A word of warning: today I intend to preach a weird sermon.
That’s because recently I learnt that I come from a weird country. Indeed, I have lived all my life in weird countries. We are living in a weird country: Britain and Italy are both examples of weird countries. Let me explain what I mean. Weird is an acronym: WEIRD. Weird countries are Western, educated, industrialised, and can anyone guess what the R stands for? Pause. And the D?
And you know what is so clever about this acronym? On the one hand it is an accurate description of what part of our late 20th and early 21st-century world looks like – the privileged part. Anyone who has been born into, grown-up in, and lived in a weird country in the last 70 years has been living in a golden age. On the other hand the very word weird suggests an anomaly: weird just isn’t normal.
Here in today’s gospel, Jesus is giving his disciples the chilling description of normal: ‘then he said to them, ‘nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues: and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.’ Much of the world for the last 2,000 years has been living this kind of ‘normality’.
There was also something weird about the great temple in Jerusalem. This was Herod the Great’s shiny new mega temple. The Second Temple had been built when the Jewish people returned from exile in Babylon. Then, between 20 and 10 BC, that is to say between fifty and forty years before this conversation between Jesus and his disciples takes place, it had been given a make-over. It was rebuilt and enlarged. Now it was all bling and glitz. There was so much gold on the new facade that you couldn’t even look at it in the midday sun. Herod, who came from a family of outsiders, rebuilt the Temple in an attempt to convince the Jewish nation of his family’s legitimacy. He rebuilt it by imposing exorbitant taxes. Jesus knew that Herod’s temple was weird and that it wasn’t going to last. Indeed, in less than forty years Jesus’s prediction would come to pass: not one stone would be left standing on another. In 70 AD, after the Jewish revolt, the Romans would utterly destroy Herod’s Temple, and the Temple in Jerusalem would be gone for ever.
So let us come to the present day, and to what is normal and what is weird. Weird, remember, is safe. Weird is privileged. Weird is glitz and bling. Weird is an anomoly. Normal is catastrophe. Normal is kingdom against kingdom, normal is famines and plagues. Normal is – to use another acronym – SNAFU. ‘Situation Normal All Fouled Up’.
I can remember when in October 2007, when I saw a chilling interview with Michael Fish. Do any of you remember Michael Fish? He was the BBC’s leading weatherman from 1974 to 2004, and such a mild, likeable character that he became something of a national institution. 2007 was the 20th anniversary of the Great Storm, Britain’s most destructive hurricane, and he was being interviewed because he had famously not predicted it, or rather, he had denied that there would be anything to worry about. At the end of the interview he was asked what he thought of global warming. Mild-mannered, charming Mr Fish looked straight into the camera and he said: ‘Have you any idea what humanity has passed through in the 20th century: the world wars, the death camps, the genocides? Well, it’s nothing compared to what we are going to suffer in the 21st century as a result of global warming.’
That for me was a wake up call: a moment when the sleepy ease of Weird was interrupted by the alarm clock of normal SNAFU. The disciples had a similar moment when they admired Herod’s shiny new Temple only for Jesus to tell them that one day soon not one stone would be left standing upon another.
So what does Jesus tell his disciples to do? If we look at today’s gospel again, we can see that he gives them three pieces of advice: do not be led astray; do not be terrified; and testify.
Do not be led astray. There are those who say there is no global overheating. Who tell us we can buy bigger, sleeker cars, and that we only have to put up a few walls for our weird societies to prosper for ever. In other words, it’s the alarmists who are leading us astray. Hand on my heart, I doubt it.
Do not be terrified. Sometimes, it’s hard not to be. Let’s face it: Jesus’s description of the apocalypse, whether it refers to the destruction of Jerusalem a generation after he lived, to our own predicament, or to the endless succession of wars, plagues, and famines of the last two millennia, is terrifying. Why shouldn’t we be terrified? There seem to be very few grounds for optimism. Optimism, however, has never been the Christian way. Optimism is the belief that the worst will not happen. Optimism is the belief that if we make our best efforts we will muddle through. Instead of optimism we have a promise: that in the worst times, God’s presence will continue to be with us. Although the world was flooded, God led Noah to build an ark. Although Israel was enslaved, God led the Israelites out of Egypt. Although Christ was crucified, Mary Magdalene discovered his tomb empty on the morning of the third day. Solutions and resolutions occurred, often despite the fear, the back-sliding, and the inertia of most of those involved. So instead of optimism, let us have hope. Hope is based on God’s actions, not ours. That does not mean we needn’t do anything – quite the opposite. But it does mean that there is always something more in play than just ourselves.
And finally, we must testify. To testify means to talk about the end of our weird and comfortable world: to talk about the enormity of the problems posed by our destabilised climate. Before we can talk about it, we need to be thinking about it, we need to be informed about the new normal.
So may I end with two – admittedly very small – practical suggestions: the first is to look at the Caring for Creation policy on the Diocese in Europe’s website – that’s one way to begin focussing on climate change, and what we, as a church can do to counter it. The other is to consider giving up meat during Advent. As I’m sure you are aware, Livestock farming is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing meat consumption can lower your carbon footprint and environmental impact. I can see a time coming when the churches will resurrect the medieval practice of fasting from meat in Advent and Lent, as the Orthodox churches still continue to do to this day. So why not stay ahead of the curve and consider fasting from meat this Advent?