Message.

The summer of 1540 was extraordinarily hot and dry across Europe. Temperatures reached heights which would not be repeated for over 400 years while only 2025 saw less rain. France, south-east England, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Slovenia, northern Italy and southern Spain were all affected. It was the worst climate event of the 16^th century.

What made this sweltering summer so bad was the fact that it came in the middle of a ten-year spell of dry weather. Metre-wide cracks opened up in the ground, large rivers were reduced to a trickle, fish stocks were decimated and locusts starting to breed and swarm. Poor harvests led to widespread famine and human migration while cattle died of heatstroke and thirst. River transport came to a standstill, as did the watermills used to grind flour. Up to 800,000 people died from a variety of heat-related illnesses. Wildfires were endemic with many villages and towns burned to the ground. Many folk believed that the fires had been set by organised arsonist gangs, although this probably wasn’t true. Nevertheless suspects were arrested, tortured and exiled.

This exceptional summer took place at a time when political and religious tensions were running high. The Protestant Reformation had been sweeping across Europe, in particular the north, but the Catholics, led by the hard-line Jesuits, were now fighting back. It was in this year that the Spanish Inquisition executed its first victim. In such a febrile atmosphere, folk were quick to blame the calamity on people different to themselves: for instance German Protestants alleged that Catholics (or Anabaptists or Muslims) were responsible for fire-raising – although it was pointed out that Catholic towns were burning too. Nevertheless suspected fire-raisers were arrested and even tortured.

Of course the people of those days couldn’t understand was what was causing the extreme weather; they probably had some homespun “red sky at night” weather lore, but that summer wasn’t following the rules. We now know that the weather was caused by a high-pressure block over the Atlantic Ocean which stayed in place for months; however even we, with our knowledge of meteorology and super-computers, still don’t have all the answers. I’m sure that there were plenty of hot-headed (in both senses of the word!) religious fanatics who were keen to declare that this catastrophe was a judgement from God – although I doubt if they agreed on the reasons for their divine punishment!

So far I haven’t heard anyone, at least in Britain, saying that this summer’s heatwaves, with their terrifying consequences, were sent by God. But perhaps I don’t move in the right circles! This is in contrast to 2014, when David Silvester, a councillor from Oxfordshire, blamed recent storms and heavy floods across Britain on the Government’s decision to legalise gay marriage. In a letter to his local paper he said, “Scripture makes it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war”. He also said that he had written to the Prime Minister two years earlier to warn him of the disasters which would follow the passage of his same-sex marriage bill. I get the impression that Mr Silvester saw himself as a prophet in the mould of Jeremiah or Joel; that view would have been reinforced by the horror and mockery that his comments provoked.

Having said that, Mr Silvester was expressing a view held by many people around the world: that natural disasters such as droughts, floods, lightning bolts or earthquakes are sent by God (or “the gods”) as a punishment, a warning or a cleansing act. A modern Muslim writer puts it well: “Since time immemorial people have been intrigued by the question of whether natural disasters have anything to do with God’s displeasure. There are two apparent schools of thought: one holds that all major calamities and disasters are the results of natural laws. They have nothing to do with human conduct, nor have they anything to do with our rejection of prophets sent by God. On the other hand, however, followers of religions all over the world have always believed that whenever calamities acquire an extraordinary character, they cease to be a natural phenomenon and instead fall into the realm of the supernatural. This poses an intriguing puzzle”. The writer rightly goes on to say that, because we now understand the natural world far more than our predecessors, this issue has become more important than ever for both believers and non-believers.

Of course the view that God controls and uses weather pervades the Old Testament. We all know the story of Noah and the ark: but why did he build it? It’s because, according to Genesis, when God “saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time, he was sorry that he had ever made them and put them on the earth. He was so filled with regret that he said, ‘I will wipe out these people I have created, because I am sorry that I made them’” – which he did by sending rain. Later, after the Israelites had escaped from Egypt and were about to enter the Promised Land, God told them, “If you listen obediently to my commandments which I am giving you today, then I will give the rain for your land in its season. [But if[ you turn away and serve other gods and worship them, my anger will be kindled against you, and I will shut up the heavens so that there will be no rain. The ground will not yield its fruit and you will quickly perish”. A dire warning indeed!

Moving on, we have the prophet Elijah declaring a drought caused, we understand, by Israel turning to pagan worship under a bad king; we hear Jeremiah telling farmers faced with empty wells and cracked fields that these are a testimony to their sin; and Amos declares that God has sent rain to one town but withheld it from another, three months before harvest. These are by no means the only Old Testament verses which claim that God controls the weather and uses it for his own ends.

The New Testament takes a rather different line (although James does mention Elijah and his prayers for both drought and rain). Paul, for instance, doesn’t attribute the storm which wrecks his ship to demonic forces; it happens because the captain has taken a risk in setting out so late in the sailing season. And, of course, we have Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, saying something which seems to drive a coach and horses through the Old Testaments beliefs: “Your Father in heaven makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”. Although he hints that God is still in overall charge of the weather, it’s certainly not being used as a means of punishment or even blessing.

So where do we go from here? On the one hand it seems far-fetched, even ridiculous to believe that God organises the weather for us. (I’m reminded of the church picnic party pleading with God to give them sunshine, while the farmer of the adjacent field is feverishly praying for rain. I can also think of Father Duddleswell in “Bless me, Father” asking God for “the right weather” for his church fete; it pours with rain and he’s delighted because he receives a good insurance payout to add to the generous gifts of his parishioners!). And, to go further, it seems frankly superstitious to suggest that God uses weather to punish or reward people; in any case, that flies in the face of what Jesus said.

But we can’t ignore the Old Testament either, and here we do need to notice two things. I’ve already mentioned the first: this pervasive, one might say primitive, belief that God does manipulate the weather. We can understand why people believed (and, to an extent, still believe) this: it’s because weather can be very powerful and frightening, it’s something that human beings cannot control, it’s something which, in the old days, was largely unpredictable. It’s only natural that folk should pray to God, either in supplication or confession, to send the weather that would favour them; it’s only natural, too, that prophets ascribed calamitous weather events and natural disasters to divine providence. They had no other way of getting a handle on them.

However there is something else about the Old Testament which I’ve only hinted at: it’s the fact that the Hebrew nation was in a unique covenant relationship with God. That’s why he could say, “If you act like this, I will bless you; if you act like that, I will punish you”. We may well have lots of questions about this relationship, which we can trace from Adam to Abraham, Isaiah and beyond; we may well feel that it was one-sided or even unfair. But recognising it is absolutely basic to understanding the Old Testament. It cannot be ignored.

However we are not in that kind of relationship, even if – as David Silvester claimed – we are a “Christian country”, whatever that might mean. Our relationship with God hasn’t been formed by divine decree nor by law written on stone tablets; ours is built fair and square on love: God’s love, shown to us in Jesus. We are free agents, so those Old Testament warnings about actions and their consequences (which we struggle to believe anyway) simply don’t apply to us.

Or do they? Remembering that this summer has been the hottest on record, with 40 days when the temperature exceeded 30° and southern England experiencing 60 days with no rain, we may yet ask if God judges or punishes us through weather events. In the sense that he sends lightning or a tornado or a flood to a place that has been particularly wicked, no: for instance, would we say that poor Monmouth, still trying to recover after last winter’s inundation, was more wicked than (say) Abergavenny; or that those people in Stourbridge whose houses burned to the ground were more evil than those in nearby Halesowen? I can’t believe that, nor can you.

However I do think that God is judging and punishing the world in a less specific way, simply because we humans have been abusing his creation, thoughtlessly plundering it for our own ends rather than acting as its careful stewards. If we are bound by a covenant, it is the one made to Adam and hence all humanity, that we can and should use the earth’s resources but must do so carefully, mindful of their creator. The so-called “laws of nature” which govern our world are God-given and should not be ignored; indeed creation functions in a complex and delicate balance which we should dare not disturb. But we do and, though many still deny them, the consequences are both disastrous and inevitable. It is foolish and risky to break God’s laws.

A year or so ago we, as a church, decided to become “greener” or more environmentally friendly. We made a few tweaks to the way we operate and gained the Bronze “Eco-church Award”. Since then though, and apart from deciding to install solar panels, we haven’t spoken much about these matters; it’s quite possible that, both as a church and as individuals, we’ve largely gone on behaving as we always have. Now I know it’s easy for us to say that our actions for better or worse only have a tiny impact on the environment compared to the decisions or actions of governments. That’s true, and I despair (for instance) at the British Government’s decision to build new runways at both Gatwick and Heathrow when we should be trying to reduce air travel; I’m also concerned about the effects that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, not to mention’s this summer’s wildfires, must be having on the atmosphere. Those are things we can’t do anything about, but they don’t absolve us from our responsibility to live in harmony with God’s creation. After all, to coin a phrase, “Every little helps”.

So, to summarise, what I’m saying today is this: that I honestly can’t believe that God uses his little finger to stir up the weather, whether that be to judge or to bless. I know that’s what many Bible passages seem to say that but – and you may disagree with me – I think our understanding of both climate and God has moved on in the last two thousand years. However I do think that we humans have the power to bring weather blessings or catastrophe upon us, by the ways we interact with God’s creation. It’s up to us to decide whether or not we call those consequences “blessings” or “judgements”. But we cannot, we must not, write God out of the meteorological picture.