Sermon by Canon Michael Wedgeworth at the Cathedral Eucharist,
Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
13th September 2015
50 th Anniversary of the Blackburn Cathedral Choirs’ Association
NATURE ‘S LAST DAYS ?
It was five minutes past nine in the evening of the 15 th of August……precisely.
The family had gone home, the newspaper was folded up, the iPad shut and the television switched off.
Peace.
We looked out of the window and saw the most magnificent array of pinks and reds and greys and blues: just for a few minutes, the setting sun lit up the sky and the drifting clouds with a gorgeous symphony of colour…..and then it was gone.
We hadn’t paid for it; we hadn’t searched for it, nor had we gone anywhere to see it and nobody had worked to paint it; it was an entirely free gift of nature.
The many people here who have sung in choirs will surely have imprinted in their experience, as we listeners have, these words from Haydn’s Creation. We will be able to hear them again at next summer, at the Cathedral’s Gala
Concert. They are from the Psalm appointed for today.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God…the wonder of his works….. displays the firmament….”
On anniversary occasions like today we are entitled to steal a few glances to the past.
My own family has been thinking quite a bit about how the world has changed over the last 100 years. It’s all because the matriarch, having now reached the
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age of three score years……. and forty four (calculators are available from the church wardens) is beginning to feel her age, and it may not be long before she unfurls her sails and drifts into harbour. (Although we’ve been saying something like that on and off for quite some time.)
It didn’t start off very well for her, with her brother grievously injured in the
Great War when she was only five. But what a century of change was to unfold. And, although there have been dark chapters, much of it has been good and life-enhancing: a free health service, advances in medical techniques, more humane treatment of the disabled and mentally ill, education for all, the end of capital punishment, international agreements on human rights, a less class-ridden society , a concern for justice for the poor and marginalised.
There is no doubt that our Church throughout this time has become smaller and leaner, but it has accepted women into its priesthood; made its liturgy more accessible and broadened its understanding of spirituality; recognised and given a place to the gifts of lay people and has courageously argued for a new vision of politics in our national life, and right now, is standing up for desperate refugees.
By and large it’s a good story: the big question is, will it remain so?
The world of nature: what an absolutely incredible, marvellous, wonderful world it is.
“Consider the lilies of the field, said Jesus. “They toil not neither do they spin, and yet I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
The huge birds gliding between the trees in the rainforest, brilliantly coloured as though they had been painted by an outlandish artist; the teeming shoals of fish in the oceans: striped ones, bright ones, some that look like floating shards of glass that you should be able to see through, but can’t.
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But it is all now at risk. At very serious and grave risk.
On grandchild duty last week, I walked down the high street of Kenilworth and stopped at the Catholic Church to have a quick look.
Built in the 1960’s, it isn’t the greatest feat of architecture, but it has a nice garden in front of it, with, surprisingly perhaps, just one modest statue: a man in a brown robe, with a rope around his waist, holding a dove in his hand. The dedication of the church is to this man, Francis of Assisi, the most famous of all the saints.
It seems his first habit was a piece of dirty old cloth lying by the road, with the rope taken from a disused farm implement. But Francis had a huge reverence for the beauty and magnificence of nature, seeing God in everything, and even preaching to the birds and the animals.
He spoke of the Sun as his brother and the moon and the stars as his sister. In his great poem- cum- prayer, the Canticle of the Sun, he said “We praise You,
Lord, for Sister earth who sustains us with her fruits, coloured flowers and herbs”….”We praise you Lord for Sister Water, so useful, humble, precious and pure”
It was this same saint who used farm animals and a new born baby to create the first live Nativity, something of a contrast in its messiness to the artistic representations that were to come, but just one more sign of his reverence for all life.
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When the other Francis, our present Pope, wanted to warn the world of the terrible dangers it faces from global warming, he did not give his encyclical the usual sombre Latin title, but instead used the Italian dialect of Umbria, where lies the city of Assisi. It opens with the recurring theme of the Canticle of the
Sun: “Laudate si…….Praise be to you”.
The encyclical is revolutionary, not just in its conclusions but also in its challenge to previous church teaching about nature. The Pope says that both
Christians and Jews have misunderstood, in speaking of humanity’s dominion over all creation. No, he says, creation is our ‘common home’, shared with animals, forests, mountains and waters. And we must respect nature every bit as much as we do human beings.
I don’t know about you, but I feel I have a lot to learn about this “gospel of creation”, of which Pope Francis says, mystically: “All creatures are moving forward with us towards a common point of arrival, which is God”
Twelve days from now, the Pope will address the United Nations in New York.
He is expected, fearlessly, to say that if the rich nations fail to tackle global warming, the poor nations will face such a desperate plight that today’s refugee crisis will seem small scale by comparison
I am sure he is well aware that there will be a powerful backlash from business and political leaders who cannot conceive that anything should be allowed to stand in the way of economic growth. Opinion polls in the United States already show his popularity is on the slide
But surely no reasonable person can deny that the science points unmistakeably in this direction, though of course the Pope is not a scientist but a pastor, speaking out of his special concern for the poor of the world. And it is all too painfully clear that whilst we here are experiencing odd weather patterns, it is the poorest countries which face - and are totally ill-equipped to deal with - the catastrophes of earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and blistering, unrelenting heat.
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September 2115.
Not many of us will be alive by then, although they say that with advances in science and medicine, a third of all children born in the West today will live to be a hundred.
Whether there will have been by then a century of progress …… and flowers and trees and animals and people and food and water and indeed any kind of hope for the poor depends crucially on what we do now ! ……In how we respond to the gospel of creation.
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