Climate Change

Su Wk 2, OT, Year C

Do you know what I wish? What I wish above all things: To be a little more honest in my care for the environment. To be not only worried about what we are doing to the planet, but turn that negative concern into positive action. I have to be honest here. When I heard about the terrible scandal of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia scientists, I immediately thought it proved that all this nonsense about climate change is just that: Nonsense; no sense at all; just someone’s opinion. Not even based on scientific fact. Anyway, if the planet is undergoing ‘global warming’ how come it’s been so cold? Why has there been so much snow? I was reading an article in the newspaper recently asking this very question. There is a difference, I read, between weather and climate change. They are not the same thing! NASA says “the difference between weather and climate is a measure of time.” Just because it snowed last week doesn’t mean our actions are not over heating the planet!

The prophet Isaiah, we hear, is still ‘banging on’ about Jerusalem. He tells us he ‘will not be silent’ and ‘will not grow weary, until her integrity shines out’. He sounds a little like those environmentalists who will not be silenced until we all start listening and acting. Until we all do just a little something to help protect the world which God created. Our bishops have asked us, today, to remember peace. This is Peace Sunday, and there is a prayer card available to all. The Pope, in his message for World Peace, says simply “if you want to cultivate peace, protect creation.” I’m beginning to think it’s gone past thinking about it, talking about or even contemplating it. What we need now is action. Let’s get on with protecting creation. Let’s be proper stewards of creation as God asked us to do way back in the beginning. There’s nothing new here. Like Isaiah, we cannot stop until the beauty of creation shines out; until the will of God is fulfilled.

God’s will being fulfilled is precisely the point that John makes in his telling of the Wedding Feast of Cana. There are many, many rich and wonderful allusions, in this passage of scripture, to the price Jesus will pay to redeem our sins. Is it not strange that he should speak of his mother as ‘woman’? Surely Jesus would say, “mum, my hour has not yet come”, until we realise that John’s next reference to Mary with this title of ‘woman’ is at the foot of the cross when she will witness more surely what her Son’s hour means. Woman, this is your Son, he will say as the full price of his hour is made clear: his passion, death and resurrection. The fruit, of course, of He who is, is wine in plenty. Both the prophets Amos and Joel speak of wine in plenty during the Messianic times. Think, for a moment, about the quantity of water that has been transformed into wine. We hear that there were six jugs of thirty gallons. That is over 1400 pints, or the equivalent of over 600 bottles of wine. That’s a pretty big wedding and not bad for a small village in Galilee.

At the wedding feast there is one person who is the key for us to consider, today. Is it Jesus, the miracle worker? Is it Mary, the woman who intercedes for us? Is it the servants, those who carry out the instructions of Jesus? No, it is the steward. The steward is the one who determines that the first of the signs has been enacted. If we are to be, as we were created so to be, the stewards of creation then we are the ones who are to determine if peace is reigning? We are the ones who the pope is encouraging to protect creation in order that we can cultivate peace. So for me, my wish is to be a little more honest in my care for the environment; to turn my negative concern into positive action. I wonder, what is your role as a steward of creation? How are you to live out your role as the bringer of peace?