Address for Welcome to Sunday, on Green Communion Sunday 2021

Where have you seen God this week? I hope its not been one of those grim periods when God seens intent on hiding. I know it can be hard to keep on with faith when some of the regular practises of worship that have sustained us through a lifetime are currently not available to us, and we may well be exhausted by our heartfelt collective prayer Please God, make it stop, But nonetheless, let's take the fact that you've made it to Dining Room Church as a hopeful sign, on the strength of which I will dare to repeat the question... Where have you seen God this week? For me, throughout this whole season of struggle, sadness and stubborn hope, I've seen God more in creation than anywhere else at all. Last spring, when the threat of the virus was very new and real, I took comfort from the life force bubbling over in that most exuberant of springs. Watching nature renew itself in such beautiful profusion somehow comforted me as I considered my own mortality. For a while I really knew, in heart as well as head, that beyond my life and death, birds would still sing, buds open, lambs be born...and that somehow made my own sense of vulnerability easier to bear. I found myself singing Great is thy faithfulness around house and garden Summer and winter and seed time and harvest... and that did indeed help me to ask for and receive Strength for the day and bright hope for the morrow... God spoke to me and his message of love stilled my soul And this week as I saw snowdrops, catkins and even a cowslip begin to speak of spring, once again God met me in creation with the good news I needed. The Celts used to talk about the little book - that was the Bible - and the great book - that was creation, and they read God in both. The instinct to worship in response to the beauty and mystery of the universe is as old as the human story itself. The Psalm we read just now is a reminder that for thousands of years, people have looked at the world around them, and seen God as creator of heaven and earth, of the sea and all that is in them. The passionate outpouring of the Psalmist, in this, and in so many of the psalms, is a song of praise to God the Creator which echoes down the centuries and still resonates today. But even here we are reminded that all life is finite, that we are not rulers of our own destiny When you take away their breath they die and return to the earth. This past year has bought that home to us again and again. We had thought, for a while, we were unassailable, masters of the universe....only to find ourselves brought low by something too small to see with tbe naked eye...The very triumphs of human science and engineering that enable us to travel all around the world and experience it's winders, nonetheless also enabled a tiny virus to travel around too, wreaking dreadful havoc. We are clever, yes...but we are not in control. We too have limits. When all is said and done, full of potential as we are, we are created, not creator. Kathy Galloway once leader of of the Iona Community writes It’s a timely reminder, because as a species, we have not been very good at recognising our limitations with regard to creation, to the earth we inhabit, and share with other species and life-forms. It is one of the most painful lessons of adulthood, realizing how little we really know, and how much less we can command. The struggle to impose our will on everything around us, including the earth, causes grave damage to the environment, to other people and to ourselves. The need to get our own way, especially with regard to energy over-consumption, is really something that belongs to the ‘terrible two’ stage of infant development. Our tendency to assume that the universe is at our disposal, that it has no intrinsic worth other than its usefulness to the human species has made us dangerously, even criminally careless. I've just begun watching Sir David Attenborough latest series The Perfect Planet. As always, it is stunning in its beauty, but his message is stark. Our planet sustains life, is, as far as we know, the one perfect planet in all our galaxy because everything is held in balance. But humankind has gone all out to upset that balance. We have over reached ourselves again and again, and now, as ice caps melt, islands are covered by rising tides and species become extinct forever, we face the probability of a dreadful reckoning. The climate emergency may be the greatest act of human defiance ever. If we believe that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, if we seek and find comfort in our frailty as we treasure the rhythms of the seasons, then we need to be prepared to change. I've needed to hear God's voice speaking in creation. Don't let's drown him out with our toddler cries of "me, me, me"...but set aside the greed that destroys the work of human hands and lays waste the earth. Are you with me? It really is time for a change...