Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Romans 8.18–25; Matthew 6.25–34
“Consider the lilies of the field… they neither toil nor spin, yet… even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
Salisbury Cathedral, 4 February 2026, by Gerry Lynch (public domain)
February can be an underrated month – although the weather hasn’t been too kind to us this year with the grey and the rain. But when we get a sunny, calm, day, like we had on Wednesday, it becomes clear that winter’s lease is running out. There is heat in the Sun—when it gets a chance. The days are getting rapidly longer: in these parts, daylight lengthens by over an hour and a half during February.
Most of all, it is the flowers that make this time of year. First the snowdrops, then the crocuses, then the primroses and the daffodils and all the rest of them pop up, long before the first buds appear on the trees. They cheer us up not only because they tell us that winter will soon be over, but also because they are so pretty.
Of course, these early flowers are important for practical reasons. Their nectar feeds honeybees and other insects that wake from hibernation early. Mice and voles feed on snowdrops; slugs and snails feed on the early flowers too, as they do on almost anything, and they in their turn feed creatures further up the food chain. But the beauty of the first flowers is a gift in and of itself.
Why should the concept of ‘beauty’ mean anything to us at all? What gives us a sense that some things are beautiful and others aren’t? It isn’t a matter of survival of the fittest in the game of evolution. I mean, daffodils are beautiful but I don’t recommend you try to eat them, not unless you want a trip to A&E. Lions and tigers and cheetahs are beautiful but, if you’re in nature, you don’t want to contemplate their beauty for all that long.
Now, there are many things that show us that the universe cannot simply be the product of random chance. For example, while we can’t make a scientific case in favour of Christianity, specifically, we certainly can make a scientific case against the idea that the universe and life within it emerged spontaneously by chance. The fine tuning of the fundamental physical constants required for matter and chemical reactions to be possible at all is often within a few percent, in some cases, within billionths of a percent. Meanwhile, the great British cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated in the 1970s that the odds of even one, very simple, biological cell emerging spontaneously by chance within the lifetime of the universe are not one in a billion or a trillion but 1 in 1 with forty-thousand noughts after it. This is a number that in standard 12-point-type would run the length of a football pitch. This is slightly less likely than winning EuroMillions every day for two billion years: billion, not million. I think we can say that the universe seems to have a designer—whether that designer is Christianity’s Holy Trinity, or something else entirely, in another question.
I think it’s in the light of those incredible odds against our existence being by chance that we need to understand our sense of beauty? Why can it move us so much? Why can people who are physically ugly by most people standards radiate such beauty, while some physically beautiful people have ugly souls?
Would life be worth living without beauty? I think it would be pretty awful. In the gift of appreciating beauty, from a nodding snowdrops to a soaring aria, God gives us what we can’t even explain why we need.
That idea lies at the heart of today’s Gospel reading. It is set early in Jesus’ public ministry, and is part of the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous record of His teaching. Jesus tells his followers not to worry about what they’ll eat and drink and wear. Instead, they should look at the flowers of the fields, and remember that even their greatest king ever, Solomon, wasn’t as beautifully clothed as they are. If God clothes even the flowers like this, how much more care will He take of you?
For Christians have always believed that humanity is the pinnacle of God’s creation. As Christianity declined in the last couple of generations, we tended to lose the correct sense of humanity’s importance and drift in the direction of one or other of two rather extreme understandings. One is that humanity, with all its knowledge and material power, can do what it likes to the rest of creation, can exploit it as a resource; this loses the awareness of our dependence on the web of life and leaves us poisoning the very systems we need to stay alive, with consequences that are quite obvious in these strange years when the cherry blossoms come in December and the daffodils before the end of January.
The other extreme is that humans aren’t any more worthwhile than any other part of creation – that fundamentally we’re no more valuable than the snowdrops and the slugs – and that given how powerful and destructive we’ve become, the rest of creation would be better off without us; there’s even an organisation called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement encouraging us to die out.
Yet, the Bible and the tradition of the Church both teach us that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the pinnacle of His creation. Today’s first reading, from the very long letter that St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, perhaps the greatest collection of his teachings, says something more than that. It says that a glory will be revealed to us in the future, which will be so great as to make the struggles of our lives in this world seem puny in comparison.
It uses extraordinary language, saying the whole of creation is groaning in labour pains, like a woman about to give birth. Our pains and sufferings as human beings somehow correspond with the pains of the whole of creation as it is now: science teaches us that everything living and unliving is subject to decay and death, even the particles that make up rocks and gas will decay in the end. Yet, St Paul says, these pains herald that creation will itself give birth to new life, and we will be reborn along with that, to be the people we were always made to be, yet remaining ourselves, like caterpillars turning into butterflies.
Now, life involves more than its fair share of suffering. Some of you are undergoing terrible agonies right now, and all of us have done at some stage or another. And during the darkest times in my life, these sayings of Christ about the lilies of the field and of St Paul about creation groaning in labour pains have sometimes seemed trite and irritating.
But Christian hope has always been in the sufferings of this world being transformed into the glories of the world to come. That’s what the Cross and Resurrection are all about. If the world depresses you – and it depresses most of us at the moment; if its problems – environmental, political, human – seem impossible to solve, remember that Christian hope has always been in a Kingdom that is not of this world.
Death and Resurrection are the pattern of the whole universe. We see it in the way the stuff that makes up our bodies exists only because long dead stars ended their lives in explosions on a scale beyond human comprehension. And we see it, in our own place and time, so clearly at this time of year, when the dead leaves of winter give way to the snowdrops, and the crocuses, and the daffodils.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Snowdrops and Raindrops at Winterborne Kingston, © Gerry Lynch, 10 February 2018
