‘God is Green’ – recycled!

Rambling round the roses

I was asked to comment elsewhere on whether there is a ‘theology of plants’…  Perhaps I should have responded that “a theology which excludes them is likely to be deficient!” But this induced the following ramble, some of which regular readers may recognise.

I have needed to be wary of claiming “theology” due to a culture which takes it for an empirical science, requiring water-tight arguments; a discipline which proves rather than convinces. ‘Natural theology’ has to work a bit too hard in its reasoning, where the awe and wonder may already have done its job for it.

Human beings don’t need to think and pray only in that way, and in my work as EcoChaplain, I was openly commissioned, from the outset, to recognise the value, scope and power of ‘poetic theology’. Hymns and prayers, with all their logical flaws, may be at least as valid as essays and theses as we encounter the mystery of God. Should we, when we turn to God, always speak of trees/plants? I’m convinced!

Though some of this requires an appreciation of divine irony.

Jesus was welcomed (Palm Sunday) by branches, hung on a tree. The identity between Christ, affixed by human cruelty, and the abuse of the tree (of life) to hang him up there should take our breath away. When I’ve used the Iona prayer about ‘wood and nails…purchased our salvation’, have I forgotten that wood comes from plants? The deeply moving Anglo-Saxon poem ’The Dream of the Rood’ which is quoted ( in runic script) on the tree-like cross now sheltered by Ruthwell Parish Church narrates the feelings of the tree wrenched from their forest home by ’stone enemies’ and forced to become an instrument of torture of the World’s friend’. On the sides of the cross, happy birds much berries from its leaves. The animals Jesus encountered, without antagonism, in the unkempt wilderness, are also there.

It’s clear that ‘wilderness’ is not lifeless ‘desert’, but perhaps more, as the Celtic Christians would have sought it out, a ‘deserted place’, where you can escape the bustle and listen for the voice of God. But can there be a wilderness in the midst of a city? The last few weeks, when we hear the birds as the traffic subsided, suggest there can.

What do you grow in your garden? In Holy Communion, through faith, by grace, fruit and grains are offered as the flesh and blood of Christ, broken and scattered, gathered and shared, for the good of all. Few of us would be outraged at singing along with’JesusChrist the Apple-tree’. The convergence of God and nature, whilst we remain calmly aware of the difference between creator and creation, wonderfully reconciled in the body of Jesus Christ, deepens rather than damages our faith. Can a garden speak of this ?

The hyssop that comforts and eases pain on the cross (John 19:28–30) reminds of our awesome debt to the healing powers of plants, celebrated in Revelation, 21, where the leaves of “the tree” (and when you read this, “the tree” implies wonderful diversity) are for the healing of the nations. A right relationship with this part of fellow creation implies justice and peace as well. Out of utter practicality, monasteries and Christian communities cultivated medicinal plants, as do we, though they’re so often masked by blister-packed pills. My late wife’s cancer treatment came from yew berries. Foxgloves help people with heart disease. The list is well-nigh endless. And few folk remedies are lacking in a grain of efficacy.

And Pope Francis recalls a tradition many churches are now happy to revive (Laudato Si Paragraph 12. “What is more, Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wis 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20). For this reason, Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty.
Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.”

It’s truly refreshing that people have begun to delight in wildflower borders and meadows – even on the grass verges in Motherwell!

In our approach to climate crisis, do we try to fight a war, or befriend an abused neighbour and carer? So often too, there is need to balance the arrogance of ‘care FOR Creation’ with the humility of acknowledging how we might be cared for BY Creation. The shaping of a garden should surely take this into account. Just as it should provide for other creatures than ourselves. It is with unambiguous approval that Jesus notes how the mustard-shrub provides habitat for the birds. ( Matthew (13:31–32), Mark (4:30–32), and Luke (13:18–19)

The parable of the Sower ends with an abundant harvest, perhaps because of and not despite the modus operandi of scatter-sowing. It allows for the ecosystem in which this takes place. The birds are fed, and there are weeds. Nature can do their part. Likewise, ecological wisdom underlies the prohibition on superficially efficient reaping. Extreme tidiness, we are discovering, kills: not only starving the creatures whose habitat is on the margins, but also the poor, and ultimately even the rich. And it’s with the authority of God that this point is made. Nothing we do will affect only ourselves. Only sinful arrogance says otherwise.

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you are not to reap to the very edge of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not strip your vineyard bare or gather its fallen grapes. Leave them for the poor and the resident alien; I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:9-10).

This provides the food-bank which ensures the survival of Ruth, one of Jesus’ ancestors, all the more as Jewish tradition values the female line of decent).(Cf Matthew’s genealogy.) Many community gardens provide open access to passers by whilst going food. With all the challenges of regulation that this involves!

I’ve noted that even German churches are being encouraged to allow for wild-flower borders in the graveyards and green spaces they administer, to let foliage cover their church buildings, recognising that managing structural damage may be offset against the welcome for other creatures whose habitat the church then provides, and the bonus in delight for the people who visit. Church authorities even appoint consultants to advise on this, though it’s also necessarily an education in perseverance and collaboration with the needs and demands of nature. Our recent and timely appreciation of our dependance on pollinating insects surely encourages us to acknowledge their place in our spirituality. I don’t know how far we may have come in the appreciation of decay: of the sheer beauty of a rotting log, or indeed what goes on inside a compost bin; and yet life continues because life recycles, and plants and fungi are the workers involved. Not ‘bondage to decay’ comes to mind, but partnership with it. Bondage, like all slavery, is an abuse, and the processes of decay are themselves wondrous aspects of creation.

The ancient and fundamental duty and honour of hospitality is surely key: a locked and completely private, walled-off garden says much about its owner. Abraham welcomed God in person from under the shade of the trees. And in the Book of Isaiah, is it the abuse of the holiness of trees, rather than that the pagans had sacred groves, that so infuriates the prophet?

Next time someone tries to make a case for cutting down a tree in church grounds “because it takes light” think again. In so doing, it’s helping you breathe. Always question such things.

You might have visited various types of historic gardens: those where nature is collaborated with and thoughtfully managed (the school of Capability Brown and others) and those where the aim is to show the complete human mastery of nature, forcing it into artificial geometries and shapes (look at pictures of Versailles). I cannot see that the second expresses a spirituality appropriate to our own age.

The mention of the fig tree in Luke 21 often obscures the following phrase: that we look at and learn from “all the trees”, and there has never been a better time to do so. Science, of course, far from undermining a biblical approach to vegetation, has begun to give meaning to the ‘personalisation’ of plants in Biblical language. We shouldn’t be intimidated into neglecting this though fear of inappropriate anthropomorphising. Green leaves do not just feed us, they give us and all other creatures oxygen for life. Not only do they ‘clap their hands’, (watch the trees in a stiff breeze) but plants certainly communicate, and respond to stimuli. They work together . We share in the building blocks of our DNA so much of what they are, that any approach towards the domination of nature which disregards its spiritual nature and value will tend towards an idolatry of the human. Your garden needs to be someone to ’tend and keep’ rather than to dominate and ruthlessly exploit. Be wary, please, of popular Bible translations which, in your living memory at least, have “weeded out” references to fellow creatures and replaced these with the assumption that it’s only about people. (see Mark 16:15 in GNB!!!). Again, nothing is absolute and clear-cut, but open up you mind to the partnership of plants and animals in the background of everything you hear, pray and sing in church, and you might find the garden of your faith is richer, lusher, more sustainable and sustaining in the turmoil of present day life.

A garden is a privilege, and access to it, even if it isn’t ‘your own’ should be a delight. In sight, sound, smell and peaceful hospitality. I don’t know the details of the ‘paradises’ of middle eastern aristocratic gardens, but it’s worthy of a final comment, that this was what Jesus, from the wood and the nails of the cross, promised the barbarically punished and lowly fellow creature on the point of death. In a garden, we may be with our ancestors, and they in God’s hands. Do you keep memorials fresh and tidy or allow nature to take their course, in the faith that God remembers? What do you think.

And since it is not ourselves, but the Sabbath, which is the culmination of the first Genesis story, perhaps a garden must be a place to value rest, rather than just of labour. God ‘walks in the garden’.

Ultimately, we don’t need to stretch points or lean over backwards to feel how a garden can be a sacred space. But it’s worthy of some discernment and thought, what message we receive from it and give to others.

Going up? Looking down!

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The  environmental chaplaincy is in crisis mode.  

And that’s OK

Maybe that’s  actually the most realistic place to be for the foreseeable future. 

Never a normal again.

I remember with enduring and sustaining gratitude and delight, that it’s two years since I heard that Would be able to take up this wonderful and impossible post. 

The ways of working over past years  ( travelling, face-to-face encounter) have been put beyond use, though these may remain in our residual repertoire for now.

But, for now:….

Some roles are unavoidably “furloughed”, such as interaction with those in training institutions, though I have reason to believe that, like the blossoming of Network meetings online through the perseverance of our programme co-ordinator,  this might actually become more possible due to current circumstances. Likewise, or so it might first appear, the obligation to lay foundations for environmental chaplaincy beyond the time of the current iteration ( though read on…)

For the time being,  following discernment, rather than anything in my terms of service/job description, I am a full-time digitally visiting preacher, putting into video ‘sermons’ a level or energy comparable to that involved in planing and carrying out a visit to a local congregation. 

Also emerging more strongly at this point, is to  continue to pioneer a green approach to the waypoints of the Christian calendar.  Like Ascension.

The project of ‘Creation Time/Season of Creation’  ( and coming up, ‘Climate Sunday’) is an additive, rather than transformative step in this direction, though these remain  as vulnerable as ‘green issues’ generally are to being sidelined as icing on the cake.  How many congregations  will want to know about ‘Climate Sunday’ if churches are still subject to lockdown measures by September? 

To break into the most memorable and constitutive festivals which, (for good or ill,)  help people to grasp and define for themselves what the church is when the church is being the church, has been one of the most difficult nuts to crack. Even making plain the missional implications of Christmas as the  story of a refugee family can be rather uphill.

We’re happy to have a special eco-service now and then, and might even enrich it by inviting neighbours,  though Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity are still, for most of  British Christians, ‘too holy to be green’.  And, for pastoral reasons, we can often add Mothering Sunday and Harvest  to this list.  EcCongregation Scotland is an agency of Mission and evangelism to the churches.

Lockdown circumstances are pushing me into more worthwhile reflection, precisely on things to which I would not likely be invited to be part of by local churches. For instance, that the extremely odd and often unhelpfully picturesque festival of Ascension is indeed Ascension into Creation, rather than out of reality. In this I am building on some liturgical models from the Iona Community.

 In the ‘old days’ , someone in my position would head off on a sabbatical and come up with a manuscript for a book, “Greening the Christian Year”  – or some other such predictable title….. which would be published, reviewed, swiftly remaindered, then pulped.

Should such a thing happen, at least digital publishing saves the environmental impact of those  final stage. 

But where the green dimension of completely mainstream and identity-defining customs and celebrations is brought out , that’s where the answer lies to continuing ‘environmental chaplaincy’, and precisely because  everyday churches and leaders will make it happen. 

The question of how  to reach this stage still requires further reflection and inspiration.

But please do not underestimate this potential for lasting transformation of church life by targeting what people think of as the under-rated and empowering foundations of that life.  Right now, under very real pressure from the Pandemic (which we really do have to see as the ‘foothills’ of the greater layers of crisis,)  the old solutions of trusting money  and giving greatest  power to those who administer it might look to be  reasserting themselves. 

One wonders how deep the awareness in our institutions of the magnitude of environmental emergency ever penetrated at all?

What is needed is dialogue and partnership, rather than a power game. Or a blame game. As noted, the pressures are  horizon-blockingly real. We need to pray for and constructively support those who are trying to respond to them.  No one would want these things on their plate!

As part of the preparation for the online retreat I was asked to lead during  Laudato Si week, I looked in greater detail, than ever I had  before, at the ‘commandments’ of Jesus. I combed the four Gospels on the lookout for direct commands, instructions and interventions.  The occasion was a reflection on John 14, where, rather than insisting disciples ‘obey’ commandments, Jesus asks that they ‘keep’ (treasure) the commandments that they ‘have’. In the version of the Bible I was using, ‘obey’ occurs in John’s Gospel  when it is used not by Jesus, but by his complacent opponents:

“We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will.” (John 9:31)

Our hope as Christians, of course, is precisely that God does listen to sinners, and loves and guides those who realise they have acted against God’s will.  And  of the friends of Jesus, more is expected than the mere obedience of slaves. (cf also Luke 17:10)

And that instructional teaching from Jesus is the starting point for the concrete and grounded decisions, of varying scale and moment, which lie before us together and alone.

Still, you can’t legislate on the basis of one translated word. And every theological assertion will have holes. This is something we have to live with, and not be disabled by. The most destructive and unhelpful theology is one which intimidates by trying to sew everything up, or to annihilate opponents. That also throws away the great advantage of theological reflection: that, with honesty, we responsibly  make leaps of reasoning before the pathway to our landing-point may fully have emerged. The colours of the rainbow coexist, even when we insist we only see white light.  How to find our place and purpose in the created World, without continuing our ancestral capitulation to the injustice and idolatry of the systems of the human “world”?

(For the record: a huge proportion of  Jesus’ ‘commands’ are for the equipping/formation/shaping of disciples. Healings are accomplished by direct intervention against natural forces, but generally only with the consent  or at the request of humans who look to be healed.  Rather more of Jesus; teaching ( especially in Luke)  is of the order of “this is the situation: you decide, though take the consequences”.  Jesus commandingly  evicts, rather than destroys, natural forces/demons who are in the wrong place. And I wondered if his robust conversation with the wind and the waves, to the benefit of terrified disciples, might be helpful in giving us confidence in managerial interventions to ‘tend and keep’ the environment, whilst mitigated by the comforting nuance of “peace, be still” ( Mark 4:39)).

Reflecting on differences of church tradition also throws up  the sense in which imperatives emerge through discernment. Reformed churches are reticent about acknowledging as ‘sacrament’ anything not directly ‘ordered’ by Jesus in scripture, though others are more than content to allow discernment to command, albeit with very heavy safeguards.

Circumstance, like Jesus, both prunes us  and enables. What is the fruit we look to bear?

Nonetheless, the question I’m left with is this: what does Christ command us today, equipping us as friends, and how, having discerned this, will we allow our lives to be transformed?

As the ‘men in white’ of Ascension bluntly advised the Galileans on the hill  [paraphrase]  

“Stop looking up into the sky, and get on with it!”

A day in the life of a digital travelling preacher….

There was some old joke about ‘labour’saving devices’… that you always ended up doing more work if someone thought you had time on your hands. 

I don’t think it’s quite like that, to have moved from a physically travelling preacher to a digital one: the hours and energy demanded are actually quite  similar, even if the front-end minutes (on-screen) may seem less.  Even more than when I’m making what may be my only possible visit to your community in five years, every minute is an opportunity, every second of precious attention-span needs to be justified. This Sunday’s  “sermon on wheels” is eight minutes,  but started with an already whittled-down script and  more than  half an hour of footage.  The ratio for the reflection with which the AGM will begin is somewhat more extreme.

Setting perfectionism in perspective: a good “view” is worthwhile, even if we don’t hold the viewer to the end because the phone rings, or the cat throws up.

Mind you, cats are BIG participants in online meetings!

Then , having reached that stage, there is a “Twitter edition”, brutally cut down to 2 mins 20 seconds.

Online meetings are also a swings and roundabouts thing: they are deceptively draining because they demand more focussed attention, but you can attend, because you do so from home.

And the AGM and Gathering will be a pioneer large  ecumenical meeting for the churches of Scotland . As my colleagues said at a recent meeting “no pressure”  – but this will be in an atmosphere of peace and encouragement, rather than haughty entitlement. Because this is what I have generally been delighted to discover with the movement. Most of us know that all of us are doing our best. Compassion, commitment, and a yearning for justice are powerful environmental values. 

Some things are actually better: the staff group have spent much more time ‘together’, encouraging and talking about projects. The networks are coming into their own as seldom before, thanks to the energetic initiative of Judith,  our programme co-ordinator.  No need to mention the carbon footprint implications of being at home. And its’ great  to breathe fresher air, and hear the birds sing, who are usually drowned out by traffic where I live.

And I’ve ‘got to church’ at my local congregation ,much more often than expected, and with my family. Which impresses upon me both the need to support the online  and other efforts of local churches, and for the chaplaincy to continue to offer something special, distinctive, and in addition to the ‘regular’ things in which people are now gaining a degree of confidence.  

May we help to add to that, and the assertive visibility of our movement, through lockdown and beyond, to the Grace of God!

Holy Saturday in lockdown

Holy Saturday in Lockdown. For the first time in most of our lives, we have pause for thought on this Day of Uncertainty.

The disciples, in hiding, because they were afraid.
And not without cause, because the danger was very real.
The authorities had lost their patience.

And never mind about tomorrow, as Jesus had said. Every horizon was blocked by the pain and tensions of today. For us, it’s really difficult to look beyond the virus, for instance to the news of continuing freak weather in the Pacific region.

The easy way to see the events of the Passion is to portray everything destructive as corruption by the powerful snd influential. People have looked for the technicalities that today might get those accused of abusive crimes off the hook, as if the systems of social control and criminal justice etc in the Empire were themselves sound and reliable. Like the ‘good thief’ who imagines that crucifixion is a proper legal response to his own crimes. We note that Jesus, himself on the cross, doesn’t waste time putting him right, but offers the promise of a paradise which sets all that in perspective.

More demanding is to realise that those who acted against Jesus, by and large, seemed to be people under pressure, doing their best. Trying to be faithful to the spirit of their principles when the pips squeak.

And both during and subsequent to our current and utterly acute emergency, we can expect to see more of that, aided and abetted by what has begun to be described as ‘virtuous snooping’ – the repellent tendency to leap to the worst conclusion if one’s neighbour even appears to be transgressing the letter of the precautions, which are, nonetheless necessary. A walk which doesn’t quite look like ‘exercise’ is a long way from a crass mass gathering. The sanctions appropriate to one should not be applied to the other. Grace, forgiveness, and compassion, these most environmental of divine gifts, never stop applying.

The Passion story shows people with and without authority pushed to that stage when the letter of principles seem – rightly, and even responsibly – to be set aside. A pretty terrible burden. Which, as I have noted before, was what I saw in the preaching of the post-war generation when I was growing up. The non-logic of supporting nuclear weapons ‘because of Auschwitz’. Or annoyance at remembering the tragedy of everyone caught up in a war, “Because our own homes were bombed!”

Yes, I have heard all  of that, as a grassroots pastor, in churches.

And in the answer of the army chaplain to my question, on a chaplaincy course, about whether they prayed for the Iraqis in that war . “Yes, once they were defeated”.

I hope I will continue to be shocked that the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ, which come into their own in times of crisis, might be set aside, (whether by me or by others, ) precisely when they are most needed, because, when things were good, we never quite learned how to learn to drive these ‘emergency vehicles’.

The statement of Caiaphas, that it might be right for one person to die for the good of the people is two-edged. For Christianity, whilst crying out against the means and motivation, in some sense has also agreed with the statement.

Yet again, black and white serves us rather poorly. Christianity is born out of the resurrection, which is the divine repurposing of an evil and unjust act.

There’s another deceptively huge step of interpretation. This is in how we read ‘according to the scriptures’. The letter kills but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor 3:6). One dramatised Passion I saw this year did not make that saving difference clear, which is necessary if we are to receive, at the end of Easter Sunday:  the story of the walk to Emmaus: the poetic and mystical relationship of the Word made Flesh to Scriptures whose origins are in different times and situations, but which, because they can be seen to relate to our Risen Lord, also shed saving light on the struggles of our own day, and the Life of Emergency that still lies before us.

Holy Saturday is cruel. A day of no visible hope. But Sunday does dawn. Not with solutions, but with  transformation……. and a challenge of love far greater than the despair of Good Friday.