As you can see from the
decorations on the pillars, we had a good time last week at Messy Church thinking
about the seasons of the year. Our pictures reflect some of the joys of each –
winter with snowflakes, spring with its promise of new life, summer with the
shining glittery sun, and autumn with its profusion of wonderful textures,
colours and smells. We thought about which season was our favourite - I wonder
which is yours?
Whichever season is your favourite,
the fact is that they’re all vital. We may not like the bleak, dreary days of
February, but that period of cold, when the plants are dormant, is just as
important for them as the glory days of April and May when they are growing
apace. Without the dormancy, the growth couldn’t happen. The autumn leaves
which descend into a sodden mass on the ground feed the soil. Without the death
that is part of this season of the year, the earth on which we depend would
soon become sterile.
Ancient civilisations knew
this well. They were in tune with the passing seasons in the lands where they
lived. They had to be. They knew that their lives depended very directly on
what they could grow. If the crops failed in their fields, starvation was a
real and immediate possibility, as it still is for many around the world today.
That’s why the ending of the
story of Noah which we heard this morning, was so important to them. It
finishes with God’s promise that the seasons would be restored after the flood.
“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall
not cease.” God hadn’t forgotten them
as they floated in the ark on that endless ocean, even though it might have
felt like that. He had never let them out of his sight, and now they could
start afresh and life could begin again.
Most of us are probably far
less in tune with the passing seasons than our ancestors were. We can put on
the central heating, buy food flown halfway round the world, freeze our
surpluses to keep us going, but in the long run we still depend on the rain and
sun, cold and warmth coming when it should. The food in our supermarkets
doesn’t get there by magic. It still has to come from somewhere on this one earth
we live on. Eventually we will go hungry too if it stops producing its bounty. There
is no Planet B, as the saying goes. That’s why the threat of human made climate
change is so frightening and urgent; it may not have affected us much yet, it
has affected others in the world, and their stories should be a warning to us.
One of the things I have
noticed over the years we’ve been supporting the Diocesan Poverty and Hope
appeal is that climate change increasingly rears its head in the stories of the
projects it supports. This year is no exception. There’s a project in Burkina Faso, helping
communities learn to grow crops which will do better in the droughts that are
increasingly blighting their lives. In Rochester’s twin Diocese of Kondoa in
Tanzania, our money will help build a vocational centre to train local people
in different trades because they’ve realised that they can’t rely on
agriculture any more as the climate grows less predictable. Another project
supports communities in Argentina working to prevent deforestation. Felling
trees, the lungs of our planet, makes climate change worse. What might it mean
to these communities to hear God’s promise that “as long as the earth
endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter…shall not cease”
? How can that promise be fulfilled for them? Part of the answer lies in our
hands. We have the political and financial power to make or break their
communities, often without even knowing it. We can help to save them from the
flood or allow them to be swept away by it. We may not yet be suffering as they
do, but we will be in time – we are all in one ark together.
So there is a very direct and
obvious message for us as we celebrate Harvest today in this story of the flood
and its aftermath. It’s a message about the real, practical action we need to
take to make sure that “seedtime and harvest” endure for all of us, and
especially for the most vulnerable people in the world. We are called to “work
together with God,” as St Paul puts it.
But that work can sometimes
seem impossible. It’s hard to hold onto hope when the challenges are so great.
That’s why it matters that we understand that this story of Noah isn’t just
about literal seedtimes and harvests. It can speak to us in other ways too.
The story of a cataclysmic
flood is found in many ancient civilisations. There’s an ancient Greek version,
a Mesopotamian version, a Viking version, a Mayan version from Central America
and others from the original inhabitants of North America too, as well as the
one we know. The details differ but they all tell of a catastrophe which swept
away the world as they knew it. Experts argue about why this story is so widespread,
but some think that it may reflect an
ancient memory of the end of the last Ice Age, when melt water caused
devastating floods across the world in a very short space of time around 6000
years before Christ. We know that the land bridge which originally connected
Britain to continental Europe broke suddenly – geologists have found the evidence
all along the south coast of a layer of rocks which were obviously deposited in
one cataclysmic flood event . The Mediterranean was formed around the same
time, when the Atlantic broke through at what is now the straits of Gibraltar,
probably in a matter of months. What would it have been like to live through
something like that? Imagine the scale of it and the impact on societies that
had no knowledge of what lay beyond their own area? No wonder the stories talk
of the world being washed away; it must have seemed like that.
We’ll never know for sure
whether that’s what sparked off these flood myths, but the stories continued to
resonate with people, as they do with us, because you don’t have to be on the
receiving end of Ice Age meltwater to understand what it feels like to be out
of your depth and drowning.
The Biblical story of Noah
was written down in the form we know it while the people of Judah were in exile
in Babylon. There wasn’t any water involved in that disaster, but it certainly
felt like a flood had closed over them. Their city of Jerusalem with its
beautiful Temple had been destroyed. Their whole society and way of life had
come to an end, submerged by the might of the Babylonian empire.
But this story reminded them
that however deep and stormy the waters, God wouldn’t forget or abandon his creation. However great the destruction, they weren’t
alone and they would, one day, begin again. This story helped them acknowledge
the awful reality they’d been through, but it also spoke of hope, of the
possibility of a new start.
God is with us, it said, in
all the things that happen to us, whether we know it or not at the time. Open
your eyes and you will see him. Open your ears and you will hear his voice,
calling you to hang on in there.
St Paul had found that to be
true too. He endured many storms, as the reading we heard reminded us. There
were times of “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments,
riots labours, sleepless nights, hunger.” His determination to tell people
of the love of Chrsit constantly brought him into danger. Often it must have
looked as if it was all pointless. But
in all these times he’d learned to look out for God’s presence, to trust that
he was there. And because of that he’d found that he could be “dying; and
see - we are alive…punished and yet not killed, …sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing;… poor, yet making many rich, …having nothing, yet possessing
everything.” The flood may have
swept away everything he had, but he couldn’t lose God, and that was what mattered
most.
God’s presence may not always
be obvious, but like the seeds in Jesus’ parables, the fact that you can’t see
something doesn’t mean there is nothing there. When a seed is first sown it
looks for all the world as if it has died and gone, but from it can grow a
mighty tree, with room for all in its branches. What looks like death is actually
the start of new life. Winter is full of the promise of spring, if only we have
eyes – and faith - to see it.
So today, whatever season it
is in our lives, we’re invited to look for God’s presence in it, to open our
eyes to see him at work, and to work with him too. We can do that through our
giving to Poverty and Hope, helping others to find spring in what look like
hopeless, wintry situations. We can do that closer to home in our own community,
in the loving service we are called to for others. But holding onto hope for
others is impossible unless we have first discovered it for ourselves. That’s
why we also need to learn to look for God’s presence in our lives, to be aware
of what the landscape in us looks like. Is it winter, dark and cold in us? Are
there fragile shoots of springtime which need nurturing and protecting? Are we
thirsting in the hot summer, in desperate need of living water to refresh us?
Or is it autumn, a time to give thanks for what we have, but also to learn to
let go of the things which belong to the past, like the leaves which the tree
must release back to the ground?
Whatever the season in our
lives, God is with us. In summer and winter, in springtime and autumn, in life
and in death, today and tomorrow, and no flood can sweep his love away. That’s
the hope that will take us through whatever life throws at us, and overflow to
others to give them hope as well.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment