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            Christmas is coming where we rejoice at the coming of Jesus’ salvation.  The conference on climate change is happening in Copenhagen, to bring us hope for the world. 

            It is interesting that the prescribed Bible readings leading up to Advent from the Church has been about the Apocalypse.  It is one of the most taboo topics of mainline liberal churches.  When it was also Sunday’s sermon, it was rather lame and light on the subject. 

            There are the standard reasons why the modern Church does not want to touch the subject with a ten-foot pole.  It has been burned so often in the past with its predictions not coming true.  It inspires fear, and fear leads to abuse and control, not love and peace.  We simply do not know what it means.  Only God does.  So the issue is safely packed away in academic ‘contextualization.’

            Climate change, of course, is ‘code’ for fear.  And our society, including the Church, treats it with the same care as it does the topic of the Apocalypse.  Only God knows what the Apocalypse means.  Only climate scientists know that we are beyond the brink of stopping catastrophic climate change.  If the scale of what is to come was truly driven home by the media, the fear would be so great, thing could get nasty with the public.  By controlling the fear through drops of media warning of far-off, Third World glaciers that have melted, we should be able over the next century or two to have a smooth transition to controlling the global weather to our liking.

            Change takes time.  It took Christianity three centuries to become the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It took 300 years for science and business to convert civilization from an agrarian/warlord based society to our modern city/business-science based one. 

            The basics of climate change are quite simple.  We made a choice, though we really didn’t understand it at the time, to change the bio-chemical make-up of the planet by pumping greenhouse gases into the air, as well as all the other apostasies we have done to the forests, water and earth to supply our dependence on our consumer survival system.

            It is a reality on a scale few like to face.  We cannot survive without a job, money or a grocery store.  Everything we do in a modern city kills the environment.  We feel good about our efforts to save the planet.  We recycle.  Instead of sending our cardboard to the dump, it is sent back to the smoke-stack factory, where chemicals re-convert it to packaging, toilet tissue and photocopy paper.  It saves the forest.  The Amazon and Indonesian rainforests are disappearing at an alarming rate.  

            Just like Copenhagen.  Seventy thousand people converging to fix the planetary weather like a car engine.  We can do it.  We have the technology.

            Civilization can do it, because the success of business and science in the past proves that we can get control of any problem. 

            That reassurance is on one side of our brain.  The other side of our brain knows that all these politicians have their own agendas for their short time in power.  They aren’t serious, because they would lose their jobs if they were.  Communist China wants world economic domination.  The party leader wouldn’t stay in power long if he wasn’t in line.  And if President Obama did what he truly needed to do, he would be voted out of office for raising the cost of living and limiting our lifestyle.

            But then we run back to the other side of our brain, and say we must have hope.  Hope above all else.  It’s a Christian thing, and business-science optimism.  We can save ourselves by using business and science, ignoring the fact that science is the one that got us into this mess in the first place.  We don’t have anything else to save our lifestyle so that we don’t suffer.

            Somebody must be in control.  How else did we end up with this incredible lifestyle, compared to our disease and poverty stricken ancestors?  We depend upon business and government doing the right thing, just don’t disturb us too much, or we’ll vote you out.

            Change takes a long time, especially on the scale we are talking about.  A few years ago, scientists said the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free by 2050.  Now it is 2013.  Civilization cannot produce greenhouse gases on the scale that the Arctic can, when the methane gas is released from the melting permafrost.  Scientists are watching as it begins now.  Climate change is on autopilot, even if every car and factory was shut down today.  We trust science, business and the politicians will fix the melting permafrost problem in the Arctic in due course. 

            We saw how business and government responded when a hurricane hit a coastal city, New Orleans.  There wasn’t much money or jobs there afterwards.  Survival was tough.

            Our survival depends on a job, money and a grocery.  If any of those fail, we’re sunk.  That’s our survival system.  It depends on business.  The free market didn’t do too well when the weather turned bad.  It went elsewhere with its jobs to make a profit.  New Orleans has been slow to change back into what it was. 

            About the same time, an earthquake hit Asia and billions of heart-felt dollars flowed to the region.  A year later, the people affected were still starving in tents.

            If climate change is slow, we can adjust.  If it speeds up, what are the signs telling us about the miracle of modern society?  Does business and climate change mix?  It had better.  It is all we have to survive. 

            Is climate change man-made?  The point is moot now.  Climate change is on autopilot.  The glaciers and aquifers have dried up, and so irrigation for food and drinking water have too.  The rainforests are being cut down, creating jobs so people can survive and business thrive.  The fish are going away.  And the richest ten percent of society feels it last.  That ten percent is the 600 million people of the First World, out of 6 billion on the planet.  We chose to live by the knowledge of business and science.  Now we are facing the choice we made between the knowledge of science versus the wisdom of living with God’s Creation, Nature.

            It is ironic, in the end.  The goal of business-science is the same as the Christian’s.  Indeed, the latter is the daughter of the former.  We have created the best facsimile of Jesus’ heaven-on-earth.  We heal the sick, feed the poor (such a tiny minority now), and even bring the dead back to life on the operating table, just like Jesus did, but in our own way, through knowledge.  We are rightly proud of our accomplishment.

            But in the end it all became too much.  While creating this artificial environment of the modern city, we ignored God’s Creation, used and abused it, and thus chose our own fate.

            How could we have failed when all our motives were in line with Jesus’ own? 

            It is a taboo to talk about the Apocalypse in the Church.  Only God knows what it means.

            Funny how science is telling us the same thing, and no one wants to face it as well.  

            The specter of the rebirth of Creation from the near-death that modern humans have brought it to, out of such good intentions, is too great for most to fathom.  We run to hope.

            And yet God agrees with science, believe it or not.

            Nature is coming back to the city.

            God only has one word for us now. 

            Prepare. 

            It sounds rather negative.  But in those words there is hope.

            Shall we do it with business and science knowledge, which got us into this pickle, or with God’s wisdom within his Creation?

            What do we know of Creation, and thus God, when all we have ever known is life in the city, where the only life that is found is humans?

            God simply says ‘Prepare.’  Something is about to be healed and reborn.  His Creation.    He’s bringing it back to life, despite our choice to kill it.  And we thought resurrection was exclusively Jesus’ preserve.

            Are we with God on this, or with our own business-science lifestyle?  Can we serve two masters?