Bible reading: selected from Genesis 3.

I’ll be honest with you: if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have held a Harvest Thanksgiving service this year. And I certainly don’t have it in my heart to feel in the slightest bit jolly. That’s because the last few months have seen an appalling level of distress and disaster around the world, caused by hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and earthquakes. Communities and livelihoods have been wrecked, the landscape has been devastated, thousands have died. It almost seems patronising and cruel for us in Britain, still a relatively bounteous country, to be thankful – although even our own farmers have had a tough time with scorching heat and torrential rain coming at unexpected times. So we might well be wanting to ask, “Where has God been this year?” and say, “How can we celebrate when it seems that our so-called loving Father doesn’t really care about people?” Even though we know some of the answers to these questions, they still challenge our faith.

The Old Testament gives us some answers, but we probably find them chilling and superstitious. For it’s clear that ancient people believed two things: that God was totally in charge of the natural world, and that nature worked well for people when they pleased God but became a tool of his judgement when they didn’t. So we read the story of Noah and the flood, a horrific story of disaster (which we’ve sadly domesticated for children by making it full of cuddly animals presided over by a benign patriarch). We meet Elijah, who prophesied and then lived through a life-sapping drought, also seen as divine punishment for sin. And there are other prophets who spoke of droughts, floods, epidemics and even plagues of locusts in similar terms.

The Psalm we read earlier also sees God as the cause of everything that happens in nature. Here are a few choice phrases from it: “You … formed the mountains by your power, having armed yourself with strength”; “You care for the land and water it … You drench its furrows and level its ridges; you soften it with showers and bless its crops”; “You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance”. That’s more than just poetic language as the people of that time, totally reliant on good weather to give them a harvest and keep them from starvation, believed that God ordained everything that took place in the natural world. They hoped that he would be kind to them and they rejoiced when it appeared that he had been. This view, expressed in different forms, has been well-nigh universal throughout human history: it’s almost the only for non-scientific people to make any sense of nature’s vagaries.

But it’s not a view we here would hold, because we now know so much about how the natural world works. We understand the atmospheric conditions that cause hurricanes, from the position and strength of the jet-stream in the stratosphere to the temperature of the ocean. We therefore have a pretty good idea of where and when extreme weather events will take place (although we can’t prevent them). We also know that earthquakes are caused by shifts in the tectonic plates which cover the earth. Some of them move by several centimetres each year and the immense pressures that build up when they rub together obviously have to find their outlet. No, we can’t tell exactly when an earthquake will occur or a volcano will erupt: but we do understand why they happen and have a pretty good idea of the danger areas.

So we must ask if our world is really functioning as God intended it to? And, if it isn’t – and even St. Paul recognised its problems when he wrote that “the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now” – we must ask a further question: why is this the case? Did God, who we say is good and holy and perfect and loving, make a mistake in his design process and end up making a world – or even an entire universe! – that is intrinsically faulty? I don’t want to say that he did that; yet, in our reflective moments, we all recognise that the forces which created the beauty of Eryri or the Alps are the same ones which so often cause devastation and destruction, they are two sides of the same coin. And I cannot say why that should be.

Another explanation of our present woes is, of course, to assert that God did create a world of perfect harmony but that it somehow got spoiled along the way. This is clearly the view of the book of Genesis, which places human sin, specifically the story of Adam and Eve, at the centre of creation’s imbalance. Yet I just can’t buy into this, partly because we know that the world had existed for many millions of years before humans appeared; and partly because I cannot see how one man and one woman, committing one of disobedience, could have brought such dire outcomes upon the entire globe. Although it tries hard, I don’t think this tale or myth really does tell us why the natural world is as it is. That simply has to remain a mystery.

However (and it’s a big however) I don’t want us to ignore that ancient story, as I think it has a vitally important message that we dare not ignore: the message that human deeds indeed can and indeed do have vast, even catastrophic, effects on our created world. I’m not of course saying that the earthquakes in Turkey and Morocco had human causes – although we know that people died because of poor building standards, often motivated by greed and corruption. We know too that a major reason for those dams giving way in Libya was non-existent maintenance due to the factional wars which cripple that land. Nevertheless I do believe that 2023, with its disastrous floods in places as far apart at Hong Kong, Italy, Pakistan and the United States, its wildfires across Canada, Greece, Portugal and Siberia, its intense and unpredictable storms, its raised sea temperatures which have led to unprecedented melting of polar ice, has been the year when climate change or global warming “came home to roost”. Even in Britain the dismal summer weather has led to poor grain harvests.

The scientists have been warning us of the dangers we face for many years; the United Nations has held climate change conferences every year since 1995 (yes, as long as that) which produce fine-sounding statements and set ambitious targets; even our own Senedd has declared a climate emergency (and called for an all-British “climate summit”). Yet year upon year Governments around the world slither out of legally-binding agreements and fail to meet those targets. They always, as we’ve seen here during the last two weeks, give supposedly good reasons for scaling back their net-zero aims or opening up new sources of fossil fuels, telling us that it doesn’t matter as we will easily make up the lost ground later. I want to rage at them and say, “We’re in a global crisis; we all have to pull our weight to solve it and there’s no time to lose. How dare you even think of putting the lives of our children and grand-children at risk for the sake of short-term political gain? Wake up – this isn’t a game, it’s deadly serious”.

If you think I’ve just made a political statement, you’d be right – that’s because it’s only politicians from every country in the world who can solve this crisis. But if you think that my statement had nothing to do with our Christian faith, you’d be wrong, for at least two reasons. One is that, as we know, God loves the vulnerable and poor of this world, and it’s they who will be (and are) most affected by climate change. Christians in countries such as Britain have a God-given responsibility for them. The other reason is that, as God told Adam, we humans are stewards of creation and have a duty to care for it. If we don’t, we will indeed be subject to judgement: a judgement of our own making but also divine, as we have played with and mucked up God’s system.

Most of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, sit lightly to these responsibilities. We do little to change our lifestyles, saying, “There’s no point in me trying to do anything when everyone is carrying on as they always have, my efforts won’t make any difference”. We may even say, “I know what I should be doing to live in a planet-friendly way, but it’s just too inconvenient”. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I can’t find any Bible verse where Jesus calls his followers to “convenience”; his call is to be radical, to set aside society’s usual values, to aim for higher things than possessions, comfort or pleasure; to simply “take up our crosses” – rough, heavy, potentially embarrassing and most certainly not convenient – and walk as he directs. If that means living more frugally, wearing clothes until they wear out (and buying pre-owned ones), thinking of where our food comes from, not upgrading our cars and phones, taking holidays in Britain rather in far-flung, turning down the heating and putting on a sweater – well, we all know what we ought to do, but all (me included) jib at actually doing them. Yet we must: for peoples’ sake, for the planet’s sake, for God’s sake.

I suspect that some of you have been disappointed by this morning’s service. It hasn’t been quite the celebration you expected, we may not have sung the hymns you were hoping for, the front of the church isn’t piled high with fresh produce. But, as we do indeed thank God for his goodness (albeit with difficult questions hovering in the back of our minds), we cannot but think seriously about the major issues which threaten future harvests and about how we should live more sensibly today. Christians may – gloriously – believe that, one day, this aching world will be completely transformed and renewed by Christ; but we haven’t got to that point yet and we don’t know when we will. For now, we must love Jesus and, as a way of expressing that, love our planet and in so doing love our neighbours who don’t live in such fortunate places as we do. As a fairly modern hymn says: “God in his love for us lent us this planet” and: “Earth is the Lord’s: it is ours to enjoy it; ours, as his stewards, to farm and defend. From its pollution, misuse, and destruction, good Lord, deliver us, world without end”. Let’s say “Amen” to that.