wasps and dolphins

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(May 10^th) 2026

READINGS 

 Acts 17:22-31                                               

Ps 66:7-19                                                     

1 Pet 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

Eternal God, light of the minds that know you,

joy of the hearts that love you, strength of the wills that serve you;

grant us so to know you that we may truly love you,

and so to love you that we may gladly serve you,

now and always. 

 

In the collect we prayed a few minutes ago, both the representative words I spoke and the scattered, uncollected thoughts of all our hearts, we sought a deeper journey into the heart of the Creator. In the psalm we found the psalmist bursting out with joy at the experience of seeing God’s footprints, fingerprints, love prints in the visible world.

The psalmist or psalmists often found those prints in the natural world, and, somewhat less palatable to us now, in the great movements of history. In military success, for example, though before we feel too horrified at that, we might remember that it’s not so long since our forebears emblazoned praise to God on plinths of statues rejoicing in military victories.

We simply have to acknowledge that this has been a part of the human story, that we are flawed, that we live together uneasily, that we shed blood either literally or through the exploitation of our planet and its species. Not you and I specifically, not very often. That's why our confession is plural. We have. I may have, but that’s not the point. 

Few of us have sinned extraordinarily badly. Unless we take to heart the animal liberationists’ heartfelt cry, “meat is murder”?

Despite having a few vegetarian offspring, I for one have never quite mastered the dissonance between my love for animals and … well, you know? Perhaps C. S. Lewis was right when he made Aslan differentiate between the dumb animals and the talking beasts – trees included?

I don’t know.

Part of me wants to be a Jain, sweeping the streets so I don’t kill living beings with my footsteps. Part of me will stop off at Jimmy’s Pies after the service and see if they have a venison or a steak and pepper left over. I’m worse – I apologize to inanimate objects, hoping desperately that a tree that I chop down or even a stone that I move doesn’t mind too much.

I drew the line at apologizing to a colony of wasps that I had destroyed a couple of weeks ago – they attacked me first! Nature is red in tooth and claw after all, and perhaps even the psalmists knew that.

Definitely even the psalmists knew that, though the words are Tennyson’s.

Though I was reminded, as I muttered about the wasps that attacked me, of the words of a pest destructor who destroyed a nest for me in Napier. “Wasp stings only last a few days,” he said. “Human stings last for ever.”

Do I digress? St Paul, as he stood in the Areopagus, knew only too well the brute forces of nature. While possibly the shape of this speech that Luke recalls reflect Luke’s style as much as Paul’s, we can be very sure that it was consistent with the latter.

We know that Paul knew the ups and downs of nature – human nature and the mysteries of what I’ll  have to call “natural nature.”  In a remarkable and powerful passage in second Corinthians he even boasts of all he has endured in the service of the gospel. It’s an ugly list, far worse than a few wasp stings gained not in the service of the gospel but in a random moment on a dog walk.

I have been writing this week of the suffering of a group of missionaries, some from this diocese, who sought to bring Christ love to China in the 1930s. They weren’t bible-bashers, they were bearers of compassion. Some of them died for their attempts. Or – if we look at the honours board at St James Roxburgh, we will see the name of Nurse Esther Tubman. I was writing of her, too, recently. Like the missionaries ten years later she, in the best way she knew, was seeking to bring hope and healing to those in dire need.

Paul looked at the plinth in the Areopagus and saw the good in divinity and humanity alike. He spent the last couple of decades of his life seeking to demonstrate that goodness and justice and love was embodied not in po-faced religiosity, in laws and regulations and trying to look good, but in the life and teachings and actions and death and above all resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

He was executed for his troubles of course, because he poked the bear of civic and religious hypocrisy.

While most of us are living more sedate lives it’s worth remembering that not so long ago Alex Pretti and Renee Good poked the bears of brutality and injustice in the Unites States. So too did Martin Luther King, in a manner much more programmatic and direct. So too is Pope Leo, and Bishop of Washington Mariann Budde.  It is only the mysteries of time and space that prevent you and me from the dangerous underbellies of existence in Trump’s USA or Chiang Kai-shek’s China or the Kaiser’s war.

We are called to be who and where we are. That too is mystery, unfathomable. Our task is to respond to the God who has called us by worshipping, and by allowing our lives to be a waling advertisement of Gospel hope.

By proclaiming with our mainly quiet lives, that this same God who casts universes across heavens and inexplicably creates wasps and dolphins, mountains and mudslides alike, is the God revealed in the life, teachings, death and the craziness of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

That’s what Paul dared to proclaim, respectfully, as he stood amongst the people of Athens.