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Caring for Creation (October 2020)

Dear Friends

As I write the sun is shining in a sky of the most impossible blue. It is hot. Summer is hanging on and many of us are loving the extension of fine weather. Of course, by the time you read this, it may well be chilly and wet. Such is the delight of the weather.

But this burst of heat urges other thoughts. As I write entire communities have been lost to the inferno of wildfires across the United States. The images remind me of my final visit to Australia to see my father last Christmas before the pandemic closed the air routes. As I visited him in his Sydney hospital each day I could smell the gum trees burning as New South Wales endured another blazing disaster. Some days the blue of the sky turned a dirty brown as the smoke and ash draped themselves over us. What a nightmare it must be to run from the flames and see your whole world consumed. What a horror to return to sift the piles of ash for whatever you can find.

Climate change was one of the factors David Attenborough took us to in his recent BBC 1 TV documentary, Extinction: The Facts. Did you see it? If not, I really encourage you to watch it. The story is grim. Over one million species face extinction as the world’s flora and fauna wither in the face of threats including climate change, habitat loss and poaching. Human activity, and not least human greed, are depleting God’s good but ever so fragile creation as never before. We have grown used, even blasé perhaps, to the world endlessly supplying our wants. But the end is coming for many organisms and that will transform and worsen human life. The web of life is tattered, torn and emptying. This is where we are now. This is our environment and the environment we will hand on to the generations to come. How might they judge us? How does God judge us?

I am so deeply moved, and profoundly thankful, that both congregations are committed to environmental awareness and achieving the best possible levels of award under schemes like Eco-Church (https://ecochurch.arocha.org.uk/). There is so much good that we can do and so much good going on. Caring for creation, recycling, reducing our carbon footprint, appreciating the natural world more, learning how best to behave and to shop so as to minimise the damage we cause. In all these ways and more, we can be and are growing into our stewardship of the creation God has entrusted to us and we are duty-bound to share.

As my ministry begins we are already looking ahead to harvest. Alongside everything we will rightly wish to celebrate of the abundance of creation and the work of all who give us food, let us also rededicate ourselves to a harvest of our time and talents, our money and our passion, our vision and our willpower in nurturing a wounded creation and helping it to renew itself. God trusts us in this.

Yours in Christ,

Neil