28TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME HOMILY – YEAR B 2024
SEASONS OF CREATION FINALE
Well, here we are in springtime, happily gathering to celebrate, give thanks, and celebrate Eucharist today, as we acknowledge the end of our focus on the Seasons of Creation, reminding us of the beauty of the natural world around us, reminding us of our need to protect and preserve its resources, its flora and fauna – plants and wildlife too. I come back to that first picture of the Blue Planet Earth, from the in the void and darkness of outer space, from Apollo 8, which I always use at Christmas, reminding us of the fragility and finiteness of our precious planet. We don’t have to look far to appreciate the wonder of it all.
I am wearing my Canada stole or priest’s scarf today, as it has images of many of the native animals I saw around the cottage where I recently stayed at Pencil Lake in Ontario. A few days before I came home, the leaves on the maple trees were starting to change colour to bright reds, pinks and yellows, from the green of summertime, a sign that autumn, or Fall as they call it there, because of the leaves falling after they change colour, on the way towards a cold and snowy winter.
In the first reading today, we hear from Proverbs about God’s Spirit being at the heart of Creation, “happy with the world and pleased with the human race”. It’s a variation on the Genesis accounts. Then Paul writes to the Colossians about Jesus coming among us, as one of us, to reveal a God of life and love, intimately involved in our lives and our world, but present from the beginning of time, calling us back to himself, in forgiveness and love, where humanity had gone off the rails.
Scientific evidence suggests that this took millions of years, but Genesis has God doing it all in 6 days, and then having a rest, which God hardly needs!! It’s just not that simple, but the fact is we are here, and the question is what to we do about it, and how do we live life well? The story we hear here is a reminder to look around and appreciate and care for it all, thanking God for life and love and nature.
Then we hear from the introduction to John’s Gospel how the Word, who is Jesus, was present from the beginning, as God’s Spirit hovers over the chaos of the darkness and the water, as the source of light and life emerging, as Jesus comes among us as human, full of grace and truth.
Just as Jesus often uses images from nature, as we hear today, he also means that we should stop and look around us at this beautiful world. Francis of Assisi was known to be a friend of nature, as he wrote about the wonder of it all, known to be a friend to all God’s creatures.
Jesus looks at the mystery of growth from small things to great, as he speaks of the mustard seed, a really small one, but which eventually becomes a great tree, sheltering birds in its branches, as part of the web of life, as they say in biology class! In other places, he speaks of the beauty of the birds of the air and the flowers in the fields, the vine and the branches producing good fruit, and the shepherd looking after each one of his sheep, although he’s not too friendly to the pigs, which were considered unclean!
And so we see Jesus very much in touch with the world around him, as he moves along, reaching out to all people with whom he meets, welcoming them and showing them how to live lives sharing his love and appreciating each other and nature.
In 1969, the year they landed on the moon, I was in my last year of school, and we had to read a book for English called “Silent Spring”. It was a reference to the Great Lakes in North America, where the fish were dying and the birds not singing, as the environment in the air and the lakes was being polluted by artificial chemicals and rubbish of all sorts. It was a wakeup call to action to protect the environment, and reduce pollution.
There was an article in the Saturday Age, headed “Gone with the wool: wind farm starts up”, where it is described how “20 years ago, a small group of sheep farmers had a vision to drought-proof their farms with a few wind turbines”. Now the first one has been activated, in “what will be the largest wind farm in the southern hemisphere”. Ewes and lambs can still graze beneath them, and canola crops be grown. So here’s concrete evidence of renewable energy being harnessed and put to good use. When I was studying chemistry at Monash University in the mid-1970’s, they were talking about the development and applications of using solar energy, but it has taken time for it to be implemented, despite it being common sense to do so, and so to reduce the devastating impact of global warming.
Some had the thought that the earth’s resources were unlimited and we could just keep using things up without thinking through the fact that in the end, things would run out. It woke me up to the fact that we humans had to be careful in the way we use natural resources, and renewable energy is one way of helping to do that, with wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power.
And don’t we know that Pope Francis has a great interest in nature and the world around us, reminding us of our responsibility to protect our beautiful blue planet and its resources, and not to take it for granted, just because it’s there – at the moment?!
As he says in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si, the title coming from the canticle of St Francis: “The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place… is to speaks once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world…. The climate is a common good, belonging to the world and meant for all… We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family… We have a shared responsibility for others and the world.”
Now I conclude with an environmental story “The World That We Want” (by Kim Michelle Toft, based on the habitats of North Queensland). Is this not true? Let’s all appreciate the beauty of God’s Creation with eyes wide open.
john hannon 13th October 2024