In these talks you’re used to me making a disclaimer about ‘the’ Christian attitude to our topics. It must be very irritating for the Muslims here when I’m forever saying, ‘Well, some Christians think this and some Christians think that’. Can’t you make up your mind? you must wonder. Well, I’m sorry to say that today’s topic is even worse than usual, because the question of ‘the environment’ as we understand it could not have concerned our ancestors in the faith. We live in a world about which we know far more than they did: the centuries and millennia it has already been in existence; the variety and interconnectedness of its species; the fragility of its ecosystems and the dangers that we human beings pose to it.

The very word ‘environment’ in our sense is not in the Bible, or in the work of Christians before the second half of the twentieth century. So Christians are divided on how to deal with environmental questions along political lines, conservative and radical, rather than Catholic and Protestant. These are new concerns for our times, and my own views cannot represent all Christians, though they come from the heart of my faith.

Yet though Christians may be divided on what the environment means to us as people of faith, we still start by asking the same basic questions: where did it come from? what is its relationship to the God we worship? how do we and how should we relate to it? So since I cannot follow my normal course in these talks of starting with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and then following on through centuries of Christian thought, instead I will deal with our topic under five themes: Creation; Providence; Suffering; Incarnation and Stewardship.

When I speak of our environment – not only the human environment in which each of us lives, but every part of nature from the cultivated to the wild – and give it the name of ‘creation’, I’m giving the game away. For Christians, like Jews and Muslims, believe that the universe is not a random collection of atoms strung together by chance, but the creation of a good God, who describes everything that is as good. And because we believe that what is made says something about its maker, Christians look at the universe, the regularity and complexity of the patterns we find there and the diversity of its inhabitants, and marvel at the God who could bring all this into being.

People used to think that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that we humans were the centre and summit of creation. Now we know more of how far the universe stretches and the variety of life within it, we realise that we were like toddlers who believe themselves to be the most important people in the family. Each of us, made, as Christians believe, in God’s own image, is uniquely cherished by God; but Christian maturity involves realising that every star, every speck of dust is also precious, and that God has other concerns beside human beings – after all, we weren’t even around for the first few million years of creation!

You may be wondering how the millions of years the astrophysicists and geologists tell us preceded our own arrival on earth ties in with the story at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible in Genesis, of God creating the world in six days. For centuries people who did not split up story and fact the way we do took Genesis to be an account of reality. As people began to study the book of nature as carefully as the book of God, though, new observations about the universe made by scientists both with and without faith – for example, that the earth moved around the sun – meant that it made sense to see the beginning of Genesis no longer as a list of facts in a scientific textbook, but rather as a poem about our God: not one of the heavenly bodies, rocks, trees or rivers worshipped as gods by other peoples, but the creator of them all.

Our ancestors often concluded from Genesis that human beings were the peak of creation, and that God’s providence or guiding care for us was shown in creation, there to provide all our wants. Yet though we read in one of the psalms, poems in the Hebrew Bible, that God has dug the earth’s foundations and watered it in order to give wine, oil and bread to gladden human hearts, we hear in the same poem that God has made grass grow for cattle, trees for birds to nest in, mountains for the wild goats to roam, even prey for young lions to consume. We are not the only ones benefiting from God’s providence!

That last example also demonstrates the downside of looking for God through creation. It is easy to see God’s providence in a sunny day. It was much harder when the recent floods drowned children and ruined workplaces. It is easy to think when our environment is pleasant that this must mean God is pleased with us. It is even easier to believe in ourselves as God’s favourites who can do anything we like with creation when those with worse environments are on the other side of the world, and we cannot see the damage we are doing to them. But from observing our environment we learn about suffering as well as providence.

There are Christians, bishops among them, who see environmental disasters – floods, earthquakes, drought, hurricanes and so on – as God’s judgment on sinful human beings. I see three difficulties with this understanding. Firstly, Christians believe that God is love. While I can understand that a loving parent may need to punish children to save them from greater disaster, to send floods or earthquakes flattening whole cities speaks more of a god who delights in the suffering of others than of the good God whom I love and try to serve. Secondly, the so-called punishment involved in environmental disaster seems so unbalanced compared with the crime. How could anyone be wicked enough to deserve such devastation, even over a whole lifetime? Not to mention the animals destroyed in such circumstances, which cannot be guilty of anything. And thirdly, it often seems to be the human innocents who suffer for the sins of others: people who are too poor to live in safe areas, or to get away when others are escaping; children who have done nothing worthy of punishment; nations in the developing world who suffer from the effects of global warming caused by consumer lifestyles in Europe and North America. No: when environmental disaster strikes, I believe that God is not in the heavens, hurling down thunderbolts, but in the middle of devastation, suffering with the world God loves.

Sorry, I think I got into preaching mode there!

If that’s creation, providence and suffering: what about Incarnation?

This is the technical term for what Christians believe happened two thousand years ago: that God became human, living among us as Jesus of Nazareth. I know, from questions I have heard at previous dialogues, how difficult this is for Muslims, the idea of associating anyone with God. And when we are considering the environment, the embarrassment of this idea to faith is sharply focussed; for Christians believe that God came into creation, that Christ, through whom every atom was made, now like every other human being had a body made of atoms – a body which made him subject to limitation, weakness and death. Christians honour and love Jesus for deliberately becoming humble in this way, coming down to our level – and we believe that because God has chosen to become part of the material world, our environment is itself worthy of respect.

It was part of the Greek religion that was around when Christianity began to believe that the spiritual is good and the material is bad; sometimes Christianity has been infected by this understanding. And I can see why. Bodies are messy things, not totally under our control. The environment, in a bigger way, is the same. We would like to have it clean and neat, sanitised. But that is not how God has chosen to create it. And by coming into the mess of our chaotic environment, both human and natural, God has transformed it, making it holy too.

As well as becoming part of the natural world in incarnation, Jesus used the environment as a teaching aid in many of his stories. He spoke of seeds growing into huge plants, birds nesting in trees, flowers more beautiful than the king’s clothing, fish taken in nets, wheat and weeds together in the fields, vines and sheep. This may be coincidental, given that he was in an agricultural community where people lived much closer to the natural environment than many of us would today. Nowadays he might be speaking in Broomhall of traffic jams and community police, getting shopping and playing football. But his pictures of growing things still speak to our hearts. And right at the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation when it describes the city of God that is heaven, speaks of trees of life growing on either side of the river of the water of life, trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Even in heaven, the natural environment is still part of God’s new creation.

Going back to where I began, with the opening of the book of Genesis, there are two stories of creation. In the first, human beings are commanded to have dominion over all the fish, birds and animals of the earth; but in the second, the first human being is commanded to look after the garden of Eden, to be its gardener. So the idea of dominion, Lordship over creation, is in tension with the idea of stewardship, working to protect creation. Through most of Christian history dominion has won the fight, to the extent that some environmentalists blame the church for the human habit of taking what we want from the earth without considering the price of our consumption. Such a conclusion forgets – as Christians are also prone to do – that Jesus, whom we call our Lord, showed us that those who lead must serve.

But from the beginning there have also been people who saw God’s creation as good quite apart from its role in God’s providence to us. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, there is a regulation that in times of war, fruit trees should not be cut down – are they human beings that you want to destroy them? the text asks. In the Middle Ages, a Christian monk called Francis in Italy taught people to treat the environment with respect, as if we were all related to the earth. And, as created beings, we are indeed all related to the earth as well as to one another.

But that’s all theory – so how do Christian beliefs work out when it comes to the nitty gritty? In little things. Our own church community recycles paper, aluminium cans, postage stamps and printer cartridges, and I know that members of the church also recycle glass and plastics. We try to use heat and light sparingly. Church members tend the garden you see as you go past, as well as the little walled garden the children use. When the church boiler which died in the recent floods is replaced, we will be making sure it is energy-efficient.

That may sound rather dry, but church members also go on monthly walks together, to appreciate the beauties of creation we see around us more than is possible when you’re down on your hands and knees weeding it! One of our members is an expert on butterflies, tracking their movements as the climate changes. Another family has chosen not to buy a car, and instead cycle to church and back from Hillsborough – a very impressive feat!

In many ways we take seriously our task to look after our God-created environment: partly because God made it and loves it; partly because Jesus chose to enter both the glory and the mess of the environment by having a human body, and partly because through creation’s beauty God’s Spirit gives us a glimpse of God that we will only see fully in heaven, and through creation’s suffering, which Paul calls birth pangs of the new creation we look for from God, we can share and so lighten one another’s pain.