Introduction: Creation groaning
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 19 July 2026
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now,” writes St Paul.
Creation groaning – when we hear that phrase, we might think of our poor world, its plants and its creatures and their struggles to survive the excesses of human behaviour which – we must now surely humbly accept – are proving increasingly damaging to the rest of the natural world.
Creation groaning – under the heat of our increasingly warming planet. Creation groaning: as the seas rise and as species are lost to pollution, over-hunting and over-fishing we can almost hear the sound of nature crying in its despair and decline.
I won’t go on, we know the situation and it saddens us.
But St Paul didn’t stop at creation groaning. He said that “the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.”
Now, this, his full statement, takes us somewhere quite different altogether. It takes us from lamenting what is being lost in creation, into a place of hope. For the groaning of labour pains is a groaning which leads to new life. The groaning of labour pains anticipate new birth, new worlds being born. Paul is giving we, his readers, hope that despite the extreme painfulness the beloved earth is currently experiencing, a new world will come.
“The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God,” Paul writes. This new beginning for creation is shared with humankind, suffering, broken, humankind. As he puts it: “and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
The much-loved naturalist David Attenborough has said about humans that “We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.”
“The truth is,” he said, “the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.”
Saving the planet, taught Attenborough, means saving ourselves. “Laid upon us, whether we like it or not, is an awesome responsibility,” he said. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.” [1]
Maybe the best place to start to take that responsibility to heart is to affirm and celebrate our love for God’s world in all its beautiful complexity. And if we want to celebrate our love for God’s world then a very good place for us to start is in song.
There are many beautiful songs which celebrate creation, from traditional hymns like All Creatures of Our God and King – a joyous prayer of St. Francis of Assisi rewritten in Victorian times – to How Great Thou Art, popularised during Billy Graham’s crusades of the last half of the twentieth century.
But perhaps the most popular, most enduring, also the simplest, purest, celebration of God’s world, is All Things Bright and Beautiful, an Anglican hymn, also sung in many other Christian denominations, written by Cecil Frances Alexander and first published in her Hymns for Little Children of 1848. [2]
‘Fanny’ Alexander, as she was known, may have been inspired by Psalm 104, verses 24 and 25: “Oh Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts”.
She may also have been inspired as well by a verse from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which goes: “He prayeth best, who loveth best; All things great and small; For the dear God who loveth us; He made and loveth all.”
Or maybe inspiration may have come from William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1802, that argues for God as the designer of the natural world. The hymn speaks of “tiny wings” and “eyes to see them”, and Paley cited wings and eyes as examples of a complex design, like a watch, with God as the Divine Watchmaker.
Fanny Alexander was the daughter of a a land-agent on an Irish estate, and began writing poems and songs as a child. By the time she married the Anglican clergyman William Alexander, afterwards Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Armagh, in 1850, she was a successfully published, and well-travelled, writer. [3]
Inspiration for Alexander’s hymn text “The purple-headed mountain, The river running by” has been attributed to four separate locations in Wales, Ireland and England. Alexander visited Llanwenarth House in Govilon, Monmouthshire in 1848, and it is claimed that the hymn refers to the nearby Sugar Loaf Mountain or the Blorenge mountains, and to the River Usk. Other places where Alexander is known to have visited have also been suggested as inspirations: the gardens of Markree Castle near Sligo, the village of Dunster in Somerset, and the landscape of Grabbist Hill and the River Avill.
It may have been that “the purple headed mountain” is in Benevenagh, County Londonderry, a place she often visited, and “the river running by” is the River Roe which flows there. We will never know for sure, but what we do know is that whenever we sing this song – first learned at school – the words invoke in us pictures of the places and things in nature which mean the most to us.
For the next few Sundays this summer I’m going to invite you to reflect with me on different lines from All Things Bright and Beautiful, so that we can celebrate God’s world together. Next week I’ll talk about “Each little flower that opens”; in subsequent weeks we’ll think about “Each little bird that sings”, “The ripe fruits in the garden”, “The tall trees in the greenwood”, and finally “The sunset and the morning”. I hope you’ll find these little reflections helpfully refreshing reminders of all the beauty the surrounds us, and inspiration to keep on caring for it all as best we can. [4]
God saw all that he had made: And it was very good.
On the sixth day God completed all his work,
Heaven and earth with all their mighty throng,
And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy
Because on the seventh day he rested from all his work.
Notes
[1] David Attenborough quotes from goodreads.com.
[2] Wikipedia: All Things Bright and Beautiful.
[3] Wikipedia: Cecil Frances Alexander.
[4] These talks are based on ‘A Celebration of God’s World in Summer’ in The Staffordshire Seven, Seasonal Worship from the Countryside, pp.105-114.
