October 2010
Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.
(Luke 16:10)
There are seven (7) billion of us precious people populating this planet. Among these many mouths and brains there are far too few who care about the earth, mostly because they are pre-occupied with making ends meet, literally living from land to mouth. Even though many of the churchgoing folk – both Protestant and Roman Catholic – have environmental concerns, their theology pushes them in a different direction. They consciously or unwittingly still have that old song in mind: “I am a stranger here within a foreign land, my home is far away upon the Golden strand,” meaning heaven, of course, so their heart commitment is elsewhere.
No wonder the politicians exploit this feeling. Take the Republican Party. Its platform proclaims that, because we have god-given rights, we are free to pollute. Its political statement dictates that “claims of human-caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information and that legislation and policy based on this information are detrimental to the well-being of the United States.” If the Republicans gain power in Congress in the next few weeks, watch out. Goodbye to any measures to do justice to the earth that God created. It’s like openly approving to vandalize the Mona Lisa or Rembrandt’s “Nacht Wacht.”
E.O Wilson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and world-renowned Harvard biologist, in his recent book Creation writes that our destructive power has no limit. “We have, all by our bipedal, wobbly-headed selves, altered Earth’s atmosphere and climate away from the norm… we have spread toxic chemicals worldwide, appropriated 40 percent of the solar energy available for photosynthesis, converted almost all of the easily arable land, dammed rivers, raised the planets sea level and are close to running out of fresh water.”
With a growing world population, and more people wanting our diet, there is constantly a greater need for new agricultural land. It will come by converting more rain forests and savannas. In the meantime warning signs are accumulating. Ten million hectares (25 million acres) of grain monocultures fell victim to drought and fire in Russia this summer, partly because large tracts of peat bogs had been drained. Climate change means that extreme weather events such as droughts and floods may become more frequent in the future. In Pakistan floods overwhelmed 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of agricultural land and a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure disappeared under water.
In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we plummeted backwards. In other words, things will only get worse. There’ll never be a global climate deal.
I started with quoting Jesus. Each one of us has been entrusted by Him to take care of a minute part of his creation. We can’t do much, but that does not give us the excuse not to do anything at all. “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much,” says Jesus, also to us today. This means – since Jesus’ ministry has everything to do with the coming of the Kingdom – that when we do our small part to save creation, he will award us with all the treasures of the New Creation, his Kingdom.
Jesus also says in Luke 12:3: “What you have whispered in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops”. This is confirmed in the so-called ‘butterfly in India paradigm,’ which indicated that a small event in a complex system can lead to large results: A single butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi may be the certain cause of a hurricane in North Carolina, though the hurricane may take place a couple of years later.
It’s my job to jab, jovially, of course. There are 7 billion people in the world of which many are called, and few are chosen. The ones that are chosen are those who are faithful in small things, matters which are different from one person to the next. But one rule applies to all: Luke 16 deals with the parable of the Shrewd Manager, and ends with the words, “You cannot serve both God and Money.”
Serving God means first of all ‘serving his creation’, as John 3:16 teaches us.
Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, where he is a reluctant Presbyterian. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’.