"Dearly Beloved Brethren,
Is it not a Sin
To peel a New Potato
And throw away the skin?

Skin feeds piggy;
Piggy feeds you:
Dearly beloved brethren,
Is this not quite true?"

Today's 'sermon' was something on the lines of this rhyme from childhood. To be fair to Ian - and Ian is someone I like to be fair to - it was not his sermon but a green statement (or prospectus as it was entitled) from the Bishop of Lincoln to be read out in all the churches in the diocese this Sunday.

Now I was brought up with certain green policies long before these things became fashionable - I expect there are many people born during and just after the end of rationing whose parents were teenagers during the war who were brought up with these same precepts.

It is a sin to throw away anything which can be re-used.

It is a sin to light a fire or turn on the heating after March and before October.

It is a sin to throw away food - if it is too badly mashed about for human consumption feed it to the pig or the chickens or, if you don't have these, the dog.

It is a sin to take more food on to your plate than you can eat.

It is a sin to leave a light on in an empty room.

It is a sin to leave the television on if nobody is watching it.

It is a sin to waste petrol by making more journeys than really necessary.

I still mostly live by these precepts, and now we are being urged to follow similar rules to save the planet. Mind you 'Biggles' had automatically turned on the heating in church this morning (in June!) and we had to ask him to turn it off before our brains fried under its onslaught.

We are also being urged to make our churchyards a haven for wildlife. In Swallow we left the grass unmown last summer (more by accident than design, but that's another story) and got more complaints than we would have if we had allowed a black mass to take place. This year it is not quite lawn perfect, but is being cut every 4 to 6 weeks. We're leaving the hedges till the autumn though!

Anyway, I'm not sure what I made of it as a sermon substitute, but wouldn't any reasonable person agree with the message?

By the way, did anyone catch the Heaven and Earth Show bit about the creationist museum? I missed the end as I had to go to church, but apparently it has displays of human children playing surrounded by dinosaurs which apparently were created on the fifth day along with all the other animals, and died out (along with the unicorns?) as a result of the great flood which also carved out such sites as the Grand Canyon in the space of a few weeks. Am I alone in thinking that these scientific luddites are the sort of people who give christians a bad name in the modern world?