Rev’d Peter Balabanski

4C: Colossians 1 15-20

When I was nine years old, I persuaded my Dad to lay his camera on top of our ladder in the back yard one night and take a photo of the Southern Cross. He used slide film so projecting the picture, we’d see a bigger, closer Southern Cross. He set the camera to open the shutter automatically and take a time-exposure shot. That way, there’d be no finger shake, and the stars should come out clear and bright.

When I finally saw the slide, my first reaction was disappointment. The stars didn’t come out as points of light, but as short lines. I felt better when I was told they were lines because of the spinning of Earth. The other thing that struck me was that stars come in different colours. There are three bluish-white stars, a red one and an orange one. The pointers are blue too – and the nearest one is a double star. So I started to learn about hot and cool stars, young and old ones, and binary stars.

But my biggest surprise about the Southern Cross was to come many years later. Down the bottom of the Yorke Peninsula, you can still see the Milky Way very clearly. Looking at the Southern Cross one night, a friend got me to look not at the stars but at the spaces. Could I see the huge Spirit Emu with its head just below the cross – did I know that’s what Aboriginal people see?

I was thus introduced to a totally different perspective on the cosmos – how in the ancient dreaming, life on Earth is spiritually connected with the universe. That book I’ve been quoting by Bruce Pascoe is called Dark Emu. By calling his book by that name, he’s saying that he’s entrusting his readers with the perspective of the Aboriginal People – the perspective of a people whose life and culture has always been profoundly and consciously interwoven with Earth and Heaven – a people who see life where we don’t; where we just see emptiness.

This takes us again to the theme I’ve been emphasising throughout this year’s Season of Creation; the opposites – interconnection and alienation. I continue to discover more and more how the traditional life of Indigenous peoples is one of deep connection with the natural order and with the numinous – the spiritual dimension of life. There is no sharp dividing line between physical and spiritual life in traditional cultures. Everything is interconnected.

By contrast, our culture is becoming increasingly one of alienation; physical and spiritual alienation from the natural world, and from each other. I’ve said a couple of times now that this alienation is a working definition of sin. Its marker is spiritual blindness – whether wilful of born of ignorance; spiritual blindness, whose consequence is alienation from each other, from the created order, and from God. It leads to death; both our own death, and the death we are inflicting on more and more of non-human life. The result of this sin is that we are in crisis, and because of the influence we have over our environment, the whole created order is in crisis too.

So what do we do? How do we address this? On Friday, we saw the young people of the world rise up and demand change. Our children are frightened for their lives; they’re also angry at the obdurate stupidity – the wilful blindness – the greedy deafness – of those who claim the authority to run the world, yet who are allowing the destruction of nature for profit.

On Friday, for anyone with ears to hear, our children demanded something that our Christian faith teaches. They reminded us that the way to deal with the power of sin is repentance; turning around; turning from death to life; turning to follow the Way to life. Our children are calling us to turn to Life. That’s what repentance means.

You can quite reasonably ask me if I am saying this as a Christian teacher or just as a committed environmentalist. Am I just co-opting my faith to make it serve my greenie passions? Does anything in Scripture authorise Christian environmentalists to speak the way I’ve been doing over the past weeks? As it happens, we heard that very Scripture today. We just shared in the Colossians hymn. I picked out a few sentences from it in my weekly – they’re in bold print on the back of the pewsheet. Let’s consider the first three sentences. The first two say

In Christ all things in heaven and on earth were created.

All things have been created through him and for him.            v.16

So this hymn teaches that the natural order belongs to Christ alone.

The third sentence says – In him all things hold together.                 v.17

So this hymn also teaches that the interconnectedness of the natural order is the result of Christ’s agency and will. What these words say to me – Christ’s ownership of the natural order and his will to sustain it – these words tell me that a failure to care for the natural order is a failure to respect the will of Christ. This has practical spiritual consequences.

Standing by while the environment is destroyed has the effect of shutting others off from encountering God. Paul wrote in Rom 1.20, Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. As we look on, human civilization is destroying those very things. Vicky writes about this.

Experiencing the majesty of the natural world, in all its diversity and strangeness, its symbiosis and complexity, is becoming a rare and precious thing – the stuff of eco-tourism and World Heritage sites. Wild places are now packaged and marketed, to manage the tourist footprint. The velvety depth of the night sky unencumbered by artificial lights is now, for very many, a memory.   …

If Christ embodies and reveals the invisible God in and through the natural world, this means of revelation is also becoming increasingly rare and precious. How are future generations going to glimpse the numinous, except artificially, in pre-packaged portions? As we allow the diminishment of species and ecosystems, we diminish our ability – and the ability of future generations – to perceive the glory of God. This can no longer be peripheral to those who love Christ. See VSB,  Colossians: An Eco-Stoic Reading

On Friday, our children called us to action – to repentance and action. Today, our scriptures tell us they spoke the Truth in Christ. How are we, as a parish, going to respond?             Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

3C : Psalm 29

Have you ever been out in a huge storm? Were you unsafe? What or who was your greatest concern? Did you understand what was happening – were you mentally prepared? Do the children you know have any idea about surviving storms?

Look at this picture of a dust storm sweeping east across Melbourne; 8^th Feb 1983. I vividly remember the moment when that dust storm hit. I was teaching at Footscray TAFE College. We had no warning of what was coming; within a matter of seconds, broad daylight outside suddenly turned into an eerie, howling reddish darkness. It was quite terrifying. I remember stories friends told me later – stories about frightened people they’d seen dropping to their knees in the street and tearfully praying. For some, it seemed clear that the end of the world had come.

Storms can provoke very deep feelings in us. They can do it even when we know the science – the way lightning and thunder are produced, where all that rain comes from, and how it sometimes transforms itself into devastating hail. We know all this. And the picture of that tremendous dust storm reminds us that we know the effect we have on the nature of some storms. If you combine land-clearing, over-grazing, old-style ploughing and deep drought then add a 100 km/h wind, like that afternoon in 1983, it can become something like a 500 km wide apocalypse.

We’re emotionally engaged with storms. They bring some of us to places of fear, depression, remorse, or for some of us, exultation – emotions often associated with our spiritual condition. For the ancients, a storm carried both the fear of destruction and the promise of blessing – the welcome rains after a long dry. So are we spiritually connected with God by storms, through awe, through fear, through hope and through the reminder that the vast energy of the universe is not under our control? Today, we’ve heard two different accounts of storms and faith, Ps 29 and the Gospel. Let’s look at the Psalm.

The psalmist calls the Heavens and the Earth to hear God’s voice in storms. We hear God’s voice in the noise, the power and the destructive force of storms, and we join the rest of creation in feeling fear, awe, regret, or maybe wild joy and hope in the greatness of God who promises us the blessing of a fertile Earth, softened at last by the rain.

Maybe we have difficulties connecting with something so primordial and alien to our perspective. We’re not the first. This Psalm was actually a re-writing of an ancient hymn to Baal, the Canaanite storm god. The original was likely to have been a prayer or song which – with the help of some money or gift – would appease the anger of this god of storms. The Psalmist’s rewrite has taken on this protection-racket and set out to free people from slavery to such a capricious system.

Instead, our psalmist proclaims the God whose grace doesn’t depend on people’s willingness to pay; our psalmist proclaims the God who’s not confined by our ideas of what’s invulnerable – neither the cedars of Lebanon nor even the Lebanon itself. Nor is God confined to blessing only those who are worthy (as Jesus says, God sends the rain on the just and the unjust ^{Mt. 5:45}). God is the one who, come what may, is going to bring about the ancient promise to Abram and Sarah; the promise that through them, God will bless all families of Earth. This is a promise of spiritual blessing, but ‘families of Earth’ is also explicitly physical – a blessing we experience through our senses; a blessing lived most truly when we are living in harmony with Earth.

One of the principles of Earth Bible scholarship is that Earth has a voice. Another Psalm, Psalm 19 describes that as a voice from the heavens which have no speech nor words … yet their voice goes out through all the Earth and their words to the end of the world. ^{Ps 19.3-4}       Rant alert. As we’ve acknowledged over the past two weeks, the world’s Indigenous peoples have always been attuned to that voice, living in harmony with Earth.

Indigenous peoples have indeed been that voice crying out against the injustice of colonization. And they are still crying out today; putting the Earth’s teaching about God’s grace into words that we could understand if we would only listen; warning us of the danger of our alienation from Earth. But we don’t listen. Far worse, we are still deliberately silencing Indigenous people’s voices; dividing to conquer, or making laws that imprison them in our alienation from the Land – their Land. Two weeks ago the Queensland government quietly extinguished the native title rights of the Wangan and Jagalingou people over their traditional lands. Shortly afterwards, the people received notices of trespass from a foreign mining company.

The dust storms that used to be so frequent taught us something, you’d hope. But you have to wonder. Will anyone hear Earth’s voice speaking through unheard-of early spring firestorms? Earth has a voice; Earth is speaking. But we are strangely deaf to warning voices. We are becoming steadily more alienated from plain reality. We must do better than a minister for drought and water resources who says talk of human-induced climate change is irrelevant to the fire conditions in Qld and NSW.

We’re into our third week now of exploring an ecological spirituality – how our spiritual life (our relationship with the divine) is deeply shaped by our relationship with nature; our exposure to nature and our attitude to nature. This Season of Creation is a time for us children of Earth to remember our first calling; that’s our God-given responsibility to manage, serve and care for the Earth community. ^{Gen 1-3} This is reinforced in our calling as children of Abraham and Sarah to be God’s means of blessing to all families of Earth. ^{Gen 12.1-3} Our actions are spiritually significant; the way we deal with our Earth family constitutes our service to God who calls us to care and to bless. And Earth has a voice in this. Today we’ve remembered hearing Earth’s voice in storms; remembered our feelings of bewilderment, isolation and helplessness, or maybe wild exultation. May our memories of hearing Earth’s voice remind us to keep listening carefully; listen and respond to God’s call; obediently, humbly, gratefully and with courage.  Amen