For this first Sunday in our Season of Creation I rashly promised to lead the Exclaimers on the same theme as the sermon without having first looked at the sermon notes on the ctbi website. I was consequently rather challenged to realise that the reading was Proverbs 1:20-33 in which Wisdom chastises foolish men for not listening to her and says she'll mock them when disasters strike. I decided to begin with an adaptation of the first Godly Play session from Living in a Fragile World. This is a wonderful resource which I'd highly recommend using, but I discovered that it really needs to be used properly with all the Godly Play trappings of a carefully laid out room, children filing in slowly with shoes off and sitting at a distance from the objects with which the story is told etc. My version descended into chaos as the kids, hyper for the first session of term, could lean over and move the pieces to set up satellites, space hotels etc. It was interesting and depressing to see their lack of faith in humankind's ability to sort out the mess we've created. Hopefully we can make the next few sessions more optimistic in this respect.
We were back in the church for communion, the first with home made bread. When full-flavoured focaccia represents the body of Christ it is thought-provokingly different from a bland white slice. It feels like real nourishment.
The sermon, which I missed, apparently drew on the connection between Jesus and Wisdom in creating the world, on the importance of recognising that the world was created 'through Wisdom' (there is reason . . . a science to it) and concluded that Christians can respond to the negativity of the new 'grand narrative' of climate change with wisdom drawn from the Sermon on the Mount: that to 'travel light' is a joyful experience.
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