Choosing Life
Notes for Sermon preached at St Ann, Belfield 2022 and used in much abbreviated form in a short reflection given in the High Court in my hearing after breaking the North Warwickshire injuction.
Why would any of us knowingly do something very likely to hasten our death ? If there was a cliff edge just ahead of you, and experts said there was a cliff edge, would you keep on walking ?
If your leaders said “Keep going, don't worry about the cliff, trust us not those who know all about what happens when you walk off a cliff, would you believe them ?
And when some people started falling off the cliff, and you saw pictures on the TV, would you keep following the leaders ?
Of course You wouldn’t !
Yet that is exactly what is happening today. We are heading towards disaster. Professor Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, says what we do in the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity. He’s talking about our survival as a species.
But still our leaders are walking us towards the cliff edge.
Leaders of nations have made these reckless choices before. The words of Deuteronomy 30.15-20 cry out to us.
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Wendy and I were arrested last week. Wendy spent just under 12 hours in Chelmsford Police station. I went to Basildon Police Station. This happened because we sat on an access road to an oil refinery. As we did that, we later learned, some others had been tunnelling under the same road. Astonishingly they are still there having spent 10 days underground. The purpose was to block access to the depot which distributes oil and petrol. This has not been achieved because the authorities have decided to continue to run 70 ton trucks overhead even tho’ there are people underneath, no supports or boarding.
Why risk your life in a tunnel ? Why sit on a road in front of an oil tanker? The papers often label such people as mad or bad. Please try and suspend your judgement and hear me out. Just Stop Oil has the simple demand that there should be no new oil projects. Respected scientists, the UN, the world bank all say there should be no new oil, gas or coal. But our government is planning over 40 new oil and gas projects.
They are saying come on, let’s walk faster. And like zombies we are following !
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.
Our vocation - as human beings, made in the image of God, is to choose life.
I interviewed the bishop of Bolton a few weeks ago. You can see it on YouTube. He spoke about his granddaughter. He wondered what sort of world she would grow up into. I wonder the same for my children and especially for my one grandchild.
The reading from Deuteronomy goes on to say that if we obey the commandments of the Lord ourGod, then we shall live and become numerous and the Lord will bless us.
There are good choices to be made. There is another way to live. We do not have to choose this path of death and destruction. The economy can be changed, redirected for life. Human beings can do great things. Consider how nations coped with COVID, supporting the weak, protecting the vulnerable. Or how the US economy was changed from making cars to aeroplanes and tanks to face the threat of war.
We do not have to be bewitched by the leaders who are leading us onto the cliff overhang. There is a way to a new life. It begins when each of us chooses life and resists the walk off the cliff edge.
Our Father in heaven loves us so much. How he must weep when he sees what we are doing. How we are held in mental captivity by false and dangerous gods. When I was arrested recently in April it was for holding a banner that had the words “Jesus Wept”. Many are weeping now because of the deaths that are caused in a hotter world.
Dorothy Soelle begins her book Choosing Life talking about the exile that Israel experienced in Egypt. They rather enjoyed the fleshpots of Egypt. They were slaves but they had sort of got accommodated to it. We in the wealthy industrial West do not feel that we are exiled from God, we have adapted ourselves to such an extent that in the very midst of Egypt under the domination of Pharaoh we feel quite at home. Referring to the passage from Deuteronomy 30:19 she says choosing life in the face of death means chiming in with the great yes to life that is God. She goes on to say that choosing life is the very capacity for not putting up with the routine destruction of Life. That routine cynicism that we are expected to follow.
Conclusion
(I’m not sure how I finished this sermon. Perhaps you, dear reader, can write/think of a conclusion that speaks to you ? )