Gen. 9: 8-17.

Ps. 104: 1-23.

John 3: 15-17.

 

First of all I am delighted to have been invited to preach the sermon at his Service of Thanksgiving to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of An TAISCE.  Your organisation which has done Trojan work for the Irish environment during the past 60years.  Need I say that this has not always been appreciated.  Given the pace of environmental degradation in Ireland during the past 40 years, it is obvious that politicians and others have often put the demands of vested interest groups, ahead of protecting the environment.  .

 

The great 20^th century theologian of the Swiss Reformed Church, Karl Barth once said that, as a faithful Christian pastor, he had to prepare his sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  No marks for guessing the current, global financial crisis has dominated news globally and here at  home.  .

 

One might ask, what has this to do with respecting our environment or worshipping God?  I think it has a lot to do with the way understand our economic activities, and also how we  worship God and live out our faith.

 

One knee-jerk responses to what has happened is to say that those who caused this turmoil are very, very greedy people.  While not condoning their wrongdoing, I believe we need to look much deeper for the causes of the present crisis.  Put it this in another way, if I announced right now that there was a million euro in gold nuggets outside the door of the Cathedral, how many of us would pass by on the way out and not reach for a few handfuls of gold? All that proves is that all of us can be greedy, but the business of governance  is to organize society in such a way that it stops the rich and powerful from pursuing an economic ideology which impoverishes the people, creates huge gaps between the rich and poor and destroys the environment, locally and globally.

 

To change metaphors our political representatives, globally and locally, have not just attempted to close the door after the horse has bolted.  From the late 1970s, they began by selling off the doors; next they auctioned off the roof and the wall of the barn, through a continuous process of deregulation.  Why should we be surprised at what is happening now?  

 

Lord Acton was right when wrote that, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  This is not the first time financial institutions have  brought pain, misery, death and ecological destruction to many countries.  For missionaries and development workers, it seems like a re-run of the Third World debt crisis.  In the 1970s commercial banks made reckless loans to Third World countries.  When Mexico threatened to default in August 1982, the First World, through the IMF and World Bank, forced Third World countries to pay these debts, many of which were fraudulent, through what were called structural adjustment programmes.  The Third World debt crisis has, and is, taking a horrendous toll on people in the Third World, as basic services in health, education and care for the weak and elderly have been scraped.  The impact on the environment has also been massive, as countries such as Brazil and the Philippines sold off their tropical forests and natural resources to pay these debts. 

 

But did this debacle slow down the deregulation mania.?  Not at all.  That is why I am worried that, if the financial industry gets through this present impasse, nothing will change and they will soon be back to their old way, dreaming up new financial products.  We must not let that happen.

 

The roots of the present crisis go back, at least to the 1930s.  In the wake of the World War I and the Great Depression both Marxists and Capitalists thinkers were revising their ideologies.  Two of the most famous thinkers on the capitalist side were John Maynard Keynes (1883 to 1946) and Friedrich Hayek (1899 to 1992). Keynes rejected the traditional laissez faire of classical liberalism andargued that, in the modern era, markets had to be managed by governments even if this meant deficit spending.  During World War II, Keynesian economics spread to many other countries and remained the most dominant economic theory in the Capitalist countries until the late 1970s.  

 

Friedrich von Hayek was born in Austria and taught at the London School of Economics.  He was diametrically opposed to socialism in any shape or form, but he also rejected Keynes’s ideas about governments regulating markets.  In his book, Prices and Production, published in 1931 he argued that the market could resolve all economic problems, even unemployment if the economy was allowed to unwind freely, aided by a little bit of tweaking of monetary policy.

 

In 1973 oil prices increased dramatically causing rapid inflation, stagnation, and falling growth rate in many rich countries.  Many economists, such as Milton Friedman and politicians, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, seized on von Hayek ideas, especially those which criticised any government interference in the market.  Suddenly public enterprises were bad, private enterprise was good. Governments were encouraged to privatize major segments of the economy.  Deregulation was also proclaimed as a way to free up entrepreneurial creativity to grow the economy.

 

Columban missionary saw these economic policies being forced upon the people of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s. The Chicago boys, as they were known, forced economic liberalization, privatization and other elements of neo-liberal economics on the people and environment of Chile, despite the fact that they were totally inappropriate .and led to debt, massive inequality and ecological disasters.

 

A Columban colleague, Fr. John Colgan, recalled living in poor parish in Santiago during these momentous years in the 1970s and early 1980s.  The shock economic policies threw tens of thousands of people out of work. With no unemployment benefits or support of any kind from the state, they faced hunger and starvation. He remembers feeding more than 1,000 people each day in the parish food kitchen.

 

In the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s I witnessed the impact of these neo-liberal economic policies by the IMF/World Bank, during the debt crisis from 1980s onward. They destroyed the poor and often crippled the government by deregulating major areas of the economy. They promoted ecological plunder of the country, firstly through the destruction of the tropical forests and, more recently, through opening the country to mining interests. 

 

The hegemony of this economic ideology permeated everything, even the debate on the environment.  Many people have seen Al Gore’s powerpoint, An Inconvenient Truth, but they might not realize that he led the US delegation to the Kyoto negotiations in December 1997.  A central focus of the US demands at Kyoto was that market mechanisms must be used to address the problems of climate. At least the economist Nicholas Stern had the courage to admit in his Report that climate change is the “greatest failure ever of market economics”. Hopefully at the UN Framework Climate Conference in Poland in December, we will now be spared such nonsense.  and, on the wider stage, we can now bury the ideology of neo-liberalism.  Let me state categorically that I am not against the market. It does some things quite well.  What I am against is the cultural supremacy of the market ideology; which is presented as the basis of value for everything.

 

The summer edition of your magazine, An Taisce, has an excellent article by Charles Hall entitled, “The need for a new paradigm of biophysical economics in the second half of the oil age.” On the practical level the government should engage in some Keynesian pump priming by investing heavily in energy efficiency and renewable forms of energy.

But what has all that got to do with religion and especially the texts we have chosen today?.  Quite a lot, I would suggest.  Ultimately, in the debate  for the past 200 years, between the relative importance of focusing on the individual or the society, neo-liberalism always champions the primacy of the individual  in a market economy.  Individual autonomy is sacrosanct

 

That perspective feeds into what is known as Domination Theology. This teaches that the commission in Genesis 1: 26 to 28, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it, meant that everything on earth had value only in so far as it served humans.  While modern scripture scholars will rightly deny that the Genesis text gives humans a license to plunder the planet, without any sense that they might be violating something sacred or, at least sinning gravely, the historian, Keith Thomas in his book, Man and the Natural World, tell us that is how the text was interpreted since the beginning of the scientific age in the 17^th century.

 

But are we autonomous actors in the market economy as neo-liberals would like us to believe? Definitely not, humans cannot be defined except globally and, indeed cosmically.  The American biologist Lewis Thomas was fond of pointing out, without the huge swarm of plant chloroplast and mitochondria swimming in our cells, we could neither breathe, move a muscle or think a thought. [1]  Quite literally, we are stardust, for without the star factories to convert hydrogen into helium and also create the heavier elements, there would be no oxygen in our lungs, no carbon in every living cell, no calcium in your bones or iron in the hemoglobin of our blood.  And by the way, the vast majority of us dipped into the Cretaceous and Carboniferous geological period to get the energy we needed to attend this Service this afternoon and cook our lunch. So, in fact, we live in a large biological, geological and even cosmological context. Unfortunately, our economics or theology has not caught up with that reality.

 

I choose the text from Genesis 9, because it tells us that our religion must be sensitive to all life and all creation.  The action of Noah taking two of each kind into the ark is very relevant to our times. We are witnessing the 6^th largest extinction of species since life began, 3.8 billion years ago.

 

The First reading tells us that, when God renewed the Covenant after the flood, it was not merely with humankind but with all creation. “I am now establishing my covenant with you and with all your descendants to come and with every living creature that was with you … and came out of the ark”.  The rainbow is the sign of that Covenant which Christians commemorate each time they celebrate the Eucharist. The Eucharist challenges us to share the goods of the Earth with everyone, especially the poor, and to be concerned for the wellbeing of all creatures.  But, how often do we leave a celebration of the Eucharist fortified by its social justice and ecological message.

 

The second Reading tells us that “God loved the world so much…..” I have a slightly different take on this text, I think, than the man who displays it on his placard behind the goals at many GAA games. I will reflect on this text briefly using the insights of probably the greatest Celtic theologian in the past 1,600 years.  His name is Duns Scotus, and he lived from 1266 to 1308.  This is the 700^th  anniversary of his death and I haven’t heard of a single event in Ireland to celebrate the life and work of this insightful  person.  I think that tells us something about the abysmal level of intellectual discourse here in Ireland.

 

Scotus was a Franciscan and his love for all reality was grounded in the Incarnation.  God, in Christ, became human, in other words, part of creation.  In true Franciscan culture – in contrast to neo-liberalism – every creature, no matter how small, or seemingly insignificant, is family -  brothers, sisters and cousins.   Apart from this Christ-dimension of everything, Scotus was very focused on concrete reality – the thisness or in Latin the - haeccietas - of everything. As the poet William Henry Davies puts it, “What is this life if,

If full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. No time to look at a beautiful Spring Gentian or a bloody cranesbill.

 

 Soctus’s view of creation transparent in Christ appealed enormously to the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. ,   One of his more familiar poems, God’s Grandeur, begins with the line, The World is charged with the grandeur of God.  Or Pied Beauty,

 

 

Unfortunately, the leadership of the Christian Churches here in Ireland has given little religious guidance on our current ecological crisis.  There have been some individual efforts, but no coherent endeavour to address pressing ecological issues from water pollution, through the extinction of species to climate change.

 

Part of the reason, as in the case of neoliberal economic, is that the framework for our God-talk, or theology is too narrow.  The Christian Churches, despite believing in God as Creator, in God who entered Creation in the Incarnation and in the Divine presence in the sacraments, are ambivalent about creation.  Out of one side of our mouths we say that we are stewards of God’s creation, out of the other side we say, our true home is in heaven.  We need to develop a coherent God-talk to underpin our teaching, prayers, worship and witness.  How can this happen when, to the best of my knowledge, not a single theological institute in any of the Churches teaches a course on ecological or creation theology? 

 

Bad theology can even be worse than bad economics.  Let me illustrate this from my own life.  As a missionary, I trained as an anthropologist and went to work among a tribe in the Philippines which had neither been touched by Christian or Muslim missionaries.  They are called the T’boli.  Their lives had been destroyed by huge logging concessions in the area starting in the 1960s.  We were there to help them with appropriate education and health care and, where possible, to stop the further destruction of their environment.  We did not proselytise, but we did talk about the spiritual and moral reality of the land and forest which was deep in their own religious beliefs.  Like any good religion, you need angles – good role models, and devils – bad role models.  Top of our devil list was the chain saw, because of the damage it did to the remaining forest. 

 

In the mid-1980s a Christian-fundamentalist group set up operations among the T’boli, on the other side of the mountain.  They learned the local language and within two years were producing religious literature.  Their first pamphlet began with the word, te sidek yo adat t’boli … “how terrible your T’boli culture is”.  They criticised T’boli culture, but my main objection was the underlying message that this world was not important.  According to their teaching, the main business of religion was to help us make our way safely to the next world.  Despite the words of the Our Father, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven, the challenges of this world in the area of justice and ecology were not important.  In fact they could be a distraction from the main business of religion.  I believed such doctrine is worse than chain saws, because it devalued the Earth, God’s creation, in the name of God’s Word.  This is the worst kind of heresy in the contemporary Church and we ought not to be slow in identifying it and challenging it. 

 

So, getting our religion right is as important as getting our economics right.  As I said the most serious ecological problem facing the earth is the massive extinction of species which is taking place in our times.  Within the next 40 years we could loose between one third and half of all species.  These include apis mellifera (the western honey bee and the, Salmo Salar, (Atlantic salmon).  Extinction, which means that we are sterilizing the biosphere, will have devastating and irreversible consequences for all life, including human life, yet, it has got minimal attention in both the secular or religious world.  The bells of this Church and all Christians Churches have rung hundreds of thousands of times in the past 2,000, but have they ever rung to mourn the extinction of  the great Auk, or the Bunnan Bui, or any other species heading over the precipice of extinction?  And our Churches claim to be pro-Life! But it is a very narrow understanding of life.   Will we devote the same amount of money to rescue our close relatives, as we will to bailing out the Banks?  No, because neither our economic or religious frameworks have given extinction of species much value.

 

The religious tragedy is, that both contemporary science and our Judeo-Christian Faith offers the contemporary Christian extraordinary resources for grounding our faith, our prayers, our worship and witness in protecting God’s creation.  We now know so much more about the process of creation, or as my good friend Dr. John Feehan, UCD, says about the content of God’s old diaries.  But, sadly apart from some of the school texts, the Churches have not done this in any effective way in Ireland.  We had better begin very soon, as time is running out.  What I am calling for, is a radical rethinking of our Religion and Economics.  That will not be easy but, as the great Lutheran theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, there is no cheap grace.  He had the courage to take his Christian faith seriously, in a difficult period of history, and to live up to his convictions.  Hopefully our Christian faith will empower us to do likewise, because what is at stake is the life of the World.  .

[1] Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York; Bantam, 1975, page 2ff.