Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
This particular sermon was never preached: I contracted COVID just two days before I was to present it. It appears for the first time here.
Improving our Attitude
Scriptures: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13; Revelation 21:1-6a
It is New Year’s Eve and the scriptures recommended for New Years are familiar ones: they are the same each year!
This is my 20th New Year at Knox and you’d think I would have said all I have to say about these readings, but something really struck me this year that I think is worth mentioning.
There is a progression through the readings, not only a progression through time but also a progression of attitude that we should be alert to as Christians.
Our first lesson, Ecclesiastes, is very familiar. The Byrds even made it into a pop song in 1965: “to everything there is a season” and the words they added over and over were “turn, turn, turn”. This was very insightful because it reflected the way that Ecclesiastes was talking about a cycle through time: that patterns repeat themselves; and it describes humanity as being part of this greater cycle of life.
It’s a very philosophical perspective that doesn’t describe us as being in charge, or at the top of creation but rather as a part of something greater than we are and it encourages us to accept that fact.
Ecclesiastes is attributed to King Solomon, whose wisdom is renowned through history, although some clues suggest it may be later, even centuries later.
It may be a way of re-considering the attitudes we find in Psalm 8 which scholars agree was written by King David, Solomon’s father, on the one hand acknowledged as “a man after God’s own heart” for his passionate faith in God but also acknowledged as a flawed king because of his sometimes impulsive behaviour.
Psalm 8 talks about God being divine over all creation but then it adds a section about the status of people. It reflects those parts of the creation stories in Genesis where human beings are given authority over animals and other parts of creation. The traditional Rabbinic interpretation of Psalm 8 is that the great status given to humans comes at a price: our first and last thoughts each day must be of God who puts all things into perspective, just as the first and last lines of the Psalm reflect the glory of God.
The Psalm is less passive than Ecclesiastes. It gives us a sense of responsibility, which is something we need after decades of feeling like we could strip the value out of every bit of the world and dump the waste into the air, soil and water. We are tempted to focus on the human authority part and forget the context: that God is the higher power. We like the bits of the bible that tell us we are in charge and we resist the bits that make us accountable.
Then, finally, we come to the reading from the Book of Revelations, the last book written for the Bible, and it talks about the end of the world!
Admittedly, it’s in positive terms with the end becoming a new beginning: an amazing new beginning with God actually living amongst us. It’s a remarkable vision of love and connection but it has also been interpreted as a huge elevation of humanity, with the rest of creation being destroyed. We seem to be able to turn almost anything into an excuse for claiming power.
This kind of thinking, the kind where the old gets thrown away and replaced by the new, has contributed hugely to our society’s attitude to how we use this planet: that it’s disposable! God will replace it anyway; so why not?
This was expressed publicly under Ronald Reagan when his secretary of the environment, James Watt, opened up national parks for strip-mining and coastal waters for oil and gas drilling because he believed that Jesus would return soon and judge us harshly if we hadn’t used up all the resources God had put at our disposal.
That’s an extreme example of the attitude but the underlying assumptions informed the industrial approach to life: it assumes that we are in charge of creation and we get to do whatever we want. For some it might have been an actual point of faith but for most it was a convenient way to justify what they were doing to get rich, with some handy bits of scripture taken out of context.
At long last we are questioning that attitude, those assumptions of superiority and control. Climate change is a big part of that as we evaluate the damage we have done by our reckless burning of fossil fuels and the other scars we have left on the planet.
Similar challenges came up in our culture in the 1960s and 1970s as the West started to pay attention to Buddhism and Hinduism with their visions of the cycle of life and as some people actually tried to learn from indigenous attitudes in North America. It was all considered pretty hippy-dippy at the time; anyone in charge rejected it as being unrealistic and uneconomic.
But now, as our approach to the planet is demonstrated to be unsustainable and destructive and as it is even labelled as colonial – the anathema of indigenous attitudes to creation – we realize we have to definitively reject this “end of the world” attitude.
After 2000 years without a second coming, with its images of the destruction of the old and the creation of the new, we find ourselves destroying the work of the creator we claim to adore.
All the bad stuff in Revelations was supposed to be a consequence of the Antichrist taking charge. If you want to get all symbolic about it, we have put ourselves into the place of the Antichrist, which is a very sobering thought.
The idea of the second coming was developed and refined in a time of persecution: Jesus and his followers lived under the tyranny of Rome; when Revelations was written, Christians were being actively martyred; so, you can see why a cataclysmic end of the world would look attractive.
But we don’t have that excuse anymore: we have been in charge for centuries; we have claimed authority over nature, at best paying lip service to God’s sovereignty; we have done whatever would bring us profit, without concern about final consequences and without accepting the accountability Psalm 8 tells us should come with this power.
The New Year is a good time to remind ourselves of that ancient Biblical wisdom: that the existence of creation is circular; that we are not in charge; we are not the final authority.
Let us acknowledge that creation has cycles we need to live within and that the things we do are being done to God’s world. We will have to answer to our creator as well as the future generations who are here now and will continue to follow us.
For God’s sake, for creation’s sake, and for the sake of uncounted future generations, as we enter this New Year let us resolve to do better.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 