Sermon for Rogation Sunday
“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”
Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.
Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” … “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “where we mean/ To mend her we end her,/ When we hew or delve” … “Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.
Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!
