The structure, I guess.
The world is fire in so many dimensions, the comforts that a generation has known are being taken away. There's a defiance to so many people: it's my life and I'll live as I want it - not just in terms of sin, but in terms of selfishness and social justice.
Today, Greta Thunberg was named TIME Person of the Year - the person who's been the most influential across the world. And considering nobody even knew her name last July while this year millions have marched in a protest she began with just one sign outside the Swedish Parliament, she deserves it.
As a general rule, my church doesn't like to talk about climate change. We're not those "social justice" kind of people. We believe in individual prayer and practice, not in systemic change. The political things that we believe in speaking up about in a church service are gay marriage, gender orientation, and scripture in schools. Yes, it's a very conservative church, and sometimes a rather uncomfortable one for someone like me who's out on the social fringes, with a liberal bent.
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Four weeks later, and the new year has rung in - and with the last month of the year towns and houses and lives have gone up in flames.
But we still have a Christian leader in charge of our country, and he's about to legislate the legal right to tell gay people that they're dirtybadwrong so long as we do it from a place of honest belief, so it's not all bad, right? We get to be Christians in public without having to pay that price for following Christ that we love to talk about (except in the mainstream media which we know is full of godless sodomites and YAY we are hated by the world
I haven't asked my friends what they believe as regards climate change. I'm scared of the answer. Cowardly, I know. I can do all things in Christ who gives me strength...but I'm not comfortable with making a social pariah of myself among my friends. Well, who is? But that doesn't make it right, does it? It just makes it common...
What can Christians do about the fires? Pray for rain, of course. But I think we need something a little more uncomfortable than merely the thoughts and prayers. We need petitions - not to God, but to our politicians who have been very bad at doing anything other than murmuring platitudes before the cameras and being utterly tone-deaf to anything but their donations base.
Look, at least in Sydney, three of the strongest conservative electorates are in the church-heavy suburbs of the north. They're not the 'hippie' beach suburbs of the northern beaches, or the 'chardonnay swilling elites' of the inner west; they're the bible belt of the city, full of conservative church members who just want everything to be the way they've gotten used to it being: from being able to use resources as they please and throw things away without feeling guilty, to speaking their mind, even if it's to keep asking a non-white woman where her family's from, but get offended when their answer to the return question is "Australian" and she asks what indigenous group they hail from.
We like our creature comforts.
Maybe it's time to be less comfortable - at least when it comes to prayers and actions.
We need to pussyfoot less around the people "protecting our Christian rights" and demand more action from them. Things like, oh, funding the RFS, ensuring that Centrelink beneficiaries who are fighting fires continue to get paid their benefits, having evacuation plans for all cities and towns, not selling our water rights away, insisting on the conservation of town water supplies in all towns and cities across the country, encouraging the uptake of both rainwater tanks and greywater systems...and these are the really conservative-friendly ones.
I haven't even gotten to the controversial topics like reducing our carbon footprint, offering tax breaks to companies that reuse recycled plastics, having a Coal Exit Plan in place and activating it sometime before we run out - and not moving promptly to Nuclear Will Save Everything Oh And Look, The Mining Companies Who Profited From Coal Can Switch Their Operations To Uranium Instead. (My stepfather went on at length about The Greens holding back Australian progress in the form of nuclear power because apparently nuclear power is 'clean' while solar panel making is pollutive.
There are no good choices in late-stage capitalism; but he won't believe that. He doesn't like The Greens - Rupert Murdoch has taught him that the Greens are Evil and trying to Obstruct The Path To The Future, and so he has learned his lesson well and will regurgitate it at every opportunity like it's the very gospel itself.
Yes, we pray, but sometimes God says 'no'.
If God says 'no', then what do we do?
We work with the 'no' He has given us. We act as though drought is going to be our persisting future, as though fire is going to be our endless summer, as though our world is temporary and we should do what we can to save it as long as possible. "Does grace mean we can sin as we please?" Paul asks the Ephesians (I think it's the Ephesians). "Certainly not! We seek to live grace-filled lives as a sign of the grace that we have, no longer thrashing about in the sin that we were steeped in."
We have environmentally sinned as we please for the last 150 years, but in this age we have been granted the vision of how sinful and fallen we are. We have the opportunity to live in grace - in the holding back of the inevitable by nothing less than an unexpected and undeserved wake-up call.
The question is whether we will?
It's too late for advent as I write this: the time of anticipation of God coming near has passed. He is not just near, but here.
The kingdom of God is at hand, the renewing of the world is not just spiritual but surely also in the temporal now. We are the agents of His work - those who brought health care to the Roman empire, those who decided to educate the uneducated so that they might better know and understand and comprehend the salvation of Christ, those who claimed the right of humanity for women and slaves who were made in the imago dei as surely as white male landowners, and so many more fights for justice through the ages.
Will there be Christians at the forefront of the grace of climate action?
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