Season of creation...A prayer of thanks giving and confession for river sunday

In the Church calendar September is the Season of Creation, an opportunity to give thanks to God for the wonders of the earth and natural world. I have been trying to write a prayer for the services that reflect the unique landscape and place that New Zealand is. This week is River Sunday and I've used some of the Seasons of Creation liturgy that is used by the Uniting Church of Australia and other Churches around the world (the parts I have used from their prayers are in italics) .

For my overseas friends in New Zealand one of the ways the Maori talk of their identity is by their whakapapa, their genealogy, and also by identifying with which mountain and river they belong to.

Many of our provinces nd regions take their names from the rivers that flow through them.

Once again I offer this prayer for people if they want to use it, or parts of it and also if people have suggestions that would make it better then that would be great as well.

In our land people identify themselves by mountain and river

Our land is shaped and defined by river and stream

The constant flow of water from mountain to sea

We gather in this place in this land to give God praise

We gather as the people of the river that makes glad the city of god,

We gather as the people of Mt Zion

We are your people and we come together to praise you, O God

 

We come to give you praise for the wonders of your creation

In particular this morning the rivers and fresh water

We remember the rivers God created

In Eden and across our planet

Rivers that are the lifeblood of Earth

Rivers that are vital for all that lives

Every good gift flows from your hand O Lord

 

We give you praise for the many rivers of our land

The mighty Waikato and Clutha

The rivers that give name and shape to province and region

The braided rivers that weave across our of southern lands

The roar and rush of fast flowing mountain stream

The gurgle refreshing coolness of bush creek

For all these water ways we give you praise O Lord

 

We remember the streams and creeks of our past

How our lives have been touched by river current

The pools and ponds where we played

Water falls that have drawn us to stand in awe

Adventurous trips amidst rapid and rock

Still moments as we watch the water and time go by

We have been blessed by your gifts to us

 

We stop and see that all is not well

We ask for forgiveness for the way we have mistreated your gift of water

We have polluted our rivers with chemical and un thinking  land use

We have turned our streams into waste dumps

We have wasted precious water in luxury living

We do not value what we were given

Forgive us O Lord and help us to treasure your rivers

 

We thank you for your presence in the rivers of our life

That in Christ we have found life giving water that quenches our thirst

That in him is a flow your grace that forgives and makes clean

Those in our journey through this land your Spirit leads and guides

In rapid and torrent and still waters by

Even by the rivers of Babylon where we wept you are still there  

Fill us afresh that we may love and serve the whole of creation

 

To the glory of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit Amen

Seasons of Creation: A Prayer for wilderness Sunday....a Jounrey from our city home to the wilds and back with Christ.

September in many churches is a time to celebrate the season of creation (It's spring down here in the southern hemisphere). This week it's wilderness Sunday... And as I've looked through a lot of the liturgy for that I've discovered that  it does not reflect the uniqueness of New Zealand.  We don't really use the word wilderness to talk about the wild places in this country, we might use words like remote, isolated, rugged and unspoilt but not wilderness. We might refer to the bush and mountains, high country and forest, but wilderness does tend in mine mind at least to have some very north American connotations. Much of the stuff for this Sunday from the Uniting Church of Australia is unique to Australia as they call this Sunday Outback Sunday and I guess that is the defining feature of that vast country.

We do live in a country that is full of wild places, even living in its largest city its only an hours drive away from bush clad hills of the Waitakere's and the amazing rugged west coast beaches. You can jump on a boat and sail out into the Hauraki gulf. Then further afield we have such amazingly diverse wild country: Milford sound and the rest of Fiordland, and the Southern Alpes, and its rivers and lakes, beech forest that goes right down to the coast. in the South Island.

One day on a trip round the south Island we camped by a track down to one of the mirror lakes and ran down to get a perfect reflection of the southern Alps just before the sun rose, we climbed up to a glacier in the morning, tramped up through rain forest to a trig station where we could see beaches and lagoons where the white heron nests in New Zealand, and those southern mountains, then in the early evening went down to a seal colony on the shore line, as it was high summer (I seem to remember) and not dark till late we decided to drive on over the Alps  via the Haast pass and into the brown hills of Central Otago.

Then there is the north Island, with its rolling farm country, tracts of preserved native forest and bush, the volcanic plateau, east cape and countless miles of coast line. My words could never do it justice.

Anyway here is my prayer for wilderness sunday... A journey from our city home to the wilds of New Zealand and back again....I know sounds a bit ' a journey there and back again' middle earthy... As always please feel free to use it or any part you find helpful. Please feel to make comment or suggestion as to how it could be made better and hopefully you can use to it express your praise to God for creation and for his presence with us.

We gather today to give you praise

Not as your people of old from desert path and farmers field

But from asphalt suburban street

From the sprawl of our hustling bustling city home

We come and raise our voices to give you thanks O Lord

 

In the rush we stop and set aside this time

We lay aside the incessant beep of electronic devise

We rest from the tightly packed demand of everyday

We still ourselves, take breath and focus afresh on you

Meet with us today and revive us we pray

 

We give you praise for our open spaces

Park lands and playing fields

Walkways and garden retreats

Beaches, estuary and sheltered harbour

Thank you God for space to play and to be

 

We give you thanks for the wild places close by

Where city gives way to Bush topped rangers

 For coastline where black sand meets pounding surf

Where Sparkling Hauraki Gulf holds off shore Island reserves

For this rugged beauty that surrounds us we give you praise

 

We give you thanks for the unique wilds of our island home

Down from high mountain top through beech forest to ice carved fiord

The Bare rock and tussock grass of high country and volcanic plateau

Inland lake and Forest stillness and the vast stretches of coastal grandeur

So amazing are you works, O Lord

 

We thank you for the way this beauty is preserved

For unique landscape and habitat protected in national park

For native forest blocks voluntarily set aside in trust

Wonders hidden and safe because of remoteness and distance

Help us to ensure that it is treasured and passed on with care

 

Help us to balance land use and need with conservation and preservation

To still our harmful demand for more and more

To share with those in need and cut back on what we waste

 Help leaders entrusted with our future in their decision making

We pray you would aid us with care for one another and creation

 

 Help us to follow you more closely

That we might follow Jesus to solitary places to meet with you

That we might follow our saviour to love and to serve

That we may follow the wind of you spirit where ever it blows  

Breathe new life in us by your word today

 

May we know your presence with us Lord,

Your grace and forgiveness as we seek you more,

New life and growth even in harsh times and places,

Your guidance in wilderness wanderings and as we walk our City Streets

May we live to bring glory to you O God:  Father, Son and Holy Spirit

elemental narraphors- Earth... the parable of the field (Luke 8:4-15)

You may be good gardeners… you may have a passion for it… I’m not a good gardener and I don’t like gardening.  My dad was a great gardener. When I was growing up He spent most of his weekends out the back in his vege patch. We lived off the veges he grew… summer lunch was the freshest sweet corn dripping with butter, breakfasts came from our grapefruit tree … Desserts were often topped by bottled peaches, apples  and fejoa from our backyard… salads at dinner were made from the lettuce, cabbage and tomatoes from the garden and there always seemed to be beans

Years after my father had died Kris and I moved back to Auckland from Tauranga and lived just down the road from where my family home had been. We tried to start a garden and it was back breaking work in good old Waitakere clay. I came to appreciate what my father had achieved. He had spent a lot of time and energy in caring for the soil… he would leave a quarter of the garden fallow each year, planting lupines there to fix the nitrogen in the soil.  When spring came the compost bin would be dug out, sieved and spread out and dug in. Crops were rotated so you only had the same thing grown in the same place every four years.  

Jesus used the image of soil and trying to grow food to talk about how people would respond to his teaching, to teach us how to listen to the word of God… so it could do its work in us of producing good things.

It’s a very helpful parable because the gospels also record Jesus explaining it for his disciples. The sower is Jesus preaching, he was preaching to large crowds but the number who responded and followed seemed small. The seed is the word of God and those who listened are the various soil types.

He talked of seed falling on the road. The seeds would be unable to penetrate and be trampled or picked off by birds. He likened that to Satan being able to come along and take it away. We are not that comfortable about talking of Satan these days as the enemy of our soul, and there are others who simply talk too much about that and give him too much power. Jesus only mentions him once in this parable amongst so many other adverse conditions to good crop production.

The seeds take root in the other soil types. But one is rocky. In Judah much of the land is simply top soil over a hard limestone base and even though the seed germinates and starts to grow it cannot put its roots down far enough to get the nutrients it needs so when the hot weather of persecution or opposition comes it withers away.  Other areas are full of weeds, which grow up and compete with the plant for sunlight and water and stop it maturing. Jesus talks of life’s worries and the pursuit of wealth and pleasure as things that will do that in the lives of the listener. Finally he talks of the good soil, the soil that has been prepared to receive the seed and is able to sustain it till it produces a bountiful crop. Jesus says these are the people who hear the word retain it and patiently persevere with it.

What crop is produced I hear you say? Well this is one of a series of parables in Luke of the kingdom of God. The crop of the seeds of the word will look a lot like Jesus. Paul paints a picture of what that might look like in our lives when in Galatians 5:22 he talks about the fruit that walking in step with the spirit of God produces in our lives… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control: Character traits that reflect Jesus.

One of the great thing about parables is they are open ended invitations to continue reflecting and journeying.  We are using Leonard Sweets word narraphors to express this...They are metaphors to think with and narratives; stories that can shape our own life story. Here are a few of my reflections on how this parable connects with our lives today….

Firstly, This parable shows that Jesus was aware that different people would react to his message in different ways. That just because Jesus is God’s chosen agent did not mean people would respond to him automatically. It’s helpful when you work and minister with people to be reminded of this. During the week I had a conversation with a minister who had settled here from South Africa who said sharing the gospel with Kiwi’s was hard… it was like seed on hard ground. He had found many of the recent migrant groups to New Zealand more open to the Christian message. One of the reasons I don’t like gardening is that we’ve moved so much it invariably involves lots of breaking up hard ground, that’s hard work. We as a church are actually working in a field that is hard ground. It’s not easy work… we tend to have to do the hard years to see fruit.

Secondly, I don’t know about you but I’ve always thought that the different soil types actually referred to different people, and they do and I don’t really relate to any particular one of them . I’m sort of a mix, they all relate to me in some way. When I was at Bible College a visiting lecture invited us to reflect on this parable in a different way. He called it the parable of the field. We focus on the sower or the soil and maybe we can’t see the big picture that a sower would be working in a field that was a mix of these soil types. There would be the paths round the outside, some areas which had heaps of weeds and weed seeds, others that were rocky and thankfully others that were good, and in one way we could look at our lives like that field. To be productive we needed to work on the soil types in our field, our life just like my father worked on the good old Waitakere clay to make it productive.

How is our life like a road… The word road isn’t that helpful in our four lane asphalt world. In Jesus day it would have been well-worn walking tracks so the various farmers who lived in the villages and towns could get to their allotted fields. In my mind I couldn’t help but think about well used paths in our own life. The places we are very set in our ways… and it is difficult for the word of God to take root and bring fruit there. Some of those most resistant to Jesus message were the religious leaders of Jesus time. They were very set in their ways, they kept to certain paths and were very certain that was the right way. So when Jesus came along even though he was the fulfilment of all they were hoping for and believed they missed it. Maybe to allow the word of God to take root in those areas of our life, we need to do some spade work. This year as a parish council we’ve wanted to give people some encouragement to grow their devotional life, to try something different… not because we don’t think people develop their devotional life, but hopefully in doing a things differently like the E100 Jesus challenge and coming to church for an hour during the week to pray and even being part of a small group will help in that process. They are small invitations to take even a small step off the beaten track .

I wonder what rocks sit right under the surface of our lives as well. How deep have we let the word of God take root.  Rwanda was known as the most Christianised country in Africa, yet in  1994 it was the scene of one of the worst genocides. The gospel was very widly spread but very thin, it was a veneer over seething racial hatred. I have a friend who has been involved with church leaders in Rwanda since then  helping them working through reconciliation and seeing the gospel go deep to help people understanding a Christian way of seeing others; that we are all made in God’s image and we are called to love our enemies. That may seem a bit extreme but we like them are blind to our own cultural conditioning. At the moment I am reading a book which is wrestling with the fact that much of what is taught as Church leadership today has more to do with our western understanding of success and achievement rather than emulating the life of Christ. It kicks up some rocky ground for all of us…How much of the way we see what we want out of life is shaped in the same way. Is it a Jesus shaped vision or a culturally shaped one? Often breaking up that ground takes time.  The nurture of the soul and the pursuit of Long range spiritual development and ministry gets second place.

When I mention weeds If you are like me then you’ve probably got a list as long as mine of things that are keeping you up at night, that compete with our faith for space and light and energy. I have to admit I’ve found myself focusing on the weeds in my life recently. Not to pull them out but the way they are getting on top of me, many have to do with the future of the church here. On Friday in the e100 essential Jesus we had the reading from John about Jesus raising Lazarus back to life… It was like a seed germinated… I was focusing on the doom and gloom of the tomb, not on the resurrection power of Jesus Christ… I had to pray the words of Martha “Jesus, I believe that you are the messiah, sent from God” and reaffirm my faith in Jesus. It has actually loosened up those weeds hold. It’s a step in the process of weeding them out.

What does good soil look like? Thursday started out a good day this week, U2 released a new studio album after five years… and what made it even better was that it was free. If you are a U2 fan you’ve got two weeks to download it from iTunes for free. AS usual its full of good tunes and profound lyrics… One of the songs spoke to me as I was thinking about what good soil looked like… It said ‘the only heart that is open is a heart that is broken’. Now I don’t think that means we should walk around with all the wounds and hurts we’ve suffered in the past not healed, I actually believe Jesus wants us to find wholeness and health in relationship with him… But in those words I couldn’t help but hear the invitation in the beatitudes that those who will be blessed are those who are aware they are poor, who are aware of their need for God, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who seek peace with a single mindedness. 

I’m not a good gardener but my heavenly father is a great gardener… the encouragement to us as we work through all this is that we have a God who has dirt under his finger nails. Who is willing to get his hands dirty in our lives to see the seed of his word take root and grow and produce fruit. In genesis we see God forming humans out of earth and breathing life into that form. In Isaiah we see Israel as God’s vineyard, which he goes about tending, lavishing his care on… that is picked up by Jesus in the New Testament as he encourages us to abide in him, I am the vine he says in John 15 and my father is the gardener. In Jeremiah 18 there is the vision of God as the potter shaping his people into a beautiful earthen vessel.  We have god who has dirt under his finger nails… Our heavenly Father is a great gardener. We need to let him tend the field that is our life… to make it more fruitful.

I want to invite you to take a moment or two just to focus on the soil we’ve given you and maybe as you do use it as a way of looking at various soil types in your life. Then as I close that off in prayer I want to invite you to plant a seed… it’s a seed of a plant we can plant out later in our garden out the back. It’s a sunflower seed and as we started the service by sayng sunflowers area great parable as they follow the sun through life.

A Prayer of Thanksgiving and Confession For Land Sunday

 

There not many places you can see both sides of your country from... even in a place as small as New Zealand. But the Auckland Isthmus is one of them. I went for a picnic lunch with my wife on top of Mt Eden and with my new phone took a panorama shot which captures the dark bush clad Waitakere rangers off in the distance across the suburban sprawl of west Auckland and also both the mouth of the Manukau harbour, on New Zealand's west coast, and the upper reaches of the Waitamata harbour, on our east. 

 

On some church calendars September is the season of creation, a time for giving thanks for creation and acknowledging creation care as part of the outworking of our  Christian faith. A lot of the liturgy comes from the US or even Australia and, no offense, it does not sit well on these shores... So I am trying to write my own...  Sunday is Land Sunday and I have written a prayer as someone who lives amidst the volcanic cones of Tamaki Makaurau (the Maori name for Auckland) and between the two harbours of Manukau and Waitamata. A prayer giving thanks to God for this land and earth. I humbly offer it up and invite you to join me... Please also feel free to use it or parts of it and to make any suggestions for improvement.

 

 

 

Loving God, full of grace and mercy

We join the whole of creation to praise your name

We have come from so many different places

 Yet In Christ we come together as one people

We acknowledge you have planted us here in this land

Amongst the volcanic cones of Tamaki Makaurau

Between the harbours of Manukau  and Waitamata

It is here that you call us to grow and to bear fruit

 

Eternal God, creator of all,

We give you praise for this land

We thank you for snow tipped mountain grandeur

We praise you for rugged bush clad hills

We thank you for the rolling farm paddocks of green

We give you thanks for rich productive alluvial river valley

We thank you for the many splendours of our coast

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it

 

Great God, source of all life

We give you thanks for the flora and fauna of our Island home

Native forest giants and trees that have journeyed with us

Kiwi in forest night, kea on mountain top, the song of Tui and Kereru

And birds who share our city home, pigeon, thrush and sparrow

The shoreline full of the cry of gull the graceful gate of wading bird

For all animals: bird, fish, reptiles and insects, farm animal and pet

The world and all that live in it are yours, O God

 

 Gracious God, Lord and saviour of all

In Christ you have stepped down and met us on our journey

Earthquake has taught us that even solid ground can liquefy

You have pulled us from the mire and given us a sure place to stand

On rocky unsure path you lead and guide and will not let us fall

In darkest valley trail you are with us and comfort us

Even in dry scorching desert you provide a way

Christ has saved us Christ will lead us safe home

 

Just God, righteous in all you do,

Land is a blessing from you for the good of all

Forgive us for the way we have misused and abused your gift

When we have used it without giving back and left it desolate

Forgive us for hording what it provides while others go without

Help us to make amends for past injustice with Tanagta Whenua

Help us to be good stewards of this good earth

Forgive us and help us heal our land

 

O Holy Spirit, Fill us a fresh with your presence

Help us to keep our lives fertile soil for the seed of your word

May it take root in our lives and produce a good crop

Empower us to proclaim the good news of Christ in all we say and do

Enable us to serve, care for and love all who share this land, this earth

Cause us to seek justice and stand against injustice

Help us to care for the precious gift of creation

All glory to you O God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit

elemental narraphors... water

Mash ups are songs made by taking take one part of a song, like the vocal track, and adding it to parts of another song to make something new.  The word Narraphor is a mash up. It’s a mash up of words, of metaphor and narrative: word image and story. Narraphors are not new,  Jesus was the master of narraphor, he blended story and metaphor to speak to us. His Parables take everyday images and weave them into a story which we interact with, that opens us to an ongoing reflection, conversation transformation and relationship.

 I’m not a master of narraphor, I’m just learning, in fact this is sort of an experiment...But over the next few weeks I want to invite us to look at the four elements that the mediaeval world though everything was made of… water, earth, air (or wind) and fire and use them as narraphors for our spiritual life. They are actually motifs that run through scripture, they keep popping up, and they carry meaning and significance, and deal with things that are elemental to our life in Christ. They are elemental narraphors… so let’s dive into the first one… which fortunately is water.

We passed out glasses of water this morning and I’m going to invite you to hold it in your hand and look at it.

It’s water…and Water, or H₂0 is essential for all life. It’s essential for human life, apparently by weight the average human is made up of between 60-65% of water. To remain healthy we need to drink about 2.4 L of water a day that is to simply to replace the water we lose… through respiration, perspiration and in other ways. Water is so abundant in our country that we forget how valuable it is. Futurists predict that by the end of this century major wars will be fought over access to clean water like we have in our hand this morning. Even in our nation the quality of the water in our rivers and our taps and how we are to aid draught prone areas are election issues.

At a very basic level our faith is water based…A good way to explain that is to look at the difference between farming in New Zealand and in the outback of Australia. In New Zealand we tend to use fences to keep our stock where we want them. We manage them by moving them from one paddock to another. In the dryer areas of Australia where farms are bigger fences are not practical. They keep their stock together by using a well, the animals soon learn to stay by the well where there is water, and food and therefore life… if they wander off then… they dehydrate and die.

People sometimes think that Christianity is about fences. Rules and regulations, does and don’t that somehow keep us part of the flock. But our faith comes from a place more like Australia, a desert land; much of the action in scripture takes place round wells and water sources. Both passages we had read out to us today tell us that at the centre of our faith is a reliable source of life giving water, the presence of God with us.

The passage in Ezekiel comes at the end of a series of visions that relate to the restoration of Jerusalem after the exile.  It is a vision of a river. It starts as a trickle from the sanctuary in the temple, where Ezekiel had seen God come back to dwell with his people.  It flows out past the altar into the courtyard, out into the city and the land of Judah. Miraculously that trickle very quickly, in the space of about 2km, becomes a mighty river, that what all the measuring and talk of cubits is about it is supposed to show us the miraculous nature of this river, a river that turns desert into productive land that makes forests grow, that can even flush out the dense salt of the dead sea and make it teem with life. That makes fruit grow and healing possible.

In John on the last day of the festival in Jerusalem Jesus stands up, maybe even at the very place Ezekiel saw that river flowing out of the temple.  And Jesus says “if you are thirsty, come to me and drink, and out of your heart streams of life giving water will flow.” John interprets that as the sending of the Holy Spirit, the means by which we can know God’s presence in our lives. That God no longer dwells in the temple but within us.

I just want to share very quickly this morning some ways that I believe God wants us to connect with these passages with the life giving water of the presence of God.

Each has an action and a reflection.

 

I want to invite you to have a drink of the water you have with you. To quench your thirst and I want to invite you to drink deeply of the river of the presence of God. When I was growing up and going to youth group about once a month it seemed we'd have a spiel about 'have you had your quite time today?" and it felt like farming with fences... I want rather to encourage you by sharing a little of the life giving water I have found this week.

The image of Ezekiel’s vision of a forest growing along the banks of the river is reminiscent of the metaphor Psalm 1 uses for someone who finds delight and joy in the word of God, they are a tree planted by the waterside. They have put their roots down deep into the word of God to know God. And I just want to encourage you by sharing a way I have found it life giving for me this week.. One of the e100 Essential Jesus readings this week was Mark 4:35-41 Jesus calming the storm… And it spoke to me… I sat down and I wrote all the forces arrayed against me at the moment, things pushing in like they were about to swamp the boat I wrote them in a storm pattern, then in the middle like the calm eye of the storm I wrote psalm 46:10,’ Be still and Know that I am God’ someone had shared with me last Sunday for encouragement. I felt the presence of Jesus with me and as I wrote them down and was able to leave that paper in the prayer room here it felt like their weight had been lifted off my shoulders. They are still raging but I found life in God’s presence with me. I made up a sheet that is in the service sheet today for you to give it a whirl sometime this week.

Drink deeply and you will find that life giving water of the presence of God flow into your life.

 The second thing I want you to do is pour a little water into your hand… Don’t worry if you spill some on the carpet. Then I want you to wash your hands. I’m sorry I don’t have any towels, but can you feel the fresh water on your hands. Can you feel that they are clean.

In Ezekiel’s vision the water flowed on the south side of the altar. It connects this living water with the altar where sacrifices we made by which the people of Israel could acknowledge and ask forgiveness for the things they had done wrong things which were a barrier to them knowing the life giving presence of the holy and righteous God.

In the New Testament it is Jesus who invites us to come and drink of him, Jesus who gave up his own life who by his blood paid the price for what we have done wrong and enables us to come into that life giving relationship with God.  It’s symbolised for us by the waters of baptism that speak of the old being washed away forgiveness, new birth and new life,.  This morning I want you to hear afresh the life giving story of the cross in your life… you are  forgiven…the slate is wiped clean…  you are accepted… you are beloved.

A few months ago a van got stuck in the grass down the driveway by the church. I went round to help get it out. We stuck some boards in front of the back wheels and went round to push and you guessed it I ended up splattered with mud. This morning I felt it was important to acknowledge that the life giving water of Jesus also cleans off the much and dirt that other fling at us. The Dead Sea is the lowest point below sea level on the earth’s surface. Water and salt and minerals flow into the Dead Sea and they have nowhere to go. Because it is hot the water evaporates and leaves the salt and minerals behind and they build up. Over the millennia the Dead Sea has become about 35 % salt and nothing can live there. Ezekiel’s vision sees the life giving water of God’s presence able to transform even that, to be teeming with life so much so that it provides food for other people. God’s living water can bring his cleansing, healing and transformation even to the lowest point, and the most toxic.  

Finally his morning I want you look at the water you have left in your cup.

 In Ezekiel’s vision the end result of the presence of God was not simply a transformed land, but rather one that could provide sustenance and food for other people. It finishes by talking about fruit trees that produced fruit all year round, more than that whose leaves had healing property and this is picked up in the book of Revelation as being leaves that could bring healing to the nations. In the passage we had in John it talked of streams of living water flowing out from us.

AS you contemplate the water you have can I invite you to have as a prayer for the rest of the week how am I going to be bring this life giving water to the people around me at work, at home, at school. Maybe it’s as simple as mark 9:41 giving a glass of water in Christ’s name, a random act of kindness.

One of the critiques I read on how people use the vision in Ezekiel is it can be over spiritualised. And yes we’ve done that… WE can just focus on the inner journey and we can miss the fact that the source of living water in the vision actually has an impact on the environment. It actually brings transformation in the desert. The living water that flows from a restored relationship with Jesus flows out into the whole of creation. I’ve said it often but the Hebrew understanding of peace and wholeness is a matrix of right relationships with God, God’s word, with each other, both Christians and non-Christians, with our possessions with the spiritual realm and with creation. The PCANZ has as its mission statement ‘working with others to make Christ known’ and we talk of expressing that in terms of the five faces of mission and one of those is care of creation. AS you look at that water today can I invite you to think of a way you can in act that this week in a small way in your life to care for creation.

 

 

A Prayer for Forest Sunday from New Zealand

I am not one who follows the church calendar that much but September has been designated by some the season of creation and people in our church have said they appreciate celebrating that as part of their Christian worship. It is a time when the church can acknowledge God's good earth, and our need to exercise our Christian faith in caring for it. THE PCANZ (Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand) sees 'Creation care' as part of its five faces of mission.

In reading some prayers written in other countries I became aware that it didn't express the unique character of New Zealand, with our unique flora and fauna. AS this Sunday is forest Sunday I started to reflect on the wonderful variety of different trees and habitats we have, and wrote a prayer of thanksgiving and confession to express that. I humbly offer it to anyone who might find it useful and also offer it for critique and response... if anyone has a good source of such prayers and liturgy with a Kiwi flavour that would be great... of course if you don't have a cabbage tree in the car park of your church the last verse maybe have to be amended.  I wanted to bring the prayer from images of our land to a concrete (well asphalt) reality for us here at St Peter's). Hopefully a reminder of the prayer as they leave...

From bush clad hill

Mist filled hanging valley

Farmland, Hedge row and even back yard

These bird filled Islands greets you each fresh day

We join our voices with that dawn chorus

We give you praise O God,

 

We stand with our forest land

 Kauri, Rimu, Kahikatea and southern Beech

like them we stand in awe of your greatness

Like them we acknowledge your provision,

Like them We thrive because of good soil and sure water source

We give you praise O God

 

Like our rugged coast at high summer time

Putting on the crimson Pohutukawa cloak

We celebrate your coming in Christ

We rejoice in the good news of your life death and resurrection

Your salvation has come to our shore and into our lives

We give you praise O Lord

 

Like fern koru unfurling

Because of Christ we are filled with new life,

We reach up to give you praise

We reach out to share that life

We open ourselves up to know you more

We give you praise O Lord

 

 

We confess that we have not treated your earth with the care it deserves

We have exploited it for our own gain,

Used it with no thought for tomorrow

We have left it broken and littered it with our refuse

We confess we treat each other with the same lack of care

Forgive us O Lord

 

We see hope in the marginal land

Clear felled, burnt or abandoned as no longer of use

We see Manuka, Kanuka start to re-establishing the forest green

We know in Christ that as we confess and repent You forgive

We know you are able to restore lush life in us again

Heal us O Lord   

 

Make us like the cabbage tree in our car park

At the slightest breath of wind it moves and dances

It becomes alive and animated

May we be as sensitive to your Spirit’s breath

Moving in praise and love and care for the whole of creation

Move a fresh in us O Lord

 

 From bush clad hill

Mist filled hanging valley

Farmland, Hedge row and even back yard

These bird filled Islands greets you each fresh day

We join our voices with that dawn chorus

All glory to you: father, son and Holy Spirit… amen