This month the Ethics Centre embarks on an adventure: a year of living ethically, if you will. Our intention is to supply resources to help you and your corps / church community deal with ethical questions and moral dilemmas that may be pressing in on you, or perhaps you ought to be thinking more about. Each month will bear with it a new topic for your consideration and new resources for your use.  This is an ongoing project, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions for additional resources or themes.  Please check back over the following weeks to see what resources have been added to the mix.

In this season of Thanksgiving, we begin with one of our favourite ethical issues, a hot topic these days: human responsibility for the earth.

In Christian teaching, much is made of getting saved so we can exit this planet for eternal bliss in Heaven, which is understood as a spiritual “place” for disembodied souls. But what if the faithful are not meant for that kind of heaven? What if we were designed to stay right here?  Understanding salvation differently might make us take another look at the world around us. Could it also change the way we treat the earth?

To be sure, salvation is about rescue. But what if Jesus was talking about rescue from oppression and injustice and the sin that is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of society that people can hardly see anymore what it right and true and good?  What if Jesus wasn’t talking about personal blessings and sweet escape for you and your friends when he said that he had come to save us? What if Jesus’ sermons are better understood as describing the here and now instead of the hereafter? Read them again and think about it.

Look closer and you’ll see that Jesus wanted to redeem this world and everything in it; he wanted to make all created things new. Jesus intended to establish the kingdom of God on earth; which is great for you and me, being that we are part of creation, connected to the earth. We were once created from scratch in the garden, we were instructed to live for the garden, and we were carefully designed to be nurtured and sustained by the garden. The good news is that God intends to make a new heaven and a new earth when he comes again. The garden of Eden will be remade as a garden city and God will come to live with us (see Revelation 21, 22).

For too long we’ve been acting like the earth and its inhabitants have an expiration date, as if God is going to scrap the whole thing and start again. But the story of the Bible doesn’t support that idea and we’ve been hastening the earth’s demise rather than fulfilling the divine invitation to care for our garden home and help it to flourish and give glory to its Maker.

In politics and the media, a lot has been made of “going green.” Scientists, whistle-blowers and doomsday theorists are raising the alarm. But the apostle Paul has been crying out with the same sad story since he wrote his letter to the Romans. We don’t need to listen to the news to know that there is something wrong. The very earth is groaning as in the pains of child birth when it ought to be praising the Lord.

Shouldn’t those of us who know God and how he works be on the front lines of a move to slow the destruction of the earth? Shouldn’t those of us who follow the simple yet transformative ways of Jesus of Nazareth care most about a suffering world?

To link to some worship aids on this topic, please click here.