Where are the butterflies?

 

From the September issue of Grapevine, the parish newsletter of the Nenagh Union of Parishes.

In August and September the Buddleia bushes in our gardens should be covered with colourful butterflies, sipping nectar from the sweet-smelling flowers. These are mostly from the Vanessid family: the native Small Tortoiseshells and Peacocks which survive the winter here as adults in sheltered places, including behind curtains in our houses; and the Red Admirals and Painted Ladies, immigrants from southern Europe and Africa, which arrive in Spring, breed here, and then return south in Autumn.

But where are they this year? Earlier in the year I saw many other butterflies, even a couple of tattered Small Tortoiseshells in early Summer. But as I write in late August there are almost no Vanessids to be seen at all. This I find very worrying.

Insect numbers generally have been falling over recent years, including butterflies. If you are my age, you will remember how car windscreens used to be matted with squashed moths and flies driving home after dark. But that is now a distant memory. There is less food now for insectivores like swallows and bats. One reason is changing farming practices, and the use of insecticides. Another is changes to the seasons due to climate change. The collapse of butterfly numbers this year is probably due to the disappointing summer we have had, connected to climate change. I hope that better weather next year will see numbers bounce back. But I fear we may be seeing signs of the collapse of the ecosystem that supports these butterflies. Future generations may never be captivated by their beauty, as I have been.

Butterflies are not mentioned in the Bible, not once. I wonder why not. They’re so beautiful and graceful. I can imagine Jesus, teaching outdoors, pointing to one, saying, “Behold, the butterfly…”, and using it to illustrate some profound truth. If he ever did, it’s not recorded.

But wait a minute. Consider the lifecycle of a Peacock butterfly. A tiny green egg is laid on the underside of a nettle leaf. A few days later a tiny, black spiny caterpillar hatches out. It devours the nettle leaves and grows until it is about 2in long. Then it hangs upside down from a stem and attaches itself with a thread. Its skin bursts and falls off, revealing a pupa. A few weeks later the pupa breaks open and the butterfly emerges with crumpled wings. It rests while the wings are pumped up with liquid and harden. Then it flies away in a new body perfectly designed for its new life, to seek a mate and start the cycle all over again.

These changes are called ‘metamorphosis’, from a Greek word meaning transformation. And this word is used by St Paul in his epistles, twice:

·         Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

·         2 Corinthians 3:18: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Perhaps Paul was inspired by the transformations he saw in the lifecycle of butterflies. He tells us that as followers of Jesus we should expect to be transformed, bit by bit, into entirely new people, able to discern what God wants of us, becoming more like the image of God in Christ Jesus. Just as the Peacock butterfly’s egg turns into a caterpillar, the caterpillar into a pupa, and the pupa into the adult butterfly.

Joc Sanders

Remembering Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor & Dromore

The frontispiece of Taylor's 'Offices',
for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London,
because his printer included the picture of Christ praying

Address given At Morning Worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13th August 2024

On 13^th August the Book of Common Prayer commemorates Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore. Who was he, you may well ask? He was ordained a priest in the Church of England, and lived from 1613 to 1667, through the tumultuous times of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of Charles II.

In the secular world at the time, England was bitterly divided between Royalist and Parliamentary supporters. The Church was similarly divided between a High Church party known as the Caroline Divines, who were royalist supporters of a church with bishops, and Puritan and Presbyterian parties, who were not. Jeremy Taylor supported the former.

Under the patronage of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, he was appointed a chaplain to King Charles I. As a result, he was politically suspect under the Protectorate. He was briefly imprisoned several times, but was eventually allowed to retire to live quietly in Wales. There he wrote two devotional books, Holy Living, concerned with personal morality, and Holy Dying, concerned with preparation for a blessed death. They are renowned for their practical wisdom, as well as being models of English prose, admired by John Wesley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among many others.

At the Restoration Jeremy Taylor was appointed to the See of Down and Connor, to which Dromore was soon attached. He was also made a Privy Councillor of Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He proved to be a vigorous reforming bishop. He advocated wise toleration, but felt obliged to eject 36 of his clergy with Presbyterian views, because they refused to accept his authority as a bishop. And he was widely loved in his own time for his undoubted sincerity and devotion, as well as for his books.

I think today’s reading (Acts 5:27-42) is appropriate as we remember Jeremy Taylor. Two things stand out in it for me:

·         First is the bravery of Peter and the apostles when brought before the High Priest and the Jewish Council. They must have known that their lives were on the line, but they would not be silenced. They boldly declared their faith in Jesus Christ, saying ‘We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.’

·         Second is the wisdom of Gamaliel. He successfully urges the Council to proceed with caution. ‘If this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’ The message the apostles proclaimed prospered, showing that it was indeed of God.

Like the apostles, Jeremy Taylor stood up to the authorities for what he believed in. He never recanted his moderate high church episcopalian beliefs. He continued to write and minister in exile in Wales. We do not know why the Puritans in Parliament spared him the fate of his patron Archbishop Laud, whom they beheaded. But perhaps among them was someone as wise as Gamaliel to dissuade them. And when the Puritan turmoil was over, Jeremy Taylor returned from his exile as a bishop in the Church of Ireland, where he helped to ensure our church would continue to be guided by bishops.

Let is pray in words taken from Morning Prayer in Jeremy Taylor's Collection of Offices, London 1658:

O Great King of heaven and earth, the Lord and patron of all ages, receive thy servants approaching to the throne of grace in the name of Jesus Christ; give unto every one of us what is best for us, cast out all evil within us, work in us a fullness of holiness, of wisdom and spiritual understanding, that we increasing in the knowledge of God may be fruitful in every good work, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

 

Living Bread

 

Detail from a stained glass window in the chapel of St Joseph's Institution in Singapore

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 11 August 2024, the 11th after Trinity

One of life’s greatest pleasures is to share a meal with loved ones and friends, isn’t it?

It is for me, and it is for you too I’m sure – good food, good drink and good company. And it must have been so for Jesus as well, since so often in the Gospels we find Jesus sharing meals with others. He shared meals not just with his disciples and friends, but also with tax collectors and sinners, and with Pharisees and scribes – with all kinds of people.

 When Jesus himself broke bread as the host at a meal, he had a special way of doing so – first he took the food, then he gave thanks or blessed it, and finally he broke it and shared it out. It was so distinctive that, after Jesus’s resurrection, it was only when the disciples on the road to Emmaus saw it that they recognised him. Today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:35, 41-51) comes just after Jesus shares a meal with others on a grand scale – the feeding of the 5000 – a truly gigantic outdoor picnic. There too in his special way, he took, blessed, broke and shared the five barley loaves and two fish to feed the crowd.

We recognise this same sequence of actions – taking, blessing, breaking and sharing - in the Last Supper as recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And that of course is the model for the Eucharist which we with all other Christians continue to celebrate in his memory. The Last Supper can be seen as an acted parable – and so, I think, can all the other meals Jesus shared in his Eucharistic way of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing.

But what does the acted parable of Eucharist mean? In today’s reading John opens out for us the spiritual significance of Eucharist for Jesus himself, in Jesus’s own words. The last verse (John 6:51) sums up what Jesus meant:

^‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Today I want to share with you what these words say to me.

First, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven’?

Jesus says ‘I am’ many things on different occasions, among them ‘I am the good shepherd’, ‘I am the door’, ‘I am the way’, and ‘I am the true vine’. He is of course talking in metaphors, about his relationship with those he is talking to, but also his relationship with God, who he calls his loving Father.

Jesus has just been responding to hecklers in the crowd who want him to display earthly power, as they believe Moses did by sending bread from heaven – manna - to feed the people in the wilderness. So naturally the metaphor he uses on this occasion is about bread.

As Jesus tells the hecklers, it is God who sent the manna, just as it is God who sends the food we all need to nourish our bodies. But Jesus wants his listeners to look beyond the physical to the spiritual. God also provides what we need to nourish our spirits – by analogy with the bread which feeds our bodies, this is bread from heaven.

And Jesus knows that his loving-father God is calling him, by his every action and every word, to offer this spiritual nourishment to all people. So he uses metaphor to describe himself as the living bread which comes down from heaven.

The hecklers in the crowd know quite well who Jesus is - the son of Joseph the carpenter from nearby Nazareth. They choose not to understand his metaphor – and they ridicule the idea that Jesus came down from heaven.

Second, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’?

I suppose people since the dawn of humanity have dreaded death and had fantasies of living for ever. But we all know, as Jesus did, that our physical bodies are doomed to die and to decay.

Yet for Jesus this is not what truly matters. What does matter is our relationship with God. It is those of us who believe that God enfolds and protects us like a loving father that are released from dread of their own mortality. So he says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life’ (John 6:47).

Eternal life is surely a metaphor for a loving relationship with God. ‘This is eternal life’, says Jesus, after the last supper in John’s Gospel (John 17:3), ‘that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’

And more than that, Jesus knows his own importance. Working in and through him, God reveals his own nature as loving Father to those who listen to Jesus. Those who feed on Jesus’s words and actions, as on bread from heaven, have eternal life.

Third, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’?

Jesus goes on to equate bread from heaven with his own body, his own very flesh. He does so again at the Last Supper, when he says ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you’, words we still hear every time the priest consecrates the Eucharistic bread.

Many have found this suggestion of cannibalism very shocking. It certainly upset the hecklers in the crowd. And it upset many of Jesus’s disciples too, who, as we are told, ‘turned back and no longer went about with him’.

And it is still a problem for some of Jesus’s disciples today. I think that perhaps they interpret these words of Jesus too literally, as the hecklers in the crowd did. For here surely Jesus is extending the metaphor of bread from heaven, and to understand it we need to look behind the literal words.

Christians have wrestled to understand Jesus’s metaphor of his flesh as bread ever since. They have come up with many different ideas about how Christ is really present in the eucharist: transubstantiation, metousiosis, spiritual presence, or as a memorial.  And perhaps this is part of the strength of the metaphor, that it can be understood in so many ways.

For myself, I think the point is simply this - Jesus is expressing the depth of his commitment to God’s saving work for us. He is ready to give up his life, his human existence, his very flesh, for our salvation.  That is precisely what he did for us on the cross.

These words of Jesus are difficult. I have told you what they mean for me, and I hope you find it helpful.

But when you get home, why don’t you take down your bible, turn to John’s Gospel chapter 6, and spend a little time pondering Jesus’s words for yourself? They may speak to you in quite a different way to how they speak to me. And that is OK. Metaphors often bear many different meanings at the same time. God will surely grant you the ones that are right for you.

Let us listen again to what Jesus says:

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Grant, O Lord,
that we may see in you the fulfilment of all our need,
and may turn from every false satisfaction
to feed on the true and living bread
that you have given us in Jesus Christ;
who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen