But what exactly is the point of flowers, what are they there to do? For they don’t exist to please us, even though we are pleased by them. They exist purely to enable the perpetuation of their kind, by producing fruit and seed. So every flower we see is essentially a mechanism designed to ensure the plant it's on will have children and grandchildren. Its flowers enable a plant to colonise its own bit of the world and then hang on in there. So flowers aren’t bothered about being attractive to us; in fact that could be counter-productive if we pick them and stick them in a vase somewhere. But they do their best to be as attractive as they can be to whatever pollinates them: bees and hoverflies, or maybe moths or beetles, and in more tropical climes even bats or humming birds.
They do that by colour and shape and also by smelling nice. That sweet smell promises a supply of nectar and pollen, a reward for the creatures that visit. Some flowers even have special markings to guide a bee in, like the lines on an airport runway. So petals often have lines directing inwards (not always visible to us, as bees can see into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum). Foxglove flowers have little splodgy foot-prints that do the same thing.
And if flowers don't need us to find them attractive, for that matter we don’t need to find flowers attractive. We don't eat them or use them for any practical purpose; not for the most part, anyway. And yet, though we don’t need their beauty, we recognise it and admire it.
Let me dwell on that for a moment or two, because I think the fact that we find flowers beautiful is a big part of what makes us human beings special. More than that, the fact that we find all sorts of things beautiful and are moved by them, maybe to write a poem like Wordsworth and his daffodils. We take a delight in things, we fall in love, and that’s surely part of what’s meant by saying we’re made in the image of God. We find things beautiful: that’s one way in which we share God’s creative vision. Chapter one of the Book of Genesis tells us that our Creator God delighted in each thing he made. And so can we.
The prophet Isaiah wrote: "I delight greatly in the Lord." One way in which we can delight greatly in the Lord is by delighting in what he’s made, enjoying and marvelling at the beauty and majesty of creation, and in the flowers and other living things with which we share this planet.
But, as I’ve said already, flowers are beautiful for a purpose. They have a job to do. The aim of each flower is to become a fruit. Not that a flower has to do an awful lot in order to be fruitful; really it just has to be there, looking lovely to the bees or moths or whatever it takes to pollinate it. Jesus of course said to his disciples: "Consider the flowers around you. They don't toil, they don't weave or spin, you don't see them running about wondering what clothes to wear. But God gives them clothes more beautiful than Solomon, so they can just get on with being what God’s calling them to be."
And it needs to be just the same for you as well, Jesus went on to say. Don't worry about things that really don't matter much, like what to eat and what to wear. When you spend your time doing that, you end up looking inwards instead of outwards. You lose touch with the important stuff, with the things that really matter. No, he said: set your minds on God's kingdom - and everything you need to serve God will be provided.
What does it mean in practical terms, to set our minds on God's kingdom? While it surely begins with our honouring him as Creator, delighting in the beauty of his work and praising him for giving us so much that’s good, we need to go on from there. For we too are called to be both beautiful and fruitful, like those flowers of the field. I was talking to an old friend about what I’d be talking about this Sunday, and he responded, "Well, it’s a bit late for me to be beautiful!" But it isn’t, for beauty isn’t only our outward appearance, there’s beauty within us as well. We may work very hard on the outward show, and the TV ads certainly encourage us to do that; but we need to work just as hard on the inward beauty that really is much more important. When we’re caring, loving, considerate, generous, then we’re beautiful, beautiful in a way that helps our world be a more beautiful place.
This coming Thursday is Ascension Day, and the nine days between Ascension Day and Pentecost were days in which the disciples in Jerusalem waited prayerfully for the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised they’d receive. The Church ever since has seen this time as a chance to think more about prayer than we usually do. Our life and growth and mission depend on it. Prayer can sometimes feel like a bit of a waste of our time; after all, we’re just sitting there, or maybe kneeling there, when surely we really ought to be getting out there and doing stuff. I often need to remind myself of the sign above the door to the chapel at Lincoln Theological College where I trained. It read “Orare est laborare” (in other words, to pray is to work). For when we pray we’re training ourselves towards God, bending our hearts and minds to his will, rather like a sunflower which turns its head through the day to follow the sun.
Now if our prayer is a work we can offer God (orare est laborare), so all our work should also be prayerful (laborare est orare - to work is to pray). And this season of Rogation leading up to Ascension Day is a time to reflect on this.
Our prayer should encourage our work, and our work should be prayerful, done with God’s will in mind. The days immediately before Ascension Day are kept as Rogation Days, and the word rogation just means prayer, or more specifically, “asking prayer”. Back in pagan times, the people of ancient Rome used to walk through the crops at this time of the year, praying that they would grow well. Christian communities continued to do this, and one particular theme of Rogationtide is that we pray for farmers and gardeners, and give thanks for God’s creation. The hymn “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land that we sing every year at harvest was in fact written to be sung this Sunday, as a Rogation hymn. To the asking prayer of Rogation we add our praising prayers - we praise God for the beauty and goodness of the world about us, and we even praise him for things like flowers and birdsong, which aren’t needed by us but do please and impress and inspire us.
But our prayer needs to be more than asking and praising. To them we need also to add a prayer of commitment. We are stewards of God’s creation; our knowledge and power - and our faith - bring with them a responsibility. We are to keep our world beautiful by being beautiful ourselves, in the things that matter. And God’s kingdom of beauty will be proclaimed and built wherever we are when we are trusting in his love and in Christ’s victory over death and sin, and when the way we live reflects his truth and mercy and love. When we are working prayerfully, working as he desires, and when we are motivated by the mind of Christ, then in our caring, our loving, our mutual concern, our fruitfulness in good works, our generosity and forgiveness, we will shine into the world the light we’ve seen and found in him; and like the flowers, we will be attractive and persuasive in our beauty.
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