Rev’d Peter Balabanski
Season of Creation 4 –Jrm 32 1-3a, 6-15, Ps 91, 1 Tim 6, Lk 16 19-31
Just before his 99th birthday this year, Sir David Attenborough launched his latest film, Ocean. And he did so with an extraordinary message of hope. He said he’s realised the oceans can recover from environmental damage far more quickly than he’d ever imagined. He called on the world leaders who’d promised to protect a third of the world’s oceans. He said that at this year’s UN conference, he hoped they would take decisive action so their promises would become a reality.
Surely he must know how untrustworthy these leaders have proven to be! Yet he asks anyway. I hear in his hopeful call to a seemingly hopeless situation an echo of the messages we hear in today’s scriptures.
In our first reading, Jeremiah and his people faced imminent catastrophe. They were in Jerusalem, besieged by the mighty Babylonian army. And we know today how terrible a siege can be, don’t we. Jeremiah’s fellow citizens were about to be sent off into exile. He knew it was just punishment for their Godless behaviour. Yet, in this seemingly hopeless situation, God told Jeremiah to buy a field, and store the deeds of sale in a safe place so they could be found again a long time later. Can you imagine someone in Gaza doing that now – besieged, with the leaders of the attacking forces talking about exiling you forever, and God tells you to buy a field and hide the deed of sale where you’ll be able to find it decades from now!
Can you imagine hope in David Attenborough who’s seen what human greed has been doing to the natural world he’s studied all through his long life – can you imagine him believing humanity will actually change now? And yet he says he has a hope now that he never thought he’d have. Can hope overcome bitter experience?
Today’s scriptures tackle this head on. At their heart are two messages. The first message is to hope even when human understanding says to do so is folly. The second message denounces what, more than anything else, can destroy us; greed.
So first, hope. Jeremiah is told to do something shockingly hopeful in a city under siege. He’s told to buy land and preserve the contract so it can be found again when the catastrophe is over. That speaks to our situation where so many people see our future besieged by the threat of unstoppable climate catastrophe; where we see ourselves utterly powerless to halt the greedy onward march of a petro-chemical, military behemoth that tramples governments and populations with impunity.
Yet we Christians – along with Muslims and Jews – believe that God has promised regeneration, both for people and the Earth. Even though Earth suffers as dreadfully as it does now because of people’s rejection of our call to be Earth’s servants and protectors, people of faith believe God’s will is to restore and renew creation. And in that belief, we find both hope, and a command to live and proclaim that hope.
Our call to actively serve and protect creation is in no way cancelled by the hope that God will act. We’re not to leave it to God. Being God’s people means living the hope, acting with hope, proclaiming hope for creation. We are also to enact and proclaim peace with creation. We’ve seen the effect of someone like David Attenborough publicly speaking for this hope. It’s re-energised people who might otherwise have surrendered to despair. We are called to believe God’s promise; to declare it and live it out in action, and regenerate that same hope in others.
People may say we’re deluded to hold such hope. That’s what they said to Jeremiah too. He was locked up for what he was brave enough to say. People in power wanted him silenced. It’s a tactic that those who worship power and greed have never given up on. Our modern Jeremiahs – Greenpeace, the Climate Council, the Marine Conservation Council, the Religious Response to Climate Change, the CSIRO – all of them meet campaigns to silence them; bombings, drones, vexatious law-suits, government funding withdrawn – the whole box and dice. People of faith speaking up to protect Earth from destructive greed will face all these tactics.
And that’s the other message from today’s scriptures for us. Resist greed. Resist greed for ourselves, and when we see it poisoning the lives of others, name it for what it is. First Timothy puts it plainly. 7 we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it … 9 those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Our Gospel tells us the same thing in story form – the rich man who is blind to the needs of the poor.
Greed is bringing the world to ruin, and in its desperation to protect itself, it offers false hopes about the climate catastrophe being a mere hoax. We are called to reject that cynical lie, and instead to tell the truth and proclaim real hope; to live lives that proclaim that hope. God will bring renewal and regeneration in the end, and we are called to be an essential part of that renewal, starting here and now. Thanks be to God, our redeemer and our true hope in this life and the life that is to come. Amen.