just as Exxon has done for over 40 years. In Australia, one state premier has introduced laws to crack down on people who protest at mining sites. This is while a former advisor of his works for the New South Wales Mineral Council, and mining companies are fined a pittance for polluting water with uranium.
 

The evil or structures is greater than the collective sin of the individuals in it, and behind such structures lays a greater evil. Tom Wright in Evil and the Justice of God, informs us that the gospels “tell the story of the deeper, darker forces which operate at a supra-personal level, forces for which the language of the demonic is still the least inadequate.” On the cross, Jesus casts out the ruler of this world (John 12), the strong man he came to bind (Matthew 12). There is a collision of evil on the cross; the power of Rome, the corruption of the temple, and behind it all, the Satan. In Jesus’ non-violent death, evil and death are exhausted.
 

Following Walter Wink then, we can identify that organisations that cover up the truth, lie, and engage in corruption in the face of the present climate crisis, are following the father of lies. It’s not entirely out of place to demonise big energy when it misleads us, and continues to seek to protect its own privileged position in the economy. But following Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, we know that evil isn’t a line dividing us and them, but cuts through our own hearts. It isn’t just the corrupt temple authorities or the Romans who follow Satan; it’s individuals like Peter and Judas as well. It’s easy to follow the lie we are entitled to our high standard of living, while denouncing the lies of big energy or politicians.

The good news in Colossians 1:13-23 is that Christ reconciles “all things” to himself. This includes the human as well as the nonhuman, so creation has a future in God. Reconciliation also includes the “thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities;” the corrupt political institutions and lying, destructive industries who have manipulated the truth for their own ends.
 

Satan has been defeated, and hence all empires that follow him will ultimately either be reconciled or fall. Like Jesus, our strategies are non-violent; protest and voting, letter writing and divestment. When governments introduce draconian anti-protest laws, we protest all the same. As Martin Luther King said, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Easter reminds us that evil has not, and will not win. This is reassuring to us personally, for we’ve been rescued from evil, not to do evil. It also encourages us to name the powers that seek to destroy the earth, reminding them that they too can either be judged or reconciled, now and at the coming of the new creation.

One way of thinking about a national park is to preserve wilderness. John Muir was famous for his passion for wild places, and wrote that “John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.” He was steeped in the bible but turned much of his attention to the “book of Nature” and prefered wilderness to civilisation.

Wilderness is a slippery idea. The 1964 Wilderness Act specifies that a wilderness “is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

There are several problems with this definition. Firstly, there is no such thing as true anymore. We’ve so modified the climate and filled the air with pollutants, the water with plastics, modified landscapes and shot predators, modifying food chains. In his book Feral, George Monbiot showed how removing, and then returning wolves to Yellowstone National Park change the dynamic. Naive Christian views of predators from the likes of Wesley, have led to poor land management.

Secondly, it’s unlikely that there are many places that haven’t been modified by humans before the modern period, and indigenous people have been part of landscapes in the so-called “New World.” Establishing national parks often ignores the rights of first peoples. Native Americans were not consulted in the establishment of the Park. In Australia, the first people’s relationship with country was disregarded in the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Indigenous people have always managed the landscape, and their attitude of belonging to country shows how culture and nature are not separated in their thinking. When a central American ecoreserve was mooted to protect the panther, clashes between conservationists and anthropologists and human rights activists resulted.

Thirdly, if almost four million people visit Yellowstone each year, how is it wilderness? Isn’t it more the Disneyland of nature? Are we willing to preserve vast tracts of land, for the sake of the creatures themselves? There is always tension, whether it is cattle grazing in high country in Australia, or the anti-government sentiment led by the Bundy brothers. Add to this threats of oil exploration in the Arctic (blocked for now) or dredging the Great Barrier Reef to ship more coal out of Australia, and it seems we can’t even leave alone what small areas we set aside.

Despite all of this, wilderness is important theologically. Psalm 104 establishes that God creates space for nonhuman creatures. Mountains are not simply there for us to climb or to remove for coal, but for other creatures to live in. Water is not just for agriculture, our drinking, or for Nestle to use, but for all creatures to share. Wilderness is wilderness because it is wild and contains wild creatures.

Psalm 104 extols God’s provision for lions. We’ve largely eliminated predators rather than learning to live with them as Richard Turere of the Masai community has done. From all of this, we should learn humility. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and so should be fear of the wild creatures he easily controls and yet we cannot.

Further, as John Walton has pointed out, creation is a temple. God rested on the seventh day to take up ruling in his temple; see the parallels with Psalm 132. As the last of his creatures made, we are his images, placed into this temple so that we might reflect God to creation and serve him by caring for it, both for our use and its own sake.  This means that humans can never be excluded from wilderness because we are meant to care for it in a priestly manner, and as image bearers, delighting in it just as God does.

Sometimes however, this priestly care will mean limiting our presence for the good of the temple. Other times, being in such places will be an important part of our spirituality and worship. Where else but away from bright city lights can we experience what the writer of Psalm 8 did, in pondering both our cosmic insignificance and yet divine calling? Where else but among our fellow creatures can we be reminded of God’s creative wisdom and power?

Getting away from our civilisation for wilderness places us in God’s hands, close to nature in all of its beauty and all of its danger – not foolishly but neither hubristically assuming we can be entirely safe. Happy Anniversary America! Go and celebrate by worshipping God outdoors, but also by being mindful of the need to continue to fight for the protection of wild spaces and the global context in which they sit – for creation’s sake and ours, and for God’s glory.

Mick has written at length of a theology of wilderness in a journal article downloadable here.

The first is that of overweening optimism. In our Babel like world, wisdom, right thinking and cooperation are not to be taken for granted. Further, the message across the ages from Paul in Romans 8 is that any human pronouncement of a new age of environmental prosperity needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The other extreme is that of total cynicism. As was pointed out to me several years ago, Job chapter 1 points out that cynicism is diabolical.

That said then, how should we react to this new “deal”? The first thing to note is that the 1.5 C target is a moral one. With less than 1 C we’ve already seen impacts around the globe, but much of the brunt of this has been borne by Pacific Island nations. Islands like Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Carteret Islands are at the front line of sea level rise caused by warming waters and melting ice. Many of these nations are largely Christian, and the James principle should operate here – prayer without (climate related) works is dead. A target of 1.5 C will make a great difference, but of course with climate inertia, we can’t limit our thinking to 2100 alone. Should the Lord tarry, we need to look to a long term future where human actions don’t adversely affect future generations.

The agreement does also mention the need to acknowledge the rights of indigenous people. This is a pressing concern for many reasons. In Australia, indigenous communities have suffered health issues due to uranium mining. Recent plans to close remote communities have been linked by some to a renewed interest in uranium mining (see here and here). Indigenous communities in Ecuador continue to fight big oil. The same effect can be had when the opposite turn is taken. Will there be calls to remove indigenous peoples from forests that are managed as carbon offsets, just as they were removed from Yellowstone National Park?

This concerns Christians because we’ve been so often wedded to Constantine that little has differentiated church and state in colonialism. In a paper in the March 12 issue of Nature, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin examined various starting dates of the Anthropocene, the age of human domination of the globe. One suggested date is associated with a drop in carbon dioxide levels in 1610, associated with what they euphemistically call the “New-Old World Collision.” Diseases, war, enslavement and famine saw over 50 million die in the Americas, with the collapse of farming and recovery of forests.

Changes in climate are tied to colonialism and we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is why COP21 makes clear there are “differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

So, the world is looking at an ambitious target, and as Bill McKibben says, the starter’s pistol has fired and it is time to start running. We are still running the other way, towards almost 3 C by end of century. Now the real work begins, of cutting the Gordian knot of big energy and government, of exposing the lies of big energy like Exxon, of eating more virtuously, and so on. There is still a big role for religion, a big role for the church. It’s clear Pope Francis’ encyclical has had an impact. As I’ve argued before, we have a mission not just to share the gospel in words, but to incarnate it in our caring for creation.

The church needs to take the lead. While we are ruled by no King David, we can still play Samuel to our governments precisely because we believe Jesus is King, and the land will once more be filled with milk and honey, and justice will roll like a river. Our key word must be hope.

All of a sudden, our tinkering becomes obvious. All of a sudden, we can’t deny any more that the world is changing. Of course, some will continue to deny this reality, but it is clear that the concentration of carbon dioxide rising past 400 parts per million is due to human activity, and we need to stop now.

Christians view events through a theological lens, shaped by the bible, our faith traditions, and our wider culture. While no one lens sees everything clearly, some distort what we are doing to the planet more than others. Some Tuvaluan Christians, as Mark Lynas recorded in his book High Tide have had an optimistic view of God’s actions, based on a narrow reading of the account of Noah’s flood. Some have said, “We’re Christians. God will protect the island.” Another believes that “Only the Creator can flood the world” and “I believe in God – I don’t believe in scientists.”

Apart from some of the usual arguments about this story, the flood should be thought of as an act of uncreation, where human sin released the forces of chaos (the waters) under divine control and the waters divided in Genesis 1 are recombined.

More than 200 million people live within 5 metres or less of sea level. With at least 1 metre of sea level rise expected by end of century, the results are truly apocalyptic. Tropical storms producing more damaging flooding, enhanced erosion, and increased coastal salinity will all contribute to cause vast human movements, loss of ecosystems, etc. And sea level will continue to rise for centuries to come.

We know that there will be many other impacts. Even the approximately 1 degree Celcius we have experienced to date has been implicated in heat waves, droughts, fires, and paradoxically, heavy snow falls. With heat and water stress, crop yields are currently declining which will make feeding a growing global population difficult indeed.

It is easy then to think of this in apocalyptic terms. Famine, Pestilence and Death in particular ride out with climate change. Drought and possibly our warming climate has been implicated in the Arab Spring. Some might embrace the apocalypse, wanting the tribulation to come as it is meant to precede the return of Christ. However, reading Revelation like this is a recipe for disaster. We are not to sit back and watch the end of the world like some B-grade horror movie when we ourselves are the agents of destruction. This is not just bad theology, but bad faith.

Of course, Paris now reminds us afresh of other apocalyptic visions, with the spectre of War; an eternal war of non-nation agents against Western civilisation. All clash of civilisations rhetoric aside, the complexities of faith traditions, Western imperialism and Middle Eastern politics are messy and often left unexamined in the calls for vengeance. Rather than looking to hurrying the apocalypse by welcoming such a war, Christians are called to be peacemakers. This may not be exclusive of calls for justice, so long as the lens of justice looks everywhere, even deep into our own closets to find the skeletons there.

Part of this peacemaking, this divine shalom includes trying to make peace with our world. It is good that the climate talks will go ahead despite the recent tragedy. Christians need to embrace these talks, while neither expecting a secular messiah that will heal all wounds and save the planet or demonise it with mumblings of world government or the mark of the beast. The former ignores the role of the return of Christ to put all things to rights including the non-human creation, as I discuss at length in a recent book. The later is bad exegesis and shows us how often we fear challenges to national sovereignty not just by military invasion, but by limits on our own countries imperial ambitions. Nationalism is an idol that still dogs the modern world.

Christians can get behind this by supporting the People’s Climate March and marching as a congregation or denomination. I’ve been involved a little in the faith sub-group, meeting with other Christians and people of other faiths. For some Christians, involvement with other faiths or conservation groups is the slippery slope to syncretism and apostasy unless the sole goal is evangelism. And yet if the Kingdom of God is about peace and justice, then Christian involvement in such events provides the opportunity to work with others for shared goals and to articulate our unique hope.

I’ll be marching and praying for wisdom in Paris to prevail. But I’ll also be praying for an apocalypse of peace, love and justice – not cheering on destruction but hoping for restoration. Will you march with me?

It’s nearly been a month since Pope Francis released Laudato Si’, and it’s taken me a while to digest it. One of the most profound things that lies behind his analysis for me is his attacks on the myths of “a modernity grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, com­petition, consumerism, the unregulated market).” The encyclical rightly notes that climate change and other aspects of what is now being called the Anthropocene are symptoms of us swallowing Enlightenment myths of progress and an epistemology shaped purely by science and technology.

Not that science and technology are bad, but that in following Francis Bacon as seeing the world around us as nature rather than creation, we have abused it. As Francis notes, “nature is usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled, whereas cre­ation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all.”

This attack has drawn heavily fire. Catholic Republican Rick Santorum is on record as saying “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.” Yet scientists are supportive of the Pope’s encyclical. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said “Yes, it’s possible to be a supreme holy figure yet still know what you are talking about regarding the Climate.” This is because he is not listening to the small number of climate change denying climate scientists, or the large cadre of denialists, but the vast majority of climate scientists and environmentalists who can see clearly we have become a destructive force on this planet.

In Australia, former Jesuit and Prime Minister Tony Abbott, continues to live out the lie of limitless growth. His government continues to wage an apparent war on any view that does not cohere with its ideology. This is made clear in recent ban on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation funding new wind power projects. Such a ban can be nothing but an ideological decision, based neither on science, nor a theological allegiance to the Pope. And if conservative within the Catholic Church have been trenchant in their denial, Fox News has declared the Pope the most dangerous person on the planet.

The Pope makes a powerful critique of the dangerous ideas of others, including the “idea of infinite or unlimited growth” as being “based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.” While he praises science and technology, he warns of the Babel like view where science and technology shape our way of seeing the world in a reductionist manner, and he sees this as the cause of “the deterioration of the environ­ment” and which also “affects every aspect of human and social life.” Reductionism might solve simple problems, but it destroys the very things we value most in life; truth, beauty and spirituality.

What is on offer instead is a holistic ecology, a rich view “which respects our unique place as human beings in this world and our relationship to our surroundings”. Humans are unique from a theological point of view. Modernism has produced an “exces­sive anthropocentrism” while “Christian thought sees human beings as possessing a particular dignity above other creatures.” This recognises our difference while enabling us to remember our connectedness and our mission to care as made clear in Genesis 2:15.

Our very physicality ties us to everything else. Our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings.” This connection is spiritual, for we have communion with the rest of creation, and must avoid being reduced either to a material/spiritual dualism or a scientific detachment that views the world from the outside: “we are not dis­connected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion. As believ­ers, we do not look at the world from without but from within.”

It’s not as if we are to go back to life in the trees, for “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way.” The lens for this different way is a gospel centred one. Francis extols the simplicity of his namesake and notes to date that “to blame population growth instead of extreme and se­lective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.” If Christians are going to join Pope Francis in this prophetic call rather than simply wait for the market to sort out climate change, it will require some bold vision, myth deconstructions and lifestyle choices.

The ink is barely dry on the latest plan to deal with climate change. One can hardly claim that Lima was a resounding success, but it’s not a complete failure either. With 2014 looking to be the hottest year on record, very fast action is needed to keep a global mean temperature below 2°C over pre-industrial levels. Given that people are suffering now from less than 1°C, it is already too late to avoid some consequences of climate change. However, there is still time to avoid the worst of the scenarios. Lima at least commits all nations to act, even if the harder decisions are to be made in Paris in 2015. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking.

In Australia, things have looked pretty grim for those of us concerned about the future. While I’ve been encouraged as I have gone around speaking at churches and Christian organizations, our reaction in the public sphere has often been muted. There are sections of the church who could be showing much greater moral leadership on this issue. Climate change is an issue for everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion or politics. The reality of a drying continent, a longer and more volatile fire weather season and deadlier heatwaves does not discriminate.

Further, with the removal of the carbon tax here in Australia, an attack on the Renewable Energy Target, and the continued pushing of coal at state and federal level, we seem to be going backwards not forwards. It is heartening to see an about face on the Green Climate Fund, but it simply isn’t enough to play Good Samaritan when you are one of the robbers waylaying the innocent.

I believe it was climate change activist Bill McKibben who said climate change was too important to leave in the hands of the politicians. Why should our democratic participation be limited to voting once every few years? Of course, one of the charges made against organizations like the UN is that they are not democratically elected. For some on the far right of politics, the UN is some leftie plot designed to steal our sovereignty. For some Christian fundamentalists, the UN is a beast from the book of Revelation. In fact it’s neither, but another frail human institution that has delivered some good outcomes on climate (IPCC), health (WHO) and refugees (UNHCR). These organizations attempt to display the best of globalization, cooperation and human ideals. To thumb your nose at them is not some valiant statement of independence but nationalistic hubris – something both the US and Australia have been guilty of.

But Christians too are both international yet national, heavenly minded while committed to a place. As Claire Dawson and I were writing A Climate of Hope: Church and Mission in a Warming World, we wanted to tell both the global story of climate change and the theological story that makes acting on climate change an essential part of the Christian life. But we also wanted to talk about the story of political failure and the many smaller stories of ordinary Christians living lives dedicated to walking more lightly on the Earth, from community gardens to being arrested at a coal mine. A Climate of Hope is written for believers to show them how to move forward. We hope those outside the church we also see that inside the walls of the church is an ethical framework, a worldview breaking out that can do good, when perhaps too often the stories that have leaked into the media have been about those who have done ill.

And so as part of this having a voice in the public sphere, Common Grace is “Get Up for God Botherers”. It’s not that we don’t take part in what other organizations do; it’s just that we want to say that we are passionate about Jesus and justice, and climate change is a justice issue. It’s a justice issue because those who’ve contributed the least to the problem will suffer the most, people like Nicholas Hakata, an elder from Han Island, part of the Carteret group of island that are disappearing beneath the waves. Or people like my 12 year old son who will inherit a world unlike the one I grew up in.

On Thursday, a group of Jesus and justice junkies will deliver some crowd funded solar panels to our Prime Minister on behalf of many of us who chipped in a few bob. We really want to wish our Catholic brother Merry Climate… err, I mean Christmas. We think that solar panels are a matter of climate justice and a #MerryClimate for all. The narrative of a child on whose shoulders the government sits compels us to cut across the crass consumerism of Christmas which helps drive climate change and make a genuine gift to Tony Abbott. It is both peace offering (celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace as well as making peace) and a prophetic proclamation, pointing to new possibilities.

Common Grace means we believe Jesus loves all people, and so we are to do the same. If that means being chained up to block work on a coal mine no one needs, or buy a politician their own set of solar panels, or a range of different things – we think this is just the sort of cheek-turning, extra-mile walking kind of obedience the Sermon on the Mount asks of us.

Today people are coming together around the globe to march on climate change. I’ll be marching as well, not in spite of my faith but because of it.

In a number of posts here, I’ve argued that a solid theology of creation and of the resurrection means that Christians should be concerned about climate change. To care for God’s creation is a fundamental act of Christian discipleship. There may be no “blessed are the tree planters” in the Sermon on the Mount, but Jesus died and rose again to bear God’s image in a way no one else could. 

Jesus as risen Lord shows forth God’s image to the whole of creation.

If Christians do not participate in such marches, we lose the opportunity to show our solidarity with all those concerned about the future of our planet, and to witness to them from a fundamentally Christian perspective.

The writer to the Hebrews tells us that we are yet to fully enter into the rest that Christ has made open to us (Hebrews 4). In a sense, we are still in exile. As Paul reminds us in Romans 8 (verses 19-23), both the children of God and the whole creation groaning in birth pains await their Exodus, their entry into rest.

Creation longs for this because it will mean freedom from decay and bondage under human misrule. Paul did not write about this in the abstract. He would have witnessed the environmental destruction of his day, including the spread of malarial mosquitoes in a deforested Roman capital. When he wrote to the Romans that creation was groaning, he was saying that the environmental issues of their day point us toward a new creation.

Given our in exile, we work as Israel was instructed to do in Babylon for the wellbeing of the place we live. Jeremiah says (29:7) “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.”

Like Paul before us, we follow the Jesus Way when we pray for our leaders to act, for our scientists to produce solid research, for our engineers to come up with good solutions, and for our corporations to develop ethical practices. We do not pray and go on with life as usual. We “present our bodies as living sacrifices” and pray with our feet.

The whole idea behind incarnational mission is that we witness to God’s work in the world by looking out, not by trying to draw folks into the Christian subculture. There is a time to worship behind closed doors, and a time to go out among the people with whom we share the world and mutual concern for the future.

To be on mission is to be with people, to listen to them, and to protest with them anything that degrades God’s good creation.

In my own experience, a message of hope for all of creation gets as much if not more traction than an insurance policy after death. It is not that people are uninterested in themselves or their future fate – we live in the selfie, yolo generation, after all. But there is also a rising tide of social consciousness, and climate change presents an existential challenge on the level that humans have not faced for some time.

Many people can see the injustice being brought down on our neighbours and our descendants, and they want to work for a better future. Christians should understand this as well as anyone.

Our hope is not in an escape from this world. To simply wait for the end or cheer its coming – seeing climate change as a sign of the last days – is irresponsible, morbid and unbiblical. We pray “Come Lord Jesus” because we want his kingdom to come and his will to be done, which means working for this kingdom and doing his will.

I invite you to escape the four walls of church this weekend and “seek the welfare of the city.”

Join me for the People’s Climate March.