God Is Green

Climate change and environmental issues are undoubtedly the most important consideration of the moment for our planet. It is important that Christians get involved. I have just read Ian Bradley’s God is Green. Bradley very clearly states the necessity of our Christian involvement – “if Christians fail to speak out and act on the most important issue of our time we will not only have lost an enormous missionary and pastoral opportunity but we will have failed the human race and the planet. We will also have failed the triune God.”

Bradley is rightly clear, citing a strong Biblical basis, that God is concerned with the whole of creation. “The Bible clearly proclaims God to be lord of the cosmos as well as lord of history, involved in an active relationship with the whole of creation and not just with the human part.”

It is important to recognise that God created things to be in balance. Its diversity is both wonderful and necessary. Bradley puts it like this – “The emphasis on diversity is maintained in the story of the Flood where Noah is commanded to take with him in the Ark two of every kind of living creature and in the covenant that God makes after the flood not just with humans but with all living things. It is reinforced with particular power in the Psalms and in the Book of Job which point to the pleroma or fullness of God’s creation and proclaim that every part of it has a significance and importance to God in its own right and not just for its usefulness to humans. It is a key theme of the wisdom literature which reinforces the message of the opening chapter of Genesis of the goodness and value of all creation in God’s sight: ‘You love everything that exists and nothing that you have made disgusts you, since, if you had hated something, you would not have made it’ (Wisdom of Solomon, 11:24).”

We therefore do well to get engaged in ecological concerns and to do the little we can to make a difference. Yes, it is true, using some further words from Bradley, that – “Christians urgently need to come back to the realisation, and the Biblical revelation, that God is Green, deeply concerned for the whole of creation and calling us to share and act on that concern.”

Faith After Doubt

I recently finished Brian McLaren’s book Faith After Doubt. It is a very honest account of the legitimate struggle that most of us have with doubt. As I have said so often, doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is part of faith. In fact, for that very reason, I might have preferred a title that more obviously placed them alongside each other, which is what I think the book does, rather than one that suggests they might be sequential, whatever the order.

As McLaren himself says: “Let’s grant one another permission to doubt. And let’s see the doubt in ourselves and each other not as a fault or failure to be ashamed of, but as an inescapable dimension of having faith and being human, and more: as an opportunity for honesty, courage, virtue and growth, including growth in faith itself.”

Of course, they will come in different measures at different times and there is a sense of progress as we recognize how that happens – but the ultimate aim is not that of doubt-free faith. McLaren expresses that point like this: “I do not regret my journey of faith and doubt, because I do not regret who I have become. Faith and doubt together have made me who I am. I wouldn’t want to live without either.”

He points out, and I find this very helpful, that what really matters is love, and it is not exclusive to either faith or doubt, or a mix. McLaren puts it like this: “Jesus dissented from the typical understandings of purity, loyalty, authority and liberty. Instead of neglecting them, however, he redefined them and in a sense recycled them in service of justice and compassion. For Jesus, justice and compassion were ultimately two facets of one thing: love.”

He also says: “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t teach a list of beliefs to be memorised and recited. Instead, he teaches a way of life that culminates in a call to revolutionary love. This revolutionary love goes far beyond conventional love, the love that distinguishes between us and them, brother and other or friend and enemy (Matt. 5:43). Instead, we need to love as God loves, with non-discriminatory love that includes even the enemy.”

That is pretty challenging; but it’s a challenge we need.

Nearly 50 Years On

As I begin my second month as Moderator of the National Synod of Scotland, I have taken a moment to think back to my early opportunities of leading worship, many of which were at churches which I look forward to visiting again before too long, when the pandemic restrictions are not as at present. One of the few things I have managed to do across the years is keep a record of leading worship – which now goes back almost fifty years.

It was on the 4^th March 1973 that I preached my first ever sermon – and that was at Bathgate, where my Dad was then the minister, and the good folk of Bathgate had to put up with this novice preacher on quite a few further occasions.

Other early ‘attempts’ (at some of today’s Synod URCs) were at School Wynd, Paisley (November 75), Greenock East (May 76), Morison Memorial, Clydebank (October 76), Rutherglen (May 77), Barrhead (also May 77 – and they invited me back in November 77), Granton (October 77), Saughtonhall (November 77), Augustine, Edinburgh (February 78), and Carluke (March 78).

(It wasn't only Barrhead that invited me back!)