Caring for Creation with Apatheia

 

Sermon. 31/08/2025. St John the Evangelist’s, Ovington

Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation [transferred from 1 September]

Wisdom 13.1-9

Colossians 1.15-20

Matthew 6.24-34

 

Happy New Year!

 

Those of you who read the Saham Saga or the Ovington Oracle will know what I am talking about, or at least you stand a chance, once I tell you that today we are pretending it is already 1 September (because this is the nearest Sunday to 1 September).

 

1 September is New Year’s Day to some. It is for the Methodist Church, and also for Orthodox Churches. That’s said, it’s not been a major festival in Orthodoxy. It is pretty much just an administrative matter. But!

I bring you a new thing under the sun!

A revolution in its way!

The context is this: apart from the addition of new saints, the Orthodox calendar changes at glacial speed, if at all.

But! But in 1989 the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, who holds a leadership role in Orthodoxy, did a new thing, a radical thing.

He did something like introduce a wholly new feast.

He declared and decreed that 1 September was to be… the Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (the language sometimes varies).  

 

In the West, things have been a little different. Western Christians have long had a fondness for St Francis, who was committed to the simple life, and a life close to nature. You might think that St Francis was a saintly Doctor Doolittle, who talked to the animals. If he did, that’s actually a small part of his life and witness. But his lifestyle, including (let us not forget) his embrace of “Sweet Sister Poverty”, made him a natural saint for us, if we want to care for creation.

 

We can say that both these streams (East and West) came together. And, to skip over a few decades, where we are now is that we can have – if we want to; it is not compulsory – we can have a certain “Creation-tide”. And Creation-tide lasts - you will have guessed - from 1 September to 4 October. It’s been part of Churches Together since 2008. It’s not really a full “season”; it doesn’t have its own set of readings and so on. But it is a chance to focus on creation and nature in a special way.

 

You might well say: we already have that; it’s called our Harvest Festival! But at Harvest Festival the prime emphasis tends of be on thanksgiving, for “all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above”, and the other themes constellate around that. And that is good. Yes, that is good.

 

But… this is different. On the Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation the main notes of our prayers are for the needs and flourishing of the natural order.

We make our petitions to God,

and we plead with God,

plead especially for right discernment about the changes we must make,

to live simply, that others may simply live.

 

Our readings are along these lines. To take them in turn.

 

The first, from the Book of Wisdom weaves an argument that the majesty of God is to be found in creation, in the beauty of creation. That beauty – in myriad abundant forms – can lead us to God, so that we honour God in right use of the things of creation, or it can distract us. We can be distracted, and think of any created thing as a god in its own right. But… that may be only one way of getting it wrong. It may be that it is just as bad to think of them as worthless, just lifeless lumps of stuff, that we can exploit and use up as much as we want.

 

The second reading, from Colossians, enters more deeply into this mystery. It tells us unapologetically that the mystery of God within and under creation (of which Wisdom speaks) is Christ. It really is Christ himself. We may be used to thinking like that, or we may not. I know such words can flow over us. But we had better note what it means. It means we cannot claim to be a servant of Christ, or a follower of Christ, or a friend of Christ, if we do not care for nature itself. Christians are obliged to care for creation, and to nurture the beauty within it. To nurture, and not to exploit or use it up.

 

The Gospel reading emphasises a lot of this. It draws us back to the beauty. The birds of the air and the lilies of the field, no less! But we mustn’t get lost in any naïve sense that the point here is that God wants us to find nature pretty. It is not that we are supposed to imagine ourselves in some Constable painting. No. We mustn’t overlook the simpler point: “You cannot serve [both] God and wealth.”

 

So the themes of prayer for the care of creation are demanding ones.

They call for real change from us.

I very much doubt that this is a new idea to you. Indeed, I know that it is not. But the fact that we’ve heard it before doesn’t mean we can avoid the question, the question:

 

How am I going to live, in ways that exploit nature less?

How I can I exploit less, for the sake of my sisters and brothers throughout the world, in this and in future generations, and for creation’s sake itself?

Really: How?

 

For all the Feast is new, the ideas, the demands, the questions, are as old as Christian faith itself. We know that Genesis begins with God calling creation very good, and with human beings put in charge of caring for the natural world (it is more that than “subdue” nature, but that is for another time). We know that God calls us to love our neighbour, to love the stranger, to love the widow and orphan - standing for all in desperate need, and that Christ adds that we are to love our enemies too. Truly, this means: global love.

 

And I might stop there. For a church-sermon to church-people, I believe I have set out the case for a day of prayer for the care of creation more-or-less to the best of my ability. But I am going to continue! Even worse, I am going to suggest that I need to say more, on moral grounds. That has to be wrong. It is never moral for a preacher to bore their congregation! I agree. But my issue is that, given where we are, I fear that to stop here would be saying something that is true in itself, but ends up being false.

 

Because we have to say a word about how the word is struggling to hear any case for the care of creation. There are other voices, other noises, other shouts and clamours. They are loud, and they are and growing louder. They are angry and they are growing angrier. They would have us limit our care to those perceived to be in the in-group. The feeling seems to be that our care and attention can only go so far. If others are cared for, it must be at our expense.

 

We may perhaps be thinking of foreign presidents. But that won’t do either. It is not a secret that some of these voices are those of our neighbours, are those of people we rub up against, are those we care about it and should care about. So we do need to listen to the fears behind the shouts and the clamours, and, yes, behind all the flags and all the rest of it.

 

How then to proceed? There is one more thing I want to bring to the table. I want to commend to us all the monastic virtue of apatheia. I’ll say it again: apatheia. Yes, it does sound like “apathy” (and is the origin of the word). But you will already have guessed that its meaning is different. It means to think and reason and discern and reflect without passion, without passion not in the sense of not caring about things, but in the sense of not being ruled by the emotions that bubble up or explode in all of us.

 

It means noticing when we are angry, and then not acting on the anger, but letting it pass, drawing from it the part of it that is true and carries truth, freed from the passion of it.

 

It means noticing when we are resentful, and then not acting on the resentment, but letting it pass, drawing from it the part of it that is true and carries truth, freed from the passion of it.

 

It means noticing our fears, but not acting on them. And it’s the same with all the rest of the passions. All of those passions which, frankly, seem to dominate our public discussions at the moment, locally, nationally, and internationally.

 

In other words, when it comes to the anger and the fear, God forbid we fight fire with fire.

 

I did say that was my last point.

So, now my prayer is that

we will never be apathetic about our prayer for the care of creation,

but, when we reflect on how to live well and live well with others,

we will do so with all godly apatheia.

Amen.

Jesus, Fire, Conflict and Apathy (Not Really)

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 18 August 2019

Trinity 9

Jeremiah 23.23-29

Luke 12.49-56

Rabbi Lionel Blue of Blessed and Righteous Memory used to say: Any synagogue that isn’t trying to get rid of its rabbi, isn’t really Jewish, and any rabbi that lets them get away with it, isn’t really a rabbi.

You get the point? It’s a call for some godly realism. Yes, we may think that any faith community will be always only sweetness and light. All will be united in the faith, committed to the common good, each deferring to the other. But in the real world, it is not quite like that. Conflict - disagreement, even radical disagreement, and, with that, yes, even people not liking other people who are just too different from them – conflict is a natural part of life. It is part of what happens when human beings gather together for some serious purpose.

It is strange for me to say this precisely here. As, of all the church communities I have known, you (we/you) are among the most harmonious. You are not a community riddled with conflict. Anything but. Heavens, PCC meetings can even be enjoyable here, as they are (at least sometimes) about the shared task of working out the best thing for our community and parish and wider Church. Conflict is something of an alien theme for this time and place. And yet it is today’s theme.

Jesus says: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.”

And the Greek of the Gospel is even stronger than the English. The Greek does not say Jesus is to “bring” fire, but to “cast down” fire, to “throw” fire onto the earth; there is violence in the rhetoric.

Now, some of us were doubtless brought up singing

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

Look upon a little child;

Pity my simplicity;

Suffer me to come to thee.

And I don’t say that’s wrong. We do have reason to think that Jesus was at times gentle, and in particular in his exceptional welcome for children, for the little ones. But! But clearly it is not enough; it doesn’t say all that we need to say about Jesus. What, then, are we to make of this, not-so-gentle Jesus? Some have called him “Angry Jesus Bleak and Wild”.

Well, in the first place, notice that at no point does Jesus bring literal fire. Just as when he says elsewhere he came to bring not peace but a sword [Matt 10.34], he never does anything with a sword. It’s more like when Mary is told that a sword is to pierce her own heart [Luke 2.35], and this does not happen. So we can confidently and truthfully say that all of these images are metaphorical. This isn’t about actual violence. Fire and sword stand for something else.

Fire and sword stand for the truth that, while Jesus may be gentle, meek and mild in the ways he treats us as persons, he is fierce and ready for conflict when it comes to ideas, to things that are not true. Against untruths and lies, he can be fierce, and oppositional.

To speak plainly, in the gospels, there is something about how people respond to Jesus which makes all the difference. Respond freely and well, and you will hear “your faith has saved you” [passim]. Respond freely and badly, and you may have to walk away shocked and grieving, like the rich young man attached to his many possessions [Mark 10.22]. How you are in an encounter with Jesus will be a way of you judging yourself. There will be a moment of crisis. I mean this in the original Greek sense: a “krisis”, a time of decision-making. We may as well say this.

Jesus does not come to make us comfortable as we are, but to help us chose to be more ourselves.

If Jesus is ready for conflict, then the Church must be as well. We must be prepared to speak words which will not please everybody. We must stand for what is good and wholesome and true and generous and merciful in the world, and against the opposite of these things.

The problem is that the “signs of the times” are surely clear about this: there is going to be more conflict and anger in our society, not less, in the time ahead. Nationalism versus internationalism. More versus less immigration. More celebration of difference versus less. Economic growth (and how to get it) versus modest living for the sake of the environment. Different ideas about how to deal with crime. And, yes, whether and how to be involved in wars. And more. All of these debates are going to be raw, more fierce. Fiercer, both because that is the way leading politicians are taking things (they are less and less into rational debate), and also because that strange new creature, social media, evidently somehow encourages us to be angry and rude.

So I say this. Jesus was not afraid of conflict when conflict was called for. When peace is false, is built on lies and oppression, Jesus does not call it “peace”, any more than the prophet Jeremiah did before him. The Church also must be unafraid of conflict, when it can speak with godly clarity into a situation. But! But, here and now, in these raw days, the Church has first to model a different, a better way of handling its own conflicts than the world. Angry words alone will just make for more angry words in the world.

So, in a world were anger and conflict abound, I am going to propose a virtue you may not have heard of. A monastic virtue. It is apatheia. Apatheia. You may recoil from the very word; indeed you will do, if you think it means apathy. It does not mean apathy. It means rather detachment, detachment from your own passions, in particular (in this context) detachment from your own anger. If conflicts in the Church or world are making us angry, we must be disciplined, and be able to take a step back from our own anger, to be, yes, a little bit suspicious of it, to interrogate it. What use is this anger? – is a good question to ask. Then, if we do this, if we are in the habit of doing this (it is, I say, a discipline, and I don’t say I am advanced in it), then we may well be able to speak the words which count, into the conflict, words which have the power of fire, the power of a sword.

I pray that we go on, getting on with each other as well as we do, and I am confident about that. May it never be with apathy (for there is nothing Christian about apathy), but always with the discipline of apatheia.

Amen.