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Creation Care in the Potter’s World

 Dr Nicola Hoggard Creegan, an Auckland theologian, speaks in the 2019 Season of Creation about how we are motivated by our scriptural stories to care for creation. 
Dr Nicola Hoggard Creegan

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Creation Care in the Potter’s World

Transcript
These are challenging scriptures to that we have today. Jeremiah who says now say, to the people of Judah, and the habitants of Jerusalem I am a Potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. And Luke who says, You must hate your mother and father, you must give away all your possessions to the poor. You must count. The cost will really. So I decided to go and see what my favorite preacher said about this three years ago. And he'd just come back from sabbatical. And he said, all this is far too hard, and he preached on a Prayer instead, so that didn't get me very far. And I could I suppose have decided that I was talking about spring and creation and ignore these readings, but they are, of course, strangely resonant with our present predicament and I would at least speak to the mood of these readings. We are seeking today in the season of creation, not only solutions around climate, but also meaning in creation. The role of faith of Theology of liturgy, is to reconnect us with nature, to read the signs of nature. I think we can all feel the buoyancy of spring as it gives birth to New Life. But creation may also be signaling something deeper as well. Creation. Emergency catastrophe. Crisis are now all said together in the same breath. And in fact, it's Synod and the last few days, not just one, but two motions on climate change and carbon neutrality were passed. Someone in person said recently, that it feels as though we or they are sleepwalking into disaster just like they did in 1914, seeing the disaster, that is ahead of us but and able to change it or do anything about it. And as we commemorate the end of the first world war last year. And the beginning of the second this year, it is worth looking at some of the ways in which modern prophecy and poetry. Have together given voice to the premonition of disaster, a catastrophe and a sense of peril similar to that. We now feel around climate So 100 years ago, just after the first world war Yeats wrote, the very famous poem on the second coming. And I say that I love it here. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the Falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things Fall Apart the center cannot. Hold mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction. While the worst are full of passionate intensity, how did he know that 100 years ago? And 200 years ago as a Napoleon wrecked havoc in Europe. The Theologian schleiermacher wrote great forces of Destiny are stomping about our neighborhood with steps that make the Earth tremble and we know not how they will draw Us in. We know not how they will draw Us in and before the first world war also we get the scream. Well the shriek by Edvard Munch in 1893, which is a very famous This painting, but he's be explained it this way. He said, I was walking along the road with two friends and the sun was setting and suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused feeling exhausted and leaned on the fence, there was blood and tongues of fire above the Blue Back. Black Fjord, and the city, my friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety. And I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. What is common and all these expressions of unease or disease is the connection between nature and humans nature resonates that our psychic Health as well as responding to the results of human exploitation. If we are sensitive, we hear and feel the Earth tremble or scream as much as we sense. Its joy and your life. For ancient Hebrew. Something similar was happening as a two-faced, a conqueror and the humiliation of deportation and the sack of their Sacred City and with all of this, a loss of meaning. They took everything. What we would call personally, I am shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. That is God. But equally ancient Hebrews as far as we can understand also believed that God was up close and personal with nature. For Jeremiah God, Spirit was so close to Nature that they were almost won. Where we might talk in terms of scientific objectivity, we might say, nature, or even Gaia will pay us back. They would say, I am a plotter plotting evil against you. There is not much difference, really because we to fear at times, but the Potter is not on our side. we are not therefore facing anything entirely new, just old trajectories retraced Although as Yates, so profoundly says, there appears to be a widening gyre. We are retracing old patterns but the stakes keep being ratcheted up. A few stories, show the consequences of abusing or not heating nature. You may have read in the newspapers about the young chick couple who decided to walk the route burn track in Winter without proper provision guides or permission, they made mistakes and one of them died. There are limits to have a human can go to survive, cold and ice, and snow, and wind without a proper protection. They weren't bad mistakes, just mistakes of judgment, but lethal ones. And on a completely different scale. I have also been watching Chernobyl. And if they haven't seen it I would say it was absolutely must see TV. This was a disaster. Mistakes were made mostly by Young inexperienced, men within a corrupt, self-serving system. And with shoddy Manufacturing, It nearly cost the lives of tens of Millions. Speak of the widening, Gaia when you're tussle is with the power of an atom, the stakes are so much higher. the mistakes were not huge in themselves, but together They're mounted to something that could have threatened human life in Europe and this really is the human predicament. Small errors of judgment can have unforeseen consequences. We find it hard to understand the whole we focus too much on some things and not others. There is malice and greed but above all our human problem is Blindness. And it is interesting that the gospels are full of stories of blindness and of healing. After being blind, we can see now that blindness is our Collective problem. We are all a little like the couple stumbling around in the snow all the technicians, desperately trying to prevent a meltdown that would enter groundwater or explode and kill 60 million instantly. Philosopher. Vic and Stein said, the picture kept us captive. Our ways of seeing which are so powerful, create our worlds, and those worlds can be with the flow of nature or against it. Recently, we have begun to see that are ways of seeing are undermining nature. But within the Christian story, there is always hope the Christian message both urges us to repent and gives us a vision of the future. Recently, we had a visit by a new testament, scholar from Chicago, Lutheran Divinity School, and her name was Barbara rossing. She's an expert in the book of Revelation. And she talked about the Bible and how it gives us. Hope. She says in particular, this is not in the New Testament that the story of Jonah is a story of Hope because it shows us that a corrupt system can turn around, quickly can repent. She reminded us that salvation and healing are really the same word. We have always in church been talking about salvation. We just now need to see that. It extends further than we thought to the natural world as well as us. She ended with the ubiquitous tree of life, this is the total vision of peacefulness and Abundant Life. The most powerful symbol of healing in the Bible. and this is also what we have to offer the world, the vision of a world healed, A message should always be something Visionary as well as warning. And we need to hang on to these visions of healing because another aspect of our Collective blindness, as that we become so focused on solutions that we lose sight of the larger picture. The coroner explicitly said that this was a problem with the check couple, they just wanted to get to the hat so they didn't take the track. It was also one of the problems at Chernobyl and it could easily be a problem. Now, as we navigate the climate issue, we have to make sure that our Focus does not become so narrow that we make the situation worse. And because we are blind, we need guides and Prophets to warn us. And to see this Vision every bit as much as people did in the days of Jeremiah and probably the best-known young Prophet is, Greta. She is sure. And single-minded she is unrelenting in her denunciations. Like Jeremiah like Jesus, she has been called as a very young person. She says, she is really too young to do this work and Jeremiah said something similar. The old ways have not worked. She says the older generation has failed. She says, political movements have all failed. She says she doesn't hate her mother and father, but she did resolutely refused to go back to school. She does hate the dithering and double standards of her parents generation, which is us. She's not giving away her possessions, but she is speaking for the poor and living likely in the world. So even the stern words of Jesus, have some relevance today, Greta shows us that we need to do something new. And sometimes that does mean hating your mother and father, and brother and sisters, As individuals we know so much depends on political powers. But we can learn to listen better to Nature to pray for Nature's healing to pray that we will be healed from blindness. We can support the prophets amongst us and those who work to change an unjust system. As voters, we can make this issue more important than any other as Christians. We can try to listen and to find meaning and guidance in nature itself. And we can pray. I want to end by saying with you the healing prayer from The ecumenical community on the island of Iona. But here we are praying, not only for ourselves, but for every part of Nature and it is in New Zealand that we have made. For example, the wanganui river a person. So, we're praying for nature, as she grows in childbirth for nature as she is screaming as the ground. Trembles For nature with a center does not hold for nature. Is she laborers on one season following the other through all of us? For nature out of which will emerge the Tree of Life. So may the spirit of the Living God present with us now into you, in Body, Soul, and Spirit and heal. You of all that harms you in Jesus name, amen.