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Preaching for the Planet: Sermons on Creation and Climate
By Jenny Wilson
Review by Dr Esther Elliott, Reader St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh
This book is a collection of 38 sermons by Jenny Wilson, the Canon Precentor at St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide with a small introduction about the craft of preaching. They were delivered over a period of four and a half years, between March 2019 and October 2023, presumably, although not actually stated, all to the Cathedral congregation. This is the second collection of Jenny Wilson’s sermons published by Sacristy Press.
The collection is broken up into six sections after the introduction; preaching for the planet, preaching in the midst of a pandemic, through the eyes of artists, inspired by the poets, Jesus-windows on his story and Jesus – the stories
he told.
The introductory section on preaching, seeks to offer some thoughts on what preaching is all about. It’s a collection in and of itself, of thinkers and preachers’ ideas about preaching including Barbara Brown Taylor, Rowan Williams, Walter Brueggemann, Pope Francis and Elizabeth Johnson. Later additions of the voices of Michael Mayne and George Herbert reinforce this situating of the collection in a particular theological seam.
Once that ground is established the collection proceeds to disorientate the reader. Of course, there is the hurdle of reading something that was crafted to be listened to at a particular time and in a specific context. Then, as the sermons have a title but only note the texts being preached on in a list at the end of the book, the first few minutes of reading are often a game of ‘guess the text’. This is followed by the realisation that most of the sermons are crafted around all three of the set texts for that service. The biggest challenge, however, is that after the first two sections the connections to the themes of creation and climate are slender.
However, this is the sort of disorientation which enables imagination rather than confusion which, from the content of the sermons and the introduction, sits well with Wilson. Once enabled, imagination helps with the worthwhile revisiting of feelings and thoughts surrounding the covid pandemic through the eyes of a different culture. It also helps with the valuable task of hearing the voice of the earth in the biblical text where Wilson suggests it is useful to hear it – for example reading the story of the people of the Exodus and overlaying their voices with the voice of an enslaved planet.
For a book ostensibly about preaching however, the major gem is that quite a lot of the content of the sermons is teaching about prayer. Not so much the why, but the how and the what of prayer. Wilson says, in a sermon about being startled by Jesus, ‘resurrection has many guises’. Perhaps as we face a disorientating climate emergency it is imagination and prayer that are indeed as our key bits of kit to support us in the hope that resurrection is possible.
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