9 November 2025 – Remembrance Sunday

‘For the creation waits with eager longing,’ says St. Paul in his letter to the Romans. For it is holding on to the hope that it ‘will be set free from its bondage to decay…’ We look around us and we realise that in our Autumn landscape, decay and death is all part of the way the world turns.

The groaning in creation which St. Paul talks about is amply revealed in the natural phenomena which have become so pressing in our own day – the flood, famine, fire, natural disaster, powerful storms, the erosion of the earth’s agricultural land.

All of this is causing untold mayhem across the world - increasing migration, violent civil war, the desire for land, the rise in nationalism and with it racial prejudice, anti-semitism, political disturbance and the extraordinary way in which our democracies are stalling.

Despite this scary phenomena which are much more vivid in other nations than the UK  but are emerging here too not least in the rise of Neo-Nazism and their ugly shout, ‘White man, fight back!’, St. Paul describes the groaning of creation as the groaning of  labour pains.  It is the prelude to something new.

‘I have long believed in the power of urgent optimism.’ said Prince William at COP30, mirroring his belief that there is hope in finding solutions to the crisis. ‘The conviction that, even in the face of daunting challenges, we have the ingenuity and determination to make a difference and to do so now.’

He called on the nations of the world ‘to walk forward together’ adding, ‘Let us be the generation that turned the tide – not for applause but for the quite gratitude of those yet to be born’. Unity and the deceleration of global warming are vital to eradicating many of the earth’s problems which will otherwise overwhelm us.