By the time you are my age, that is, in 35 to 39 years, it will be the year 2046 or so. It's hard to image what the world will be like, what you will be like, and what the issues facing us will be so far ahead.

When I came to university in the late 60s, we were concerned with the Vietnam War which has come and gone. There were protests about the white regime in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Here it looks like things have gone from bad to worse than they were back then.
But what will it be like? That far ahead, who can say? Will, as people forecast, China and India become world-dominating economies? Where will the USA be at that time? Number 3? Or number 1? And what of the EU? How will Russia have gone? The big picture questions are hard to read this far ahead.

You may ask about technology. When I went to university, we had no inkling of the digital revolution that was about to break upon us. It is very hard to imagine what communications and computing will be like if we add another 30 or 40 years ahead.

Other questions remain in the air. Will South Sydney finally win a Grand Final? What new gimmick will Channel 10 be pushing out for the "Big Brother 2045'?

I think it might be safe to say that there will be at least two issues still with us that are with us today. I can think of two matters that will still be with us.

It is very likely that what Paul Kelley recently called "the Long War against Islamist terrorism represented by al Qaeda and its non-state networks' will still be being waged in 30 or 40 years' time. Though at this stage, it's hard to make any comments about what form it will take or where it will be. The issues that are raised by the clash between secular democracies and theocratic totalitarian states will not be something solved in a very short time. (Though 30 years ago the Cold War looked like it was permanent, and then the Berlin Wall fell, so who can say?)

The other issue that must be with us will be the environment, and especially the matter of the change in the earth's climate. Of course, in 30 or 40 years' time we will have a clearer idea of exactly what will be the nature of this change. Will the "we'll all be rooned" school be right after all?  Or will it be more mild than we thought. We don't really know. But I am pretty sure it will be one of the issues still with us.

I would like to speak from a particularly Christian point of view about some of the issues that climate change and our relation to the environment raise.

I need to add that one of the big decisions I took as I entered university has had a profound effect on my life's course. As I left high school,  having thoroughly investigated the New Testament claims for the resurrection of Jesus, I came to the conviction that as bizarre and strange as it might seem, Jesus was really raised from the dead and that the Christian faith was truer than I had thought. That led me not only to reaffirm my personal faith in Christ but to make certain career decisions which led me to the climax of standing here talking to you this evening.

Of course, I do not come here with any expertise in the science of climate change. I think it is clear to me, as it is to all of us, that there is now evidence that the climate is changing.  At one level, we shouldn't' be surprised about this. Science is increasingly showing that climate has regularly been changing on this planet. We are not to consider the status quo as some kind of ideal, there forever, but that just as the weather changes from day to day, so over the millennia there are also trends. How else, after all, did people manage to walk to Tasmania? Or why is Greenland called Greenland?

The new factor is that there is also evidence that some or a significant part of this change is to do with the increased carbon in the atmosphere linked to the remarkable growth in human industrial activity in the last 200 years. We have benefited immensely from the Industrial Revolution. Human prosperity and the decline in poverty have been quite breathtaking, however, we are also realising that it has had and will continue to have an impact upon the heat retention in the atmosphere and therefore effectively changing long-term weather patterns.

It is those very issues which force us to raise questions which are not simply scientific economic or technological. Questions like, what is our relation to the world around us? What are human beings? What is our responsibility to others and to ourselves? The Christian faith has a very important contribution to make to these questions.

Concern about the earth as a whole did not arise recently due to evidence of climate change. It was back in my day when our view of the earth changed. I can give you the exact day; December 24 1968. That was when Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit. For the first time human beings went round behind the moon and saw, not the moon, but the earth, rising in the distance. And it was televised. Suddenly the planet earth as an oasis in cold, hostile space stood before us - welcoming as a home but also looking so finite and vulnerable.

"The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." said Command Module Pilot James Lovell. That is how so many of us now feel about the Earth, of as we so often call it simply "The Planet'

On that journey the astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders read back an important text which they believed interpreted what they had seen. It was a very ancient text. It's one that I think still has very powerful things to say to us. (I wonder if you agree?) This is what they read:

William Anders:
"For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you".
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

Jim Lovell:
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

Frank Borman:
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

That's where they left it but they could have gone on to the creation of the plants, the fish the animals and then the humans as part of that creation. Now the question is, were they right to quote that text, the beginning of the Christian and Jewish Bible, as an insight into the world around us, into who we are, to make sense of the vulnerability of the earth and human responsibility?

Let me say in passing I do not read this ancient text, which I believe is God's inspired word, as an historical account, or as a rival to current or future scientific discoveries or theories about the actual history of this universe. (You know there are some Christians who do hold that, but I do not for all kinds of reasons I am happy to discuss with you at another time.) But I do believe it is saying something profoundly true to us, and important.

Let me contrast three different ways of approaching the question of our world around us. They are:

1. Nature as a thing to be conquered or rescued
2. Nature as the sacred other, and
3. Creation not nature, a partner in trust to us.

1. Nature as a thing to be conquered or rescued
There is a view which most likely goes back at least to of the Enlightenment (and some Christian influences) where the world around us is something we humans are to master, control and exploit, to conquer it. Sure there is a truth in this, but this view is one which is in most difficulty today for all kinds of now obvious reasons. We understand that our impact on the environment is serious and deleterious.

It is not adequate to see the natural world around us as simply a thing to be conquered.
Nor might I add as simply a thing to be rescued. There is a modern version of the "nature as a thing to be manipulated" view which continues to place human beings at the very centre of things. I hear it when I hear people talk about "rescuing the planet' and acting as though, because human beings have contributed to climate change, somehow or other human beings can very simply solve it. It still has the same instrumentalist view about our relation to nature. Nature is still a thing, to be either exploited or in this case, rescued.

Whatever you may think of symbolic stunts like one hour of semi-darkness, on any terms human beings must realise that they are a very small part of this gigantic universe and even of this big planet on which we are. This leads me to two observations.

First, is it really the planet that needs rescuing? I was interested a letter recently in The Australian by one Rod Ford of Toowoomba:

The UN and others seem to have their facts mixed up. It is not the planet that is in peril but the human race and other life forms. The planet will not care less if various life forms became extinct or the climate changed dramatically. All that will happen is that new life forms will adapt to the changes and the planet will continue on its way totally unconcerned. (9 April 2007)

Maybe, but you get the point.

Secondly, the really scary thing about climate change might not be that we are responsible for global warming, but that we are not completely responsible for it. It may be something out there that happens to us, as much as by us. We are not masters of our destiny.

2. Nature as is the sacred other
In reaction to the instrumental view of nature there is the view, very deeply held now, that the world around us, "Nature' is the source of sacred meaning. This lead to the Romantic movement. One version is that Nature is the true source of wisdom - Not human, not artificial; it is better than us.

When the NSW colony was a mere 10 years old Wordsworth wrote:

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! "tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Sounds naive today, especially when we realise that the Nazis were great nature worshippers also.

Another version is the doctrine that Nature is sacred because it is eternal and other than us. If we touch it, it loses that sacredness. So for Bill McKibbin in The End of Nature (1990), human induced climate change is a crisis of meaning:

“By changing the weather, we have made every spot on the earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning. Without it there is nothing but us.”

Though some criticise Christianity for destroying this meaning and opening nature up to exploitation by demystifying it, teaching that it is not indwelt by spirits etc. Consequently Lyn White wrote in The Historic Roots of our Ecological Crisis
(1967):

“By destroying pagan animism Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of the natural objects. [" ] Christianity bears a burden of guilt [because our science and technology] are deeply infused with the orthodox Christian arrogance to nature.”

3. Mature Christian: Creation as partner in trust to us
The Christian understanding is this. We not talking about Nature (the Other) but Creation.
By creation I mean that God is the reason it is. It is dependent on him. Yet it is not God and it is good. The Sacred Other is God, who is committed to us and his creation. And Creation is not "out there', to be either exploited or worshiped, or even in a final sense rescued, but is a partner in trust to us and with us who are ourselves part of this world, or rather part of Creation.

Fundamentally, we understand that it is God's choice and not ours that we are here and the world is here. It's God's choice and not simply an accident of meaningless and impersonal forces. We didn't ask to be here, and neither did the universe. We are dependent upon the living God who spoke and it was so. We in this together.

Yet humans have a particular place in the partnership.  The Bible understands human beings as significantly made, as it is put, "in the image of God" and given even dominion over the work of God's hands. In other words, human beings are not gods but are part of the world which God has made, but have a responsibility within that world given by God. Perhaps I could make the point by quoting from a psalm, Psalm 8, and then contrast that with Steven Hawkins and Monty Python.

Psalm 8 ESV.  The immensity of creation: what are humans?

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens. 
[" ]
3 When I look at your heavens,
the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place, 
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? 
5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. 
6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet, 
7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 
8 the birds of the heavens,
and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. 
9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The contrast between the immensity of the universe and the place of mere humans is not a recent one, even though now we know ever further how immense the universe is. Contemporary thought often emphasises the insignificance or even meaninglessness of human life in the face of the massive universe.

Monty Python, The Galaxy Song from the film The Meaning of Life
(A scene where a man is asked to make an organ donation of his liver before he dies!)

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us its just three thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point,
We go round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe.

The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
Twelve million miles a minute,
and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on earth.

On such a view the universe cripples our response to be responsible. Meaninglessness in the face of bigness mean impotence. Stephen Hawkins says how little we are:

“We are an insignificant planet on an out of the way galaxy. It is inconceivable that God would be interested in us.”

How does he know what is "small" and "out of the way"?

But the question ‘What are humans?‘can't be answered from other than an understanding of the Creator. God's creation makes the difference. The question ‘What are humans?’ can't be answered other than from the creator. The Human place is: 
- As a natural part of creations
- Less than divine beings but with glory and honour
- With dominion over the works of Your hand

Christian faith does not merely hold that human beings have a responsibility both to God and the world around them in partnership but also that God has committed to his creation. We believe that God himself took flesh, that is, became a human being and took his created humanity to himself, bowed himself to his creation and suffered terribly a death within his creation in order to redeem it. As surely as God raised Jesus from the dead (the greatest event since the Big Bang, and as profound), he has begun a new universe, a new creation.

A Christian understands the world around us as not perfect, in fact marred and incomplete, awaiting itself God's great work of saving it. I quote from a text that has always got me very excited, from Romans 8:19-21:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

This is a very big thing to talk about but inasmuch as God raised Jesus from the dead, he has begun the new universe.

The issues that face you and us in the next 30-40 years will involve our interaction with the world around us that is bigger than us. Climate change will raise issues of our knowledge, of our wisdom in response, our compassionate reason, our trust of God and his world.

I wish you well in the next 40 years.