Sermon for Big Green Week, Sunday 9 June 2024, St Peter’s Bramley.
Readings: Psalm 65; Matthew 25:14-30
This week, beginning today, is designated as Big Green Week. It’s a reminder to us that we live on a green planet. Well, actually a blue planet, as David Attenborough reminds us, since two-thirds of the world’s surface is ocean. But we’re not fish, we live on the land, not the sea.
The land and sea are incredibly diverse, along with the number of species they support. Just think of the different landscapes you can see in the UK: limestone pavements and saltmarshes, peatlands and ancient oak forests, freshwater streams, tidal rivers and the seas that surround us. Each habitat is home to more animals, plants and insects than you have probably ever heard of. Have you ever heard of the ‘twait shad’? No neither had I until I was reading up for this talk. It’s a freshwater fish that lives in the River Severn.
Creation – whether blue or green – is good. Psalm 65 which we read together earlier tells us that God revels in his creation. Throughout the Bible we read of a people who live close to the land, enjoying a mostly regular pattern of sowing and reaping. Winter was followed by spring, rain watered the earth, crops grew, the sun shone, crops were harvested and people gave thanks. Until very recently in historical terms – until perhaps the last two hundred years – that was still the case. In some places it still is: I photographed this farmer with his horse-drawn cart of hay as recently as 1995, in Romania. It illustrates beautifully Psalm 65 verse 11: “your carts overflow with abundance”.
Since the Industrial Revolution, farming has become more ‘efficient’ in the sense that more tonnes of food can be grown on each acre of land, and it can be sold around the world rather than just at the local market. This has many benefits, not least giving us the vast choice that we find in the supermarket, and enabling billions of people to be fed.
But we’re only now realising the downsides of this industrial-scale farming. To grow so much food for so many people means felling ancient forests to grow crops, much of which is used to feed the animals that in turn become the meat on our plates. It means using pesticides and insecticides that threaten many species with extinction. It means keeping animals in cramped conditions indoors fed on grain, rather than grazing in the fields as the adverts might lead us to believe.
This isn’t sustainable. Intensive agriculture using chemicals – the way that farmers manage our land – leads to degradation of the soil – less food being grown each year. Along with climate change which has disrupted long-term pattern of rainfall, it means that one in six of all species of wild animal in the UK is at risk of extinction , whether it’s dormice or grasshoppers, turtle doves or indeed twait shads. You may have noticed there are a lot fewer insects in the summer these days, and insects are important for pollinating both crops and other plants.
What has all this to do with us, here in church? Well, we believe in a God who has created this world with its awesome diversity of life. The book of Genesis tells us that everything God created is good. And that he has given us – humans – the responsibility of looking after it. When we fail to do so, that is sin.
You may think, “I don’t go round chopping down trees or poisoning rivers, I don’t shoot wild birds or spray pesticides”. But there is such a thing as corporate sin. Simply by buying the cheapest food available (grown using pesticides), or flying off on holiday (which contributes to climate change), we are each in a small way guilty of playing a small part in this decline of the natural world.
Does it matter? Yes, it does. At a purely material level, this is unsustainable. Fewer insects means that plants don’t get pollinated. Polluted rivers means it costs more to make our water drinkable, and so on.
But it’s also a spiritual issue that affects our relationship with God. The parable that Jesus told about the three servants who used their master’s money in different ways is about the Day of Judgement. On that day, whether we are still alive or have already died, we will be asked to account not only for our faith in God but also for how we have lived. God will ask us, have we been faithful servants loving our global neighbours? And what have we done with what he has given us?
The parable of the Talents is not about how much we start with but how we use it. The servant who had one talent was not criticised for starting with less than the one who had five. What mattered was that he had done nothing with it. With Jesus, ‘Do nothing’ is not an option. It falls to each and every one of us to use whatever we have to restore the earth’s diversity and productivity.
But what are our resources, our talents, in this context? I’m going to suggest three actions that we each might consider taking:
First, use whatever land we own. You may have a garden or allotment, where you can grow your own food. That’s wonderful. Or instead of growing food, you might choose to plant flowers that attract bees and other pollinators.
Many of us, living in a city, don’t have that option. Instead, we have purchasing power. We all buy food, so let’s consider how we can buy ethically. Consider this acronym: LOAF. It stands for “Local, Organic, Animal friendly, Fairtrade”.
Food grown locally has the lowest carbon footprint, the least impact on the environment. That may mean literally buying from a local farm, but even if it just means buying British food in season and refusing to buy meat and fruit that has been flown across the world, that all helps.
Organic food is that which has been grown without artificial fertilisers or pesticides. It means that insects, birds and other animals can flourish alongside the crops that are grown for food. It may be more expensive in the short term – and I recognise that not everyone can afford the extra cost of organic food – but the long term cost in terms of the health of our ecosystem is greater.
‘Animal friendly’ means vegetarian or vegan food. Many people are turning to this, either for health reasons or because of the cruelty that many farm animals suffer. There’s also a good argument that farmland is used more efficiently by growing crops that humans eat directly, rather than growing grain to feed animals that become the meat on our plates. I’ll put my hand up here and admit that I do still eat meat, though less than I used to. You may wish to start by just eating vegetarian a couple of days a week.
The F in LOAF stands for Fairtrade. Most of the world’s farmers are at the bottom end of a global supply chain. They earn very little and live in poverty; farm workers in many places are young children or slaves. The Fairtrade system works with local co-operatives and ensures that farmers are paid a decent price for their crop and don’t exploit their workers. On top of that, they are paid a premium that their local community can use as it sees fit, perhaps for building a school or installing a water supply. Another benefit, relevant to what we’re thinking about today, is that Fairtrade farmers are educated in sustainable farming practices that help to reverse the loss of fertile soil. There are other schemes such as Rainforest Alliance that seek to achieve the same aims. So if you can, do look out for those marks on supermarket shelves.
The third way we can respond to this environmental crisis, beyond growing our own food and thinking carefully about what we buy, is to use our vote. We know that climate change will impact all our lives greatly in the coming years. Yet with the General Election coming up in the next month, it is the ‘elephant in the room’ which is not being talked about in political debate.
Election candidates are thinking about the next four weeks to the election, or the five years to the one after that. But urgent action is needed to plan for long term policy over ten, twenty, fifty years, if climate disaster is to be avoided.
One way we can address this is to sign up to the Vote Climate campaign which seeks to put tackling climate change at the top of the agenda. This is a non-party-political movement that asks you to agree to vote for whichever candidate in our constituency is judged by the people behind it to have the most positive responses to questions about environmental policy, even if that’s not the party you usually vote for. Just look for VoteClimate.uk.
Well, this has been a talk about some very practical things: growing food, buying food, using our vote. People of all faiths and none are concerned about the environment and looking to do something about it. But what is our particular focus as Christians? As followers of Jesus, we seek always to work with God. The God who told us, in the words of the prophet Micah, to ”Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly with our God”. What matters most, Jesus said, is to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. That’s not just your neighbour next door but also your global neighbour, the person across the world who grows the food that you buy.
What matters isn’t the detail of what we do – God isn’t going to condemn you if you can’t afford to buy Fairtrade or don’t have a garden to grown your own food – but the intention behind our actions. So if I can summarise, I’m asking you to use whatever land or money God has given you in a wise way. To think about the impact of the food you buy, both the impact on the environment and on the people who grow it. And to take advantage of the upcoming election to get the environment on the agenda, because it’s only at a national and international level that large-scale changes can be made.
Amen.