Dear All
This month I want to talk to you about bees.
Our medieval churches, including St James, Biddenham and All Saints, Kempston, have changed bit by bit over many centuries. Their stones, roofs, corners and gaps tell a long human story, but they also make room for other lives. Bats, mice, bees, birds and butterflies have all found shelter in places built for prayer. In my view, their presence is absolutely consistent with our place in the natural order.
I once sat through a wedding with a bat clinging quietly to a pillar nearby. At midnight communion one Christmas, I noticed a mouse keeping company with the plaster figures of sheep, cattle, Mary, and Joseph in the crib scene beneath the altar. Such moments can be surprising, and they are also reminders. God’s creation is not only about human beings. It is so much wider and more comprehensive than that.
A year or so ago, I was copied into an email about bees at All Saints (my other church in Kempston). A hive had lived for generations in the old stone above the doorway. While one congregation came and went below, another congregation buzzed in and out through a small hole above. Then, one Sunday, a swarm gathered indoors above the worshippers. Understandably, people were anxious, and the possibility of calling a pest controller was raised. I found myself wanting, in a small way, to speak up for these tiny but vital creatures. I don’t like the idea of killing bees under any circumstances.
This year the warm weather brought a similar problem. People arriving at church found hundreds of dead bees on the floor. When I went to look, there were no living bees left, only the sad evidence of what had happened. They had found their way in through a newer hole, and were unable to escape because of the heavy, wooden closed doors. In desperation the bees gathered towards the brightest window (bees don’t understand glass!), and then died through a combination of starvation and exhaustion.
A basic risk assessment revealed that the answer was not to kill the bees, but to open the doors to set the creatures free to pollinate the living plants around.
That small discovery feels close to the heart of the Christian story. In Exodus, God commands Moses to set his people free from slavery. It is a story of liberation: people released from fear and oppression, and invited onto a pilgrimage of faith through the wilderness.
Yet religion can easily forget its own purpose. What begins as a path towards life can become a cage of rules, suspicion and exclusion. In the earliest Christian communities, there were fierce arguments about whether Gentile converts needed to keep the full demands of Jewish law, including circumcision. Paul, himself deeply rooted in Jewish faith and scripture, insisted that the way of Christ was not about placing unachievable burdens on people. It was about grace, freedom and love.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” Paul wrote to the Galatians. “Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” That freedom is not selfishness, and it is not indifference to others. A little later Paul says, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
For me, that is the heart of the Gospel: good news for anyone who has been made to feel trapped, judged, unworthy or outside the door. Jesus does not come to lock people in with fear. He opens a way towards mercy, truth and life. He calls us out of the cages we make for ourselves and for one another: the cages of guilt, prejudice, narrowness, injustice and despair.
The bees remind us of another kind of freedom too. We are not separate from creation. We depend on it. Our crops, gardens and food chains rely on pollinators and on countless other small lives we often overlook. If we can open the doors of All Saints so that a few trapped bees may find the light, perhaps we can also open the heavier doors of our religious prejudices, that prevent the unrestricted growth of God’s new creation.
Christ leads us not into fear, but into freedom: freedom to love, freedom to include, freedom to care for the earth, and freedom to help one another find the freedom of light.
God bless