What is God saying? (December 2022/January 2023)

Dear Friends

Once upon a time, November would hang with the mist from our breath and the bird bath would be solid after the night-time freezing. Plants, insects and wildlife would be settled into their long months of waiting for the warming touch of Spring to come again. Pavements might be slippery with ice. Coats, gloves and scarfs would be essential.

Not right now. Obviously, it would be silly to craft a global future based simply upon the evidence of a few weeks. But, I suspect, not so many are now convinced that climate change and global warming are either a myth or a scientific absurdity. The evidence of our own skins and eyes and gardens tells us that things have become strange. Whilst it might be lovely to bask in warmth for Remembrance Sunday, it surely also is alarming. Then the record-breaking comes home to us all.

Remembrance Sunday would normally mean daytimes of 8-9C in Scotland and 9-11C in England. Instead, we’ve had 19C in Scotland and England. The Met Office records show that every month of 2022 reached above average temperatures. They conclude:

“Temperatures on both 18 and 19 July exceeded 38°C, with only two previous dates exceeding this threshold in Met Office data; 10 August 2003 and 25 July 2019. These four dates: 18 and 19 July 2022, 25 July 2019 and 10 August 2003 are the only occasions when 38°C has been recorded in the UK in observations extending back to the mid-19th century… What’s particularly notable is how much more widespread the heat was from this event than the previous two occurrences of temperatures in excess of 38°C in the UK. Temperature records tend to get broken by modest amounts and by just a few stations, but the recent heat broke the national record by 1.6°C and across an extensive area of the country from Kent to North Yorkshire and from Suffolk to Warwickshire. Even when you factor in the temperatures seen in summer 1976, they didn’t reach anywhere near the levels seen this week, although that was a much more prolonged spell of hot and dry weather.

In a climate unaffected by human influence, climate modelling shows that it is virtually impossible for temperatures in the UK to reach 40°C. Under a very high emissions scenario we could see temperatures exceeding 40 degrees as frequently as every three years by the end of the century in the UK. Reducing carbon emissions will help to reduce the frequency, but we will still continue to see some occurrences of temperatures exceeding 40°C and the UK will need to adapt to these extreme events.”

Meanwhile, on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, the annual UN climate conference has been meeting. COP 27 has had a strong focus upon ‘loss and damage’ funding: richer industrialised nations (by far the biggest CO2 producers historically) paying into global funds to help poorer nations (which have produced far less CO2 over the past 150 years) mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. The climate emergency is absolutely a global ethical and justice crisis as well. Surely the world’s most deprived people cannot shoulder the greatest burden as the world warms? For me, climate change might mean some different planting schemes in the back garden. For millions in Bangladesh, or my old childhood playmates in the Cook Islands, it will mean their homes and centuries of ways of life being drowned under a rising and warming ocean amidst dead coral reefs. Current UN thinking, and increasing despair, is that the international community will fail to act decisively and fast enough to avert world temperature rise well above 1.5C. And that figure is the one we have been targeting as just about bearable in terms of climate change and increasingly powerful and unpredictable weather.

OK. So, what on Earth has this to do with Christmas? And why such misery in the season of such celebration? Is the minister truly an alarmist party-pooper with no word of festive joy to bring?

I will not for a moment deny how deeply and personally I feel the climate crisis. If creation is God’s gift on loan to us, and we deliberately destroy much of it, that is a fundamental theological emergency. I can’t imagine not being hard hit by it all.

But, rather than shoving aside the joy and wonder of Christmas, I think the climate emergency actually sends us deeply into the truth of Christmas and just why it is such good news. A challenge every Christmas is to hold on to the truth amidst the tinsel. There is, possibly, a temptation to gloss things such that the brutal realities are somehow smoothed away. For many today, Christmas is a hard season with much that makes them feel left out or that reminds them of deep sadness. The climate crisis is human folly and fragility writ as large as they can possibly be.

And this is the real world that Christmas speaks into. The Incarnation, this coming of the baby who is God-with-us, signals the Creator’s complete commitment to rescue creation from the inside. It is not the work of the magician-god who waves a magic wand and everything, as in a fairy tale, turns out to be happy ever after. Nor is it the work of the angry-god who smites everyone and throws creation into a cosmic bin in order to start over. No. Christmas reveals the truth about God and God’s ways of saving creation and making all things new. That way is slow and works within the costly ordinariness of frail and fickle humanity. That way works with me and with you. That’s how the kingdom we pray for comes. Not with magic. Not with angelic armies blowing up coal-fired power stations, sinking oil and gas platforms, blunting the chainsaws of Amazonian forest loggers and instantly loading ever rooftop with photovoltaic cells. It comes with and through us because the coming of the Messiah signals God’s global recruitment strategy. Ordinary people are called to become extraordinary disciples. We are caught up, commissioned and created to become workers for peace and justice. And that makes us God’s agents for climate repair too. Each and every one of us.

Not that we all have the same options and opportunities. We most certainly don’t. Some of us can do lots. Some of us can’t. But, as we listen to the headlines from COP 27, as we listen to the Met Office, we are being spoken to by the Holy Spirit. That voice, that beautiful divine voice, speaks deep within each of us. It is a voice of grace and mercy, of love and longing, of hope and of healing. What is God saying?

Yours in Christ,

Neil