Our beautiful world.

                                                        Our beautiful world

As we still come to terms with the rapid changes of this last week, amidst all the genuine fear and deep uncertainties I have also glimpsed a little more of just how beautiful our world is.  I am not referring here to the natural world but to the world that humanity has dreamed of, invented, developed and maintained over the last half a century particularly.   Many years ago I was visiting a friend near Heathrow airport and noticed that every 1 minute exactly a plane (usually a 747) would descend one of the flight paths.  It got me thinking of the amazingly intricate and sophisticated system that coordinated these planes coming from all over the world (and the engineering to keep them in the air!) and to allow them to land and take off so precisely.  The ingenuity of humanity is truly an incredible thing.  This was long before concerns about global warming of course but I just want to use it to illustrate just how creative and inventive we are as a species and how connection is such a core principle of our humanity.    And now almost all our planes are grounded.

Someone once said that we are not born as individuals who then choose (or not) to relate to other people, but actually we are born as social beings, made for one another and it is in these relationships we have our fulfilment.   Just seeing how devastated our transport and hospitality sectors are by these recent changes makes us realise how much a part of our lives connecting with others are, either through socialising, being entertained in a communal setting, travelling near and far and so on.   I suppose I was aware of it before in a subliminal way, that café’s were often busy, trains often full, shopping streets buzzing but it is only now in the echoing quietness that I see just how beautiful all that human activity was.   I love the first of the creation narratives that has God saying in Genesis 1:26    ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’.   Here we have at the very start of the biblical story this sense that we are not made to be alone, that even in the life of God there is a community of some sort (which we discover late to be the Holy Trinity).  

The fragility of this beautiful connectedness has been laid bare in such a short time and my hope and prayer is that whenever we get to the other side of this crisis (and we will, eventually and probably with great sacrifice) we will never take our connectedness for granted again.   This fragility is particularly revealed in the economic impact on many people, often young, but not only young, who are working with very little job security and from one pay packet to the next.  They are the under-appreciated  and often  un-noticed  people that keep our communities going by working in coffee shops, the retail trade, gig economy delivery jobs, pubs, performing arts and numerous , often mundane roles that require constant interaction with the public under time and deadline pressures.   May we never take them for granted again and remember them at this time of devastating job and income loss and the personal and private tragedies each loss represents.

As a church community we will start to feel the changes as this Sunday approaches and we are not meeting our usual friends, saying the familiar words, feeling the embrace of our lovely, welcoming sanctuary and receiving the life of God in word and sacrament.  This connection with one another is a precious thing that we have to lay aside for a while and in doing so we are going into an exile of sorts with our neighbours and wider community and it is good that we do so, identifying with them in this way.   We will need to be a church in a different sort of way in the coming months called particularly to pray and to serve and perhaps in the greater space that we find ourselves in perhaps encountering God in new and fresh ways.    This is a beautiful world, let’s do all that we can to see the image of God in other people, to be part of tackling some of the economic and environmental injustices that are the darker side to this beauty and most of all treasure the gift of connectedness with others and with God that Jesus has brought us.

God most holy, we give you thanks for bringing us out of the shadow of night into the light of morning; and we ask you for the joy of spending this day in your service so that when evening comes we may once more give you thanks, through Jesus Christ your Son, our Lord, Amen.