It’s been a confusing week, one way or another. With all the fallout from the Charlie Kirk assassination, and then this parable. Who knows what it means? Someone yesterday suggested I should have changed the NT reading, but it is one of those Anglican superstitions that you try to struggle with what you have, as though God has decreed this Sunday shall be Luke 16.

So I decided to start with the Old Testament reading.

 In this season, we are alternating between Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is lamenting the state of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel, the beloved of the 12 tribes: the one that has Jerusalem, the so-called city of peace.

The northern kingdom had already fallen to the Assyrians in 722BC, around the time that Isaiah was writing. After that, the sense of doom increases as Judah awaits a similar fate, with several incursions before the final destruction of Jerusalem and exile takes place in 586BC, when it is ransacked by the Babylonians and Jews are taken into captivity. Jeremiah is at that stage near the end of his life. He had prophesied and warned Judah for 40 years. While also giving a message of hope and of images of restoration in between the warnings.

 Interestingly, this is a very fertile dynamic time of history, sometimes known as the axial age. At that stage, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Greek philosophers, and Daoists are all challenging their people with more universal ideas of how we should behave and of the natural world and its laws.

 The Jews, though,  wonder how all this turbulence and instability squares with being the chosen people of God?  Jeremiah tries to warn them ahead of time. He has many reasons why.  But as is often the case, warnings are not heeded. Really humans are terribly bad at warnings. We are much better at picking up the pieces after the disaster has happened.

He expresses not only warning but urgency and also a deep identification with his people:

My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.

 And the call of the people:

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

And identification again:

For the brokenness of the daughter of my people, I am broken, I mourn, and horror has seized me.

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?

O that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!

 There is a strange juxtaposition of present tense and warning, and of different voices as Jeremiah continued to be edited in the years of exile. And as we hear from the people, Yahweh and Jeremiah in a somewhat interchangeable way.

 The cause seems to be  images of foreign idols and brokenness. There is also a lot of confusion about who their God is and how they should be faithful. In the time after the northern kingdom had fallen, you can actually understand their confusion. Why did Yahweh not save them? 

 It seems there was more than that. There was also corruption and a reaction to God. Why is God not here? Why won’t God do what we want? And everyone could see that there were rising powers on the horizon who were better organised and more powerful than Judah.

 In the long and tragic history of Israel, they learned over and over again that Yahweh was not a God at anyone’s beck and call.

 And the prophets could see what was coming.

 We can identify with this time of tumult, a time in which for us too there seem to be threats on the horizon. Not only climate but political instability, almost certainly linked. At the bottom of the South Pacific we might feel out of the way, but we know that things have shifted. In some ways we are just one more Pacific Island. China looms. The US is uninterested, The UK a remote realm. We too might wonder what is ahead for us, with our thousands of miles of vulnerable coastline liable to sea incursion and to invasion.  

 And there have been prophets, so many modern prophets really. We might think of 1984 and CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, which I reread recently, amazed at the way he anticipates the idea of inciting riots as a way of gaining ominous control and the double speech that disguises attack and gaslights ordinary people. In terms of climate we have also had our prophets. Rachel Carson, in the 1960s, several presidents and even the Iron Lady were convinced that something was wrong, and Lynn White Jr who pointed to the role of Christianity in the Ecological Crisis. 

 And then there is, from a bit further back, an astounding poem by Yeats:

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

 

We certainly feel the need for some revelation. Tell us, Lord, what we should do.

 Like the Jews we have to suppose that the fall away from faith is partly behind our predicament, (the falconer and falcon are out of touch), our despair and our state of deep anxiety. And our desperate need to see everything as still operating normally.

However, there is also something else that has happened to faith, and although it feels postmodern, it has also happened again and again in history. Faith has been co-opted. This is the  MAGA phenomenon. IT is powerful. It allows all sorts of things to be justified under some cloak of genuine faith. 

And one of the confusing things about the last week is that this co-option has been magnified by the very tragic death of Charlie Kirk. The assassination cut short a young life that may well have gone in another direction. But the legacy he leaves is hostile to strangers and the least and most marginalized in society. IT is hostile to climate action. That magnifies and justifies Trump’s policies.

 But then, it must have been so confusing in Judah. It must have been confusing for people in the time of Paul. He thought he was serving God until he was struck down and told not to persecute Christians.

So confusing times are not new. And that is important to remember.

 But this particular iteration does seem dire. As Yeats said, Almost Second Coming-ish.

 This new iteration of Christian faith under Charlie Kirk included a denial of anthropogenic climate change. It magnifies the Christian identification of that stance with evangelical American Christianity, especially after his death.

 IT is bad enough that Trump has withdrawn from the Paris accord, and the United Nations, and from  USAID, which helped to spread equality and resilience around the world. Under the magnifying glass of Charlie Kirk, he did it as a Christian.

 Although we are so far away, we are all caught up in this. And it is soul-destroying as we work to show that the gospel compels us to love the creation and to work for climate mitigation, to see this version of Christianity catching fire.

 So at this stage we wonder: can the gospel  for today shed any light.

 The gospel is very hard to understand. I immediately thought of an episode of Blood of my Blood, a prequel to Outlander, where the poor Englishman from the 20^th century finds himself in 18^th-century Scotland, and he has become the manager for an estate. He is sent out to bring in the rents and warned that his life depends upon it. He faces an angry mob but he comes up with a brilliant idea. He will ask for half the rent and also a contribution to a lottery where the winner will not pay rent for a year. Naturally, he brings in a good amount of money. He wasn’t dishonest, but he was shrewd

 Obviously managers have faced this problem often in the past. And whatever the unjust manager had been doing, he came up with a similarly brilliant solution.

And one interpretation of both these stories is that grace and a little bit of the feeling of agency, is something that frees things up, that gets us out of where things seem to be going relentlessly. It produces fruit in gratitude and renewed purpose. It shows us, too, that shrewdness can sometimes find a way between impossible outcomes. In the biblical story everyone seems to gain.

 So, as ordinary people, as Christians who can see that the world is not going in the right direction, how can we act on this?

 I think we can spread light in the darkness by little acts of grace, and also hospitality, and by encouraging the shrewd attempts at climate mitigation that are coming from the political, economic and scientific realms.

Hospitality is the opposite of the message of MAGA and also of Charlie Kirk. Hospitality to the stranger and the vulnerable, as my friend Christine Pohl wrote many decades ago in Making Room, is what transformed the early church and is the primary virtue and practice of the Christian.

The least now includes the creatures of the natural world.

 Shrewdness also includes the use of our minds to find technical solutions to our problems. We should not be and we should not advocate an otherworldly rejection of the world or of science. A brilliant example is a young Māori scientist in Wellington, Ratua Mataira, whose grandmother started the Māori language movement, He has co-founded “openstars technologies” where he is working on a form of nuclear fusion using a  “levitated dipole” model, showing early signs of success. /nuclear fusion would change the energy landscape and the geopolitical landscape overnight.

 We can speak of stories that can show us how things might be different: For me, a wonderful book in this area is the Ministry for the Future which gives a glimpse of a grace filled ending to this crisis when the world is green again.

 And we can pray for people in high places, as the letter from Paul to Timothy commanded us in the epistle this morning. High places includes COP. And for the first time in the Guardian this morning I saw a report with some good news, that the COP meetings and international cooperation as bent the curve from a prediction of 5 degrees warming to 2.7 degrees. There is much work still to do, but that is such good news and shows that our efforts are working in spite of dire political realities around the world.

 Grace has many manifestations. Shrewdness has many manifestations. The road ahead is not inevitable. In Jeremiah’s day, although his prophecy came true, he was trying to warn, so he did not think the path was inevitable either. In our own ways we can all try to be shrewd managers of what we do control, little as it is.