Christ the King Last after Pentecost, November 25 2012 2 Samuel 23.1-7; Revelation 1.4b-8; John 18.33-37 Rev.

Praic Ramonn

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now (Mark 13.8, 17-19) It was the first Sunday of Advent. In Oldhamstocks parish church in the Scottish county of East Lothian, James Robertson was reading, as I have just been doing, the little apocalypse from Mark 13. But halfway through, he stopped. He couldnt go on. Afterwards he apologised. As a British officer during the Second World War, he had seen enough suffering, death and destruction to last him a lifetime. 50 million people died in that war. Millions more were wounded in body, mind or spirit. Many millions were left homeless. The casualties of climate change, if we do not act quickly to halt and reverse it, will be much, much worse. * My kingdom is not from this world, says Jesus. John doesnt mean that the kingdom of Christ is other-worldly, leaving the earth to stew in its own juice. John is talking about the kind of kingdom Christs is. It is a kingdom that advances not by force but by witnessing to the truth. The story Christians tell begins with God creating the earth and appointing us his stewards to care for it. We dont make a very good job of that; and this is what John means by the world: not the created world, but the world in rebellion against God. Jews at the time of Jesus expected God to act to put this world to rights. Jesus saw this as beginning with him with his own life and work, and his death on a cross and ending in a future fulfilment. We live in between those two moments. Today, on the last Sunday before Advent, we celebrate Christ the King. This feast was invented by Pius XI in 1925, in part to say that Christ was king and Mussolini wasnt. In 1970, Paul VI moved it to its present place in our calendar and renamed it the feast of Christ, King of the Universe. Tom Wright protests. The proper feast of Christ the King is Ascension, he says. Any suggestion that Christ only becomes king at the end of a long post-Ascension process is unwarranted. The risen and ascended Christ is already king. The firstborn of the dead is already ruler of the kings of the earth (Revelation 1.5). But there is a difference in the way Christ is already king and the way Christ will be king when all is fulfilled; and it is in the first place a difference in us. We pray each Sunday, Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are praying that the Father will so align humanity with his purposes that his kingdom will be visible among us, here on earth. If we are serious in our prayer, this begins with us aligning ourselves with Gods will, getting (as they say) with the programme.

2 There is a paradox at the heart of our story, a tension between what God does and what we do. We can resolve the paradox in theory by showing there is no contradiction between the grace of God and human freedom. But it is more important to resolve it in practice. From opposite ends of the 16th-century Reformation, John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, argued that we should act as if everything depended on us as, in a sense, it does but await the future as if everything depended on God as indeed it does. As indeed it must, because there are two things we cannot do for ourselves. We cannot free ourselves from sin, from our deep-rooted inclination to make a mess of our lives and our planet; and we cannot raise ourselves from the dead. * Why is our climate changing? And why are the consequences of change liable to be as catastrophic as I just suggested? Anyone in the congregation who happens to be a climate scientist should probably cover her ears at this point or at least try hard not to scream. My veranda is a kind of greenhouse. If I sit there at this time of year, I need to turn the heating on, but in the summer, I need to open the windows. It absorbs more and more heat from the summer sun, and the double glazing gives the heat nowhere to go. The earth is a bit like my veranda. It absorbs radiation from the sun and radiates it back into space. But the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are a little bit like the double glazing. These gases water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane and nitrous oxide make it harder for the radiation to escape. The mechanisms are quite different, but the effect is the same. Fundamentally, this greenhouse effect is a good thing. Without some greenhouse gases to trap heat in our atmosphere, our planet would be too cold for us to inhabit. But we can have too much of a good thing. When the concentration of greenhouse gases is too high, our planet gets too hot, and there are no windows to open. For 10,000 years, this was not a problem. Until relatively recently, our atmosphere contained about 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide, neither too much nor too little. But around about 1750, the industrial revolution began. It spread from Great Britain to Western Europe, North America, Japan, and ultimately the rest of the world. This too was fundamentally a good thing. It took us out of a world of subsistence and survival into a world of comfort and plenty. To be sure, the benefits are shared most unevenly. The wealthy elites who run our world 1% or even 0.1% of the population show time and again they havent the faintest idea how to behave responsibly; and far too many people in our world still live on the equivalent of one or two dollars a day. But the biggest problem is that industrialization has been fuelled by coal, joined more recently by oil and gas. Burning these fossil fuels pumps more and more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. Five years ago, James Hansen summed up the results of many decades of scientific research: To avoid catastrophic climate change we need to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to 350 parts per million. Today, the concentration of carbon dioxide is 392 parts per million, and every year it rises by another two parts. We are already over the limit, and this is changing our climate in ways we can already see. When Hurricane Sandy killed dozens of people this month and caused perhaps $50bn

3 in economic losses, Businessweek wrote in large characters on its front cover, Its global warming, stupid. We need to wean ourselves off coal and oil and gas. The International Energy Agency said this month that no more than one-third of the proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050: two-thirds must stay in the ground. But it has good news as well as bad. Energy efficiency could halve the growth in global primary energy demand to 2035. The IEA also notes that subsidies to fossil fuels amounted to $523 billion in 2011, up almost 30% on 2010 and six times more than subsidies to renewable: we need to reverse that priority. The World Bank spelt out this month the devastating consequences of a world that is warmed by 4C which is what scientists predict by the end of the century, without a dramatic change in direction now. Turn down the heat, it urged. But we dont have to choose between halting climate change and promoting development for the worlds poorest people: work on inclusive green growth has shown that through more efficiency and smarter use of energy and natural resources many opportunities exist to drastically reduce the climate impact of development, without slowing down poverty alleviation and economic growth. Indeed, lack of action on climate change is the real danger: it not only risks putting prosperity out of reach of millions of people in the developing world, it threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development. Fixing climate change is technically and economically feasible, the World Bank says. But what actually happens will be a result of government, private sector, and civil society decisions and choices, including, unfortunately, inaction. * So what is to be done? We have, I suggest, three tasks before us. We must learn all we can about climate change, so that next time Ian or I preach on climate change its clear just how much we are oversimplifying. Like the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane or rather, not so much like the disciples in Gethsemane, who fell asleep on the job we must watch and pray. And we must act. Decisions are made by those who show up. Many of us find ourselves in the odd position of living in one of the worlds most democratic countries but without the right to vote. We are strangers in this land. But we still have voices. Often we live in places where public transport is difficult, if not impossible: we can ask for that to change. We can encourage politicians and businesses when they do the right thing and protest loudly when they do not. Think of Scottish politicians, who are wrestling with the challenge of making Scottish energy production carbon-neutral by the end of this decade, and of UK politicians who are backing away from the challenge of doing the same by 2030. Think of politicians in the United States, a country that far exceeds Europe in carbon emissions per capita and has done little or nothing to change course. And think about the fossil fuel companies. They will not change unless we force them to. Recently, a campaign began in the US to disinvest from fossil fuel companies. Hit them in their pocketbook, and they may wake up. * Ive been trying to do two things this morning. First, to scare the pants off you because unless we are scared by climate change, we are sleepwalking through history. But second, to say in the words printed in large characters on the cover of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, dont panic!

4 All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, says Julian of Norwich. This is still Gods world, and God will bring it to fulfilment. Rubem Alves puts it like this: Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is dancing to that melody today. Faith proves itself in action. If we are to turn down the heat, if we are to dance to the melody of Gods future, we need to turn around: to live in right relationship with God, with our neighbours, and with our endangered planet.

References NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays. Reflections on Bible Readings Year B (London: SPCK, 2002) Tom Wright, John for Everyone Part 2 (London: SPCK, 2002) Paul M. Barrett, Its Global Warming, Stupid, www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-1101/its-global-warming-stupid The cover is here: Joe Romm, Bloomberg Businessweek: Its Global Warming, Stupid, Nov 1 2012, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/01/1122241/bloomberg-businessweek-itsglobal-warming-stupid/ 350 Science, www.350.org/about/science World Energy Outlook 2012. International Energy Agency. See www.worldenergyoutlook.org/ Executive Summary: www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf World Bank, Turn Down the Heat. Why a 4C warmer world must be avoided. November 2012. climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centri grade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf Obstacles threaten Scotland's 100% green electricity target, MSPs warn, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/23/scotland-green-energy-target Ed Miliband commits Labour to 2030 decarbonisation target, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/22/ed-miliband-labour-decarbonisation-energy

Further reading Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Third Assessment Report, 2001; Fourth Assessment Report, 2007. (The Fifth Assessment Report is due in 2013.) The IPCC, established in 1988 by UNEP (the UN environment programme) and the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) and endorsed by the UN general assembly, reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding climate change. Thousands of scientists worldwide contribute to the work. The reports are technical, but the summaries for policymakers are easy to read. (Well, they would have to be: theyre for policymakers.) See www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#1 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (London: Penguin, 2007) Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) See also www.merchantsofdoubt.org