Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 24:34–38, 42–49, 58–67; Psalm 147 (sung); Romans 7:15–25a; Matthew 11:16–19, 25–30
Auditoire de Calvin, July 5 2026
How have you been weathering the latest heat wave?
It was cooler last week; but for much of June, especially for those without air-conditioning, the best way to survive was to run away to the hills – preferably over 2,000 metres, where we could watch the glaciers melt.
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We all play a part in global warming; but some play a bigger part than others. Big oil is ruining our summers. Aided and abetted by big coal and gas, it is threatening our lives and the future of our planet.
Just over a decade ago, the famous UN climate change conference in Paris agreed to reduce climate change, by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But in the years since, a majority of state- and investor-owned producers have increased their production.
From 2016 to 2022, four-fifths of global emissions stem from just 57 state or privately owned producers.
Corporations such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, or BP account for only a quarter of this, a fifth of total emissions. But historically, and still today, these corporations have led the way in gaslighting us about climate change and the damage they are doing to our world.
For half a century, they relied on climate science to adapt their pipelines and offshore oil platforms to the extreme weather disasters they knew they were causing. For half a century, they spread climate scepticism and climate denial to block the development of clean energy alternatives. Their aim was to reposition global warming as theory, not fact, so that they could profit for as long as possible from destroying the only planet we have.
We need to remind ourselves of this while there is still some hope of salvaging something from our ongoing climate disaster.
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Last I checked, “climate change”, “climate denial”, and “big oil” are not terms we find anywhere in the letter to the Romans; but they illustrate nicely what Paul is arguing in today’s reading.
Paul’s letter to the Romans, says Tom Wright, “is by common consent his masterpiece. It dwarfs most of his other writings, an Alpine peak towering over hills and villages.” Nobody doubts that “we are here dealing with a work of massive substance, presenting a formidable intellectual challenge while offering a breathtaking theological and spiritual vision.”
But this, says Wright, has a downside. “It is common to list saints and Christian leaders whose lives have been changed by reading this letter; the catalogue could be balanced by a similar number who have radically misunderstood it. Troublingly, the lists would overlap.”
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We can see this at work in our reading. Until recently, it was commonly read as autobiographical: Paul is talking about his divided self – the hard time he had living as a Jew. But that can’t be right.
In his letter to the church in Philippi, paints this short picture of himself: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” (Philippians 3:5-6)
No much inner division there! True, Paul persecuted the followers of Jesus before he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and became a follower himself, but this, he says, is precisely because he was a zealous Pharisee, a blameless Jew.
How then should we read the “I” in this passage, if it’s not about Paul himself?
We can read the passage in two ways. At one level of abstraction, Paul is talking about the human condition. At another, less abstract level, Paul is telling us the human story, beginning with Adam, continuing through Abraham, and ending with Christ.
Let’s take each of these in turn.
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Our human condition, Paul argues, is to live in a world he calls “the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4). It is a world dominated by sin.
Note that Paul is talking in the singular, not the plural. He’s not talking about the sins we all commit, as individuals or in a group. Paul is talking about sin as a power that rules our lives.
Why do we fail to do the good we recognize as good but instead do the thing we hate? It is, says Paul, because we are enslaved to sin. And if we are to do the good we really want to do, we need to be liberated from that slavery.
The danger in talking like this, of course, is that we turn sin into an incredible myth. What is this occult entity that lords it over us and makes our lives a mess?
In fact, it’s not occult at all. It’s hiding in plain sight. This is why I suggest to you that climate change and climate denial are a good, down-to-earth, illustration of what Paul means, even if, back in the day, he knew nothing about global warming at all.
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Last month, Lee Raymond, the chief executive officer of Exxon and then ExxonMobil from 1993 to 2005, died, aged 87. One obituary described him as the Darth Vader of global warming.
I don’t imagine Lee Raymond set out deliberately to destroy the planet. No sane person would do that.
But Raymond was a leading figure in the oil industry. That industry makes billions by extracting, refining, and selling oil. It owns vast oil reserves that are worth many billions more.
So Raymond, and multitudes like him, persuade themselves that, although they really don’t want to make our planet uninhabitable, they need to continue extracting, refining and selling oil that should, in truth, remain for ever in the ground or under the sea, and they need to continue lying about what they are doing and the consequences of what they doing.
That’s what Paul means by sin, and slavery to sin. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
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The other level at which we can read this passage, and the whole of Romans, is as a story of God and the human race.
God creates Adam, sees that Adam is good, and admires his handiwork. But Adam, with a little help from Eve and a certain snake, disobeys God, and the world goes to hell in a handcart. God calls Abraham, so that in the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God can put the world to rights. God gives Moses the law on Mount Sinai, to show the people of Israel how to live rightly.
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
The problem, as Paul sees it, is that while individual Jews may be perfectly capable of doing that, the people of Israel as a whole are not, any more than are the other peoples of the world.
In this, Paul is not alone. Prophets of Israel such as Jeremiah or Ezekiel said that it wasn’t enough to tell the people of Israel how to live. Unless the law was written on their hearts, the people as a whole couldn’t do that.
But that, says Paul, is precisely where we now find ourselves. God has sent his only Son to show us – most clearly on the cross – that God loves us even while we fail to do what God requires. And God has sent the Holy Spirit to flood our hearts with love, so that we can begin to do what God requires, precisely because it is good.
“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
So Paul says in the second letter to the church in Corinth. But, if I may, he exaggerates a little.
Christ, risen from the dead, is indeed the beginning of a new creation. If we are “in Christ”, we are “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven”, redeemed from slavery to sin.
But we live in the tension between the already now and the not yet. Around us, Paul’s present evil age has yet to give way to new heavens and a new earth; and every day, in every way, we confront its temptations, just as Paul and the early churches did.
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To end where I began. In the 1960s, I was a revolting student. We all were. A wave of student revolt swept across the West, confronting all we saw as wrong in the world. It took us a while to understand that to change the world required more than striking a radical pose.
In 1968 in Bonn, I came across a poster from the SDS, the Socialist German Students’ League. Alle reden vom Wetter – Wir nicht! It said: “Everyone talks about the weather. We don’t!”
What the SDS, in those innocent days, had in mind was talk that was trivial and meaningless: Simon and Garfunkel’s “dangling conversation” and “superficial sighs”.
These days, we need to talk about the weather. And then we need to choose which side we are on, as Deuteronomy says: life or death.
Sources
Naomi Oreskes, Erik M Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010)
Aaron Regunsberg, “Exxon CEO Lee Raymond Is Dead. His Climate Denial Legacy Lives On”, June 22 2026
Aaron Regunsberg, “How Big Oil Wrecked Your Summer”, June 6 2026
The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report, April 2024
NT Wright, “The Letter to the Romans”, New Interpreter’s Bible vol X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2002)