My "Nature Notes" article for April

 

Last month I wrote a bit about pets and wildlife, and there’s no doubt that some pets, some of the time, can be a threat to the animals and birds that share our space. But there are many other threats besides, to do with how we live and how we human beings plan our environment. There’s no escaping the huge numbers of creature killed on our roads, for example - on a short journey of no more than ten miles recently, I counted more than twenty roadkill pheasants before I gave up. Pheasants are not a native bird, and estimates of the numbers released by shoots etc each year vary between 35 and 50 million birds - so that’s another way in which human activity impacts on our wild environment. Roadkill attracts magpies and crows (and red kites and buzzards), and is one factor contributing to the probably artificially high number of magpies. So the trail goes on . . .

As a regular litter-picker, I am perhaps more aware than most of the huge amount of litter simply dropped on the streets of the average town, however many bins there are available.  Pigeons, gulls and many other birds find food among the rubbish, as do, when you’re not looking, mice, rats and urban foxes. But litter is also dangerous: broken glass, and tins mangled by mowers when left on urban grass or in country fields, are two obvious examples. But there are others: I was told not long ago of a hedgehog attracted by the yoghurt in a plastic pot, that died because, having got in, it couldn’t get out, because its prickles caught against the sides of the pot.  Hedgehogs, by the way, should never be given milk - it is quite harmful to them.

Smokers seem routinely to feel that it’s OK simply to drop their cigarettes where they’ve been smoking. It isn’t. It’s messy and makes our streets unsightly (and don’t even get me started on chewing gum), but what’s dropped also contains poisonous chemicals.

But, as I’ve written before, even we kind people who provide food in our gardens for local birds can be a cause of harm.  Most garden birds would, away from our towns, be woodland species; their natural behaviour is to find sources of food, make the most of it while it lasts, and then move on. In our gardens, though, the food source never runs out - we keep refilling the feeders. And sometimes we get a bit competitive, not wanting “our” garden birds to decamp to the garden of our neighbour down the road. 

But because that means birds are visiting the same place more often than they would in the wild, diseases like trichomonosis (sometimes called “fat finch disease”, though it seems to have migrated to garden birds from urban pigeons) and salmonella can be spread at feeders and birdbaths.  If you see a bird that is lethargic, seems larger and more puffed up than normal, hanging around looking sad and not feeding, that’s probably a case of this horrible fatal disease. Greenfinches seem particularly susceptible.  It’s best then probably to remove all feeders for a time and make sure the whole area is sterilized.  Infected birds vomit up food that contains the parasite.  In general, a good thorough and regular clean of everything is enough, but you can buy antiseptic products too.

A sermon for Mothering Sunday (given at Refail Chapel)

 

It’s never easy as a visiting preacher to deliver a sermon on Mothering Sunday. For it’s one of those days when if you don’t really know your congregation, it can hold you back. For some folk, Mother’s Day (to use the popular name) may be a time of sadness, for some it may bring bitter and difficult memories. Not everyone has a good experience of either mothering or being mothered.

But Mothering Sunday is deliberately that, not only Mother’s Day, so it can be more than just a celebration of mums, important though that is. Today is Refreshment Sunday, time off for good behaviour in the middle of Lent (even though in fact the forty days of Lent excludes all the Sundays); and a day when in the past people made pilgrimage to their mother church, perhaps a cathedral or other great and ancient church, or just their own family church where they were christened; and also the day when youngsters in service might be given time off to trek home and visit their families.

It was in fact a lady called Constance Adelaide Smith who, inspired by the success of Mother’s Day in America, called for the medieval tradition of Mothering Sunday in this country to be revived, and to become a celebration of motherhood. In America Mother’s Day’s always the second Sunday in May, but here it has to move around, because it’s linked to the date of Easter which changes year on year.

Now that’s also one reason why the Gospel readings set for today in the Revised Common Lectionary can present a bit of a challenge for the preacher. I have resisted the temptation to ditch them in favour of easier readings, and in fact I’ve chosen to use both the readings offered, since they’re not very long. Both of them in fact involve an element of pain. The first one - from Luke - is his account of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, when Simeon tells Mary that her son is destined to save many people, but also that a sword will pierce her own heart. And the second - from John - shows that happening, as Mary at the cross sees her son helpless and dying, and can do nothing to save him.

So Mary is a focus for today in Church, as, maybe the Church’s great icon of motherhood. Luke tells us how Mary says yes to the angel who brings her a life-changing message from God, that she is to bear his son. But later he also tells us of Jesus seeming to ignore and even reject his mother, when she arrives with his brothers to take him home. To those he’s teaching, Jesus says, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Anyone who does the will of God is my mother and my sister and my brother.”

Those words could come across as cruel and dismissive - but in fact they contain an important truth, which is that mothering isn’t just the job of mothers . . . not if by “mothering” we mean showing in practical and caring ways the kindness and generosity of God. Mary in any case was not dismissed; she was, as we’ve heard, standing at the cross, when so many of those who’d followed her son had fled; and she was also there with his disciples on the Day of Pentecost, and received the gift of the Holy Spirit as did they.

Perhaps we can think of Mary as having made a journey from being the mother of Jesus to becoming mother to the whole family of believers; on Easter morning Jesus gave another Mary, Mary of Magdala, a message to take to those who had been disciples but whom he now called his brothers. The Church has taken many forms as it’s spread across the world. It’s had its share of the pain and suffering part of being family. It has been deeply divided and in many ways still is. But Church is made up of those whom Jesus still calls my sisters and my brothers, those on whom Jesus continues to bestow his Spirit, those whom Jesus still sends into the world to share everywhere the good news of our redemption, and of God’s unending and unfailing love.

Church is supposed to be family, not organisation or institution. We belong together, because together we belong to God; together we belong to Jesus. There is an old tradition that if someone saves you from death you thereafter belong to that person for ever. And I trace that sense of belonging to Jesus in the letters of Paul.

So let’s turn to one of his letters now: the first reading I used, from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. It’s a favourite reading of mine. If mothering is everyone’s responsibility within the family of the Church, here’s a good place to find out what that means in practice. “Put on the garments that suit God’s people,” says Paul - and I like those words. “Clothe yourselves” in another translation: clothe yourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Clothe yourselves especially in love - that’s what binds everything together and makes sense of it all. Paul’s words remind me that it’s a deliberate decision to choose to live this way. It’s not something that happens only when I’m in a good mood. It’s not about who I like and who I don’t really rate. It’s not about who’s in and who’s out, or whether I might gain something from it.

It’s about choosing to live as family. Paul gives us God’s model for a community or family of love. It’s a model of mothering, for the kind of family life in which everything is shared. Where everyone shares  member shares in the good and the bad, the times of joy and the times of pain, the joys and the weeping. And the songs, too! I also like this particular passage because Paul tells us to “sing from the heart in gratitude to God.” And that sounds good to me.

It feels like encouragement not to be too stiff and solemn about our faith. And not having to pretend. It’s OK not to be fine, I don’t need to pretend it’s all good if it isn’t. It’s OK to be confused or to struggle with something, I don’t have to pretend I understand when I don’t. Church as Mother Church is a big part of today’s theme, and Mother church needs to be a place where differences don’t matter and honesty does, where we can look one another in the face, speak honestly, and know we’ll be accepted and treated with compassion and care. In some churches what seems to matter most is conforming; a rigid and judgemental sort of religion. We do stand under judgement, certainly: but read Matthew 25 verse 31, the parable of the sheep and the goats to see what we’re judged on. Mothering; our care for those most in need, our readiness to give.

So as we thank God for mothers and for mothering, and as we pray for families and for all who have the gift and care of children, let’s also be praying for God’s help and guidance in that task of mothering that’s at the heart what it means to be Church as family. Let’s clothe ourselves with that love that can bind everything together in perfect harmony. Let’s make sure that we do everything in the name of Jesus, and after the example of Jesus: and may his peace rule in our hearts. Amen.

My Sermon for Sunday 23rd March, Lent 3 (to be given at Caersws Methodist Church)

Many of my best conversations about matters of faith seem to happen in the pub after male voice choir practice on a Sunday night. I say “best conversations”, but that doesn’t always mean easy ones. So last week a member of our choir said something along the lines of - “If religion were true then surely the things you pray for would happen, wouldn’t they? So I’ve been praying for peace for years now, and it hasn’t happened! Why doesn’t God knock a few heads together and get things moving? How come he lets bad things happen to good people?”

Let me be honest here, and admit that I didn’t have much of an answer ready. The guy who asked the question, one of our baritones, isn’t a churchgoer, so far as I know, but neither is he anti the faith, and I’m sure he was telling the truth when he said he’d been praying for peace. His question was certainly challenging, but it was asked from a position of genuine struggle; he was trying to match faith to the realities of the world at a time when all news seems to be bad news, in a way that might make sense for him. And of course his questions weren’t exactly new ones. As our two readings today bear out, people have been asking questions like that for as far back in history as you care to go.

Why do bad things happen? It’s not an easy question. At least when you think about war, oppression, tyranny or discrimination, there are human beings we can point at and blame. But we know we’re also living in a world that experiences tragic chance events: last weekend, tornados were doing immense damage across the United States, the weekend before, tropical cyclones were destroying whole villages in Mozambique and southern Tanzania. There’s always something. If, for example, an undersea volcano should cause an earthquake which then sparks off a tsunami which wrecks my little coastal village, taking the lives of those of my friends and family who don’t get to escape in time, how is that their fault? Or mine? How is that a just punishment for human sin? What sins are they, and who exactly is at fault?

The difficult but only conclusion to draw is that in this world bad things happen. Some of those bad things do happen to bad people, who you might think deserved all they got, but what about the collateral damage of the relative innocents who just happened to be in the wrong place? Some bad things happen because bad people cause them to, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now three years old. Other warlords are also available, sadly. But knowing who to point the finger of blame at doesn’t take away the pain and misery and heartache their actions cause, to people who had no desire for war, to the children being rushed into hospital in Gaza on my news the other day.

So, to return to my conversation in the pub, as a Christian and a minister, how can I explain all this? Well, I suppose I can start by saying something about human freedom. We don’t live in zoo cages, we live in a world whose people are free to make good choices or bad ones, and in particular to say yes to God or turn away from him, and it does seem that in such a world there are going to be times when the unjust prosper and the just and innocent suffer. The apostle John wrote: “God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” The apostle Paul wrote: “If I have no love, then I’m just a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Love is at the heart of what faith is about, and we have to be free to love, it can’t be programmed into us. If God made me incapable of not loving him, I’d be some kind of automaton or robot, I wouldn’t be a free human being.

So that’s the theoretical answer, the doctrinal answer, and I believe it to be true, and yet there are times when it just isn’t enough: like when I see someone get hurt, or when I’m being hurt myself. Our first reading came from Paul’s letter to folk who were expecting persecution, who knew they were likely to be hurt. So he used lessons from Jewish history to encourage them to keep firm and not fall away; in the end, he tells them, God won’t abandon those who keep faith with him, so hang on in there.

My baritone friend in the pub might well have described that as nothing more than “Pie in the sky” - it wouldn’t, I think, have been enough for him. But faith is about believing the promise, even if that’s not what it feels like here and now. Not everyone manages to do it; some of the people Paul was writing to didn’t manage to do it. Not everyone stayed strong when the church faced opposition and persecution - there were some who abandoned the faith. Would I have been one of them? I really don’t know - I hope not, and I’ve been hugely inspired by the stories of faith that spring up in the dark and desperate and painful places of our world. Of faith tested to the utmost and not found wanting. I hope I could share that faith; I pray that I would.

Let’s look at what Jesus was saying in our Gospel reading. He was being questioned about some of his fellow countrymen who’d been put to death by the Romans, and others who’d been the victims of accident, of the collapse of a tower. And we see him refuse to say what probably other religious people might have said, that those who died must have deserved their fate. Instead, he insists that they were no more deserving of their fate than anyone else. 

It can be an easy way out, to say something along the lines of, “Well, I expect he got what was coming to him.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. What he does say, though, is quite a difficult bit of teaching - that in reality, each one of us has got it coming to us. No-one is so good, so saintly, so blameless that they can by their own efforts be free from the inevitable penalty of human sin. All of us fall, and not one of us can save him or herself. So all our human life is lived in the shadow of accident, illness, tragedy, cruelty and war. Even the strongest and most saintly of us will in the end run out of years. In Isaiah chapter 53 we find this verse, which we can also hear sung in Messiah: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” While Paul wrote to the Church in Rome that “The wages of sin is death.”

So one response to that question last Sunday might have been to say that there are no innocents. Everyone is stained with sin. As an explanation of things, it’s not a very happy one, in fact left as it is it’s a recipe for despair. But to repeat that quote from Isaiah, “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” And to continue the quote from Romans chapter 6, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In a world that seems unfair, that is unfair, and that is full of suffering and pain, Christ who himself suffered, who was himself treated unfairly and unjustly, becomes our king and our saviour. He and he alone can lift us from despair; he journeys to the cross in order to make himself our only hope.

I am trying hard to live a good Lent, to turn round the things in my own life might that get in the way of discipleship. But try as I may to do the right thing, I keep slipping back, letting myself down, letting God down. “Light came into the world,” said Jesus to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, “but people preferred the darkness.” The good news is that however much we shun the light, we are still loved by God. We cannot save ourselves, not by any number of good deeds or righteous acts, and yet the promise of salvation is true and real. We live in a world marred by tragedy and mired in sin, but beyond the suffering and pain, and even hiding within it, there is also love.

Each small act of human kindness tells the powers of evil that they can never win. Light is always stronger than darkness, and love is always stronger than evil. Our God is a generous and gracious God, who loves us even when we make ourselves unlovable. We see his love in the one man without sin, on whom all our sins were laid. And if we turn to him, if we turn back to the light of God’s love, we discover that human tragedy, however dreadful, can never have the last word: for his love always will.

 

My Sermon on the First Sunday of Lent, reflecting on Luke's account of Jesus in the Wilderness

 

So the devil said to Jesus, “All you have to do is to bow down before me; then all of this will be yours.” I wouldn’t normally begin my first sermon of Lent on a political note, but it’s just last Sunday that the world marked three years since President Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. The first time in Europe since the Second World War that one country had invaded the sovereign territory of another, and endeavoured to take it by force. My paper last weekend carried the story of how the president of Ukraine was, as I saw it, deliberately mocked and belittled by the president and vice-president of the United States. It made difficult reading: whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument, there’s a right way and a wrong way to behave in international diplomacy, and this was the wrong way on so many levels.

On the first Sunday of Lent We’re reminded of the Bible story this season recalls. The temptations faced by Jesus in the wilderness, all of them to do with worldly power. The devil has shown Jesus in a flash all the nations of the world. “This is all mine,” says he. “I can do what I like with it, and I’ll give it all to you, and all its glory. All you have to do is to bow down to me.”

I am astonished - though maybe I shouldn’t be - to see the USA, the leader of the free world, seeming to make common cause with Russia - Russia, where there are today more political prisoners than at any time since the 1980’s. I was sickened to see - in the Oval Office - President Zelensky criticised for his clothes, worn to identify with his people at war in the defence of their land. Too much of our world today has, I believe, gone to the devil.

Years ago, I was involved in a mission campaign. I was part of a team, we went from door to door to talk to people about faith. And I’ve never forgotten this one guy who harangued me at some length about how religion had been the cause of more wars than anything else in human history. That rather one-sided conversation made for a very difficult few minutes for this novice evangelist!

But on the face of it, he was right, of course; any history book will show you how religion has played a part in many a war, other acts of cruelty too. But in reality, behind that history there’s a deeper and more fundamental truth: the one thing that more than anything plunges the world into war, whatever label it may bear, is the human lust for power.

That lust for power can be dressed up in lots of different ways. It can wear the trappings of religion or patriotism; it can claim the flag of justice, the desire for vengeance, the insistence that the other side should be punished. But what it’s always really about is power, and the stuff that tags along with power or feeds the lust for power: envy of those over there have got, fear that they might grab from you before you can grab from them, all of it made somehow holy by an insistence that our cause is right and just, and that we are the ones blessed by God. 

But at the heart of every unprovoked assault and every smash and grab raid there’s someone who in some way has sold their soul to the Devil. Those words of his “All this I will give you” - they add up to a false bargain. What is all this that he will give us? It’s nothing more than mud and dust; and how much blood, how many human lives, is any pile of mud and dust worth?

And yet I know that I’m not immune to this - I’m not immune to wanting what I haven’t got, to getting angry at the thought that someone else has what I think ought to be mine. But not even Jesus when he’d finished his time in the wilderness - not even he was immune to temptation. It kept on coming: he was tempted as we are, we read in Hebrews. The devil retreated, but he didn’t go far, he was just biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to come round. But, to complete that quote, Jesus was “tempted as we are, yet without sin” - and to each temptation that came his way he responded with a word of Scripture, he consciously turned away from the devil and his lies, and to the one he called Father.

And we should too. Christians believe Jesus to be both God and man, but out there in the desert it was very much the humanity of Jesus that was to the fore. In a place of huge vulnerability, he’s there to face up to all the possible wrong turnings that lay ahead for him, and to distinguish the false voices from the true. And in doing that, scripture is throughout, his weapon of choice.

It should be ours too. The word is near you, says the apostle Paul - it is on your lips and in your heart. We need that same turning to God that we see in our Lord, that same inward, heartfelt awareness of God’s authority, that is the authority of love, if we too are to stand firm against the world, the flesh and the Devil - in other words, against the stuff that can turn our heads, about being top dog, getting our own way, being the one in power. Give God the power, is what Paul says. Give God the power, and make no distinction between people, for God loves us all.

The fact is that anything that we believe in strongly can be misused, can become a vehicle for the bad stuff. It’s interesting to note that Mr Trump, Mr Vance and Mr Putin would all claim to be Christians, at least when it suits them to. And certainly all of them seem easily to find Christian ministers and priests ready to speak out in their support.

What is wrong and sinful often presents itself as attractive and plausible. Every one of the temptations that came the way of Jesus in the desert was plausible - why not take this short cut to maybe doing some good in the world? Why not dazzle the people with the power at your fingertips? Temptation in our lives often looks like a good way, but that doesn’t mean it’s God’s way. In the last of the temptations we even find the devil himself using scripture to back up his case - “Look,” he says: “Here’s a scripture that says God’s angels will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” But Jesus still has a further word of scripture to counter what the devil puts before him.

That’s why the word of God needs genuinely to be in our hearts and not only on our lips. The Bible is after all a large and complex book, and in fact the word Bible means a library of books, not just a single one. There’s so much that people have justified using the Bible: slavery, apartheid, wealth, power and even war.

So our reading of God’s word has to start with one we call the Word of God - with Jesus. Here is the man who could grab unlimited power, but instead becomes the servant of all. Here is the man who could be kind, but instead accepts a crown of thorns, and lays down his life - even for those who hammered in the nails. No-one is excluded from God’s love - and even those who exclude themselves by signing up with the Devil are still loved, if only they could know it.

Pray for Ukraine - and Gaza, and Yemen, and so many other places in our world where peace is needed. Pray for a peace that is just and lasting, and includes all, that gives to all, that allows safety and freedom and growth for all. And whenever you pray for peace, add the words, “Let it begin with me.” My word for this Lent is kindness. If my faith is not a culture for kindness and a springboard for kindness then something is very wrong with it. Maybe I’m listening to the wrong voices, maybe they’re leading me the wrong way, that temptingly easy way of short cuts, rather than the narrow path where Jesus leads us. May God plant his true word of love in our hearts, and may it reveal itself in kindness, that we may be lights for a darkening world.