St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon on Sunday 17 September 2023. Here it is for you again.

We have heard three readings today with very different perspectives on the wilderness. After Jesus was baptised, he went into the wilderness as a place of reflection and solitude to prepare for his future ministry. But Joel tells of a wilderness which is the result of a landscape devastated by locusts. The destruction of the crops is so complete that there is nothing to offer to God. The ground mourns, for the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil fails. There is drought and the parched earth has caught fire, destroying the remaining pasture. People and animals alike are starving.

Locusts are fascinating creatures. Most of the time they live solitary lives as green, unremarkable grasshoppers. For years they do no damage. Then environmental conditions are just right – usually a lot of rain – and suddenly they increase in numbers and begin to sense each other. Their brains change, they change colour to brown and instead of avoiding each other they are attracted to one another, and they march in a co-ordinated formation across the landscape. They ravage the agriculture devouring practically everything in sight. In 2020 there were devastating swarms in East Africa, Southwest Asia and the Middle East. A swarm could have tens of millions of insects – one swarm was 25 miles long by 37 miles wide. That’s one and a half times the area of London. A single locust consumes its own bodyweight in one day – even a relatively small swarm of a third of a square mile can consume enough food to feed 35 000 people in one day.

Plagues of locusts are caused by extreme weather conditions, and as the climate changes they are becoming more common and more devastating. They pose a threat to the livelihood of 10 % of the world’s population.

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, predicts a plague of locusts as one of the horrors that would happen at some future time. You will have heard of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse based on visions in Revelation. The most common naming of them is Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence. They do not ride alone. What happens if hunger strikes, for example, as a result of a plague of locusts? There is competition for scarce resources, leading to war and the displacement of people. Refugee camps are places where diseases are rife as sanitary provision is inadequate. Death results – not as the hymn puts it “kind and gentle death” but tragic and brutal death where adults and children alike die in their thousands from preventable causes. When more than one catastrophe strikes at once, our ability to cope is strained to the limit.

We have seen pestilence, in the shape of Covid, infect the whole world. We fear wars, nuclear, biological, or otherwise, desertification and rising sea levels leading to mass migration and, eventually, in the worst-case scenario, to the collapse of civilisation worldwide. Civilisations have collapsed before – the Old Testament tells of the Babylonians, Persians and Greeks replacing each other, only to eventually become subsumed into the Roman Empire, which itself crumbled. But now we live in a global economy, and the mayhem could reverberate around the whole planet. We have weapons of mass destruction, and the possible effects on the planet are unthinkable. It is a real possibility, perhaps not in our lifetimes, but our families might reap the seeds of destruction our generation has sown. The wilderness might become global.

We know what actions we must take to avert the climate crisis reaching the tipping point: lifestyle changes that can make a difference include eating more vegan food, being careful not to waste, flying less and avoiding buying new things unless you really have to. Learn about climate change and tell other people about the things you discover. Use your democratic voice to promote change. There is still a chance to make a difference. But what if the worst happens, and the world slips into social chaos? These are bleak and depressing possibilities indeed – where can we find hope?

Paul has the answer in our second reading from Romans. He is writing about this world contrasted with the world as it should and will be.

One writer who understood the idea of the two worlds was C.S. Lewis. He always lived with one foot in prosaic, everyday existence, and the other in the world of his imagination. He wrote about Narnia, the country first accessed through a wardrobe, which in his book the Last Battle was made anew. This was the true world. He referred to our world as the Shadowlands – a world which isn’t what it should be.  It’s a world of shadowy landscapes through which we walk on our way toward the new creation. Lewis wrote, “The world as it is now, is a world of spoiled goodness, a world of decay, in which we can glimpse perfection”. Through his storytelling we can grasp the idea of two worlds side by side, our mundane world, which we think of as real, and God’s world which is discerned when the Spirit shows us how things can be.

Paul writes in Romans chapter 8 that the sufferings of this world are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us. All those things we have looked at: Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence, terrible as they are, will fall into perspective when we see God’s glory. And the whole of creation is inextricably bound up with our salvation. When we look with our earthly eyes our existence can seem futile to us, but in fact what we see as meaningless, foreshadows a new beginning. Just as we are frustrated by our own inability to behave in the way God would like, repeatedly failing in our attempts to become better people, the whole planet and every living thing together are suffering from the labour pains that come before new birth.

We can hear the groans not just in the suffering of displaced people, but in the earth itself. The Amazon rainforest is protesting at its depredation as trees are felled and plants and animals lose their homes. There are echoes of silent groans from all the species no longer in existence, from the dodo to the Javan tiger. There are whispers from few remaining Black Rhinos who are critically endangered. There is the choking pollution that is damaging the health of children in our own parish.

We are not living at the end but at a new beginning. The time is coming when the earth will be restored to perfection. Creation is standing on tiptoes, like a child eager to see a royal procession, longing for the redemption which will wipe away the pollution, the oil slicks and the barren lands.

Does that mean that we can sit back and wait for God to make all things new and make no effort ourselves? Leaving our brothers and sisters to suffer and our world likewise? We know we cannot, because we must be ruled in all things by love, responsibility and respect for our neighbour and for all the created world. As Paul puts it, we must be led by the Spirit of God.

Paul speaks of the glory about to be revealed, as something imminent, not as a happening in the distant future. Maybe God’s glory is always nearly visible, one action, one tiny step from us brings to birth a bit more glory. We are God’s adopted children called to do his will, to tend creation, to help our neighbours, especially the poorest people in the world, to thrive, and in doing that become ourselves the people God created us to be.

We do not know what the future will hold – whether our efforts to avoid chaos and anarchy will be enough. But we are the people of hope, who see in every situation the potential for the demonstrating the nature of God by our behaviour as his own adopted children, cherishing creation and each other to mirror and reciprocate his love and care for us. We know that in the end in some way, all will be well. Meanwhile, we live in the tension of the reality of the present and the hope of things to come.