Roger Wagner, Abraham and the angels, 2002
Growing up my family could have a picnic anywhere. On a mountainside in a gale, outside a tourist attraction because we were not buying the expensive food within or in our blue ford maxi in the rain. While we moaned, they were precious times that bound us all together.
What dominates this scene are the large, blue, industrial buildings- which are in fact Sizewell A, a nuclear power plant on the coast of my home county Suffolk, that was shut in 2006 but will not be fully cleared until 2098. The radioactive materials of course will be toxic for centuries to come. Our need to harvest energy has a legacy that will last longer than the millennia between biblical times and our own. As the cornfield hints ‘we reap what we sow’. The threat is also intimated by the bare branch that seems like a crack in the painting or the view before us.
What takes longer to notice are the figures in the grass. What the artist Roger Wagner describes in an accompanying poem as ‘a picnic on the edge of doom’. It is story of Abraham and the angels (Genesis 18). We remember the story as a moment of promise where the guests (disguised as angels) reveal that Sarah will have a son. Sarah, who overhears this, laughs with incredulity, or makes the sort of snort that belies a great deal of pain. In time she does gives birth to Isaac, whose name means ‘laughter’. However, after this promise the angels set off for Sodom and Gomorrah on some kind of fact-finding mission because the outcry over their sins has reached the ears of God. Abraham remains and pleads for the cities, reminding God that God is a just judge who does not destroy the innocent. So we have destruction of populations and the promise and possibility of future generations all within a few verses of each other ... but isn’t that how most of us live?
The threat to life and the future are as real as the big, blue building and yet we do not live without hope. So, we look at the eclipse - is the light disappearing or appearing? We see the rising steam as an offering of prayer. We notice how it’s broken by the light of dawn to form a cross made of immaterial things. We see ‘the picnic at the edge of doom’ as a precious encounter between the human and divine. When we offer hospitality to others, we might just be opening ourselves up to God’s future promises. The simple and the small matter. They are what sustain us when everything else, the world’s problems, are so big.
So, what threats loom large for our world today?
Where do you find places of hope?
Suzanne Nockels
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