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Good morning. ‘Remember, remember, the 5th of November’ goes the old nursery rhyme, but those out tonight won’t be focussing on ‘gunpowder, treason and plots’, the notorious event in 1605 when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the houses of Parliament. They will be enjoying fireworks, which need to have proper safety measures in place, at hundreds of local venues all over the country. Their bangs can disturb dogs, and sometimes neighbours, but few fail to be entranced by the illuminations in the sky. Soaring and scattering with sparks of different colours and changing patterns they can be truly spectacular. In fact I would give them a more high-falutin name and call them ‘performance art’. Even children with their sparklers weaving patterns against the sky share in the art. But there is another aspect of fireworks displays that always strikes me-their transitory nature. When one burst ceases there is a strange lull; and after you have been watching a whole show and suddenly the sky is dark again and all is quiet, you get struck by the fact that something so glorious is here one moment and gone the next, literally in a flash. Some cultures celebrate this fact. The 20th century author Shusako Endo, whose works come out of the comparatively rare perspective of Japanese Catholicism, re-creates the frustrations of a Christian missionary in the 16th century who for 30 years had tried to convey the idea of the lasting or eternal in a culture with a different feel for life. He reflected that it was easy to convey the idea that life was transitory and adds ‘The frightening thing is, that the Japanese also have a capacity to accept and even relish the evanescence of life’[1] So we seem to have a difference of sensibility here. As words in the book of the prophet Isaiah put it ‘The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.’ For ever. But, such differences are the stuff of life and it’s in mutual listening we come to deepen our understanding of it. As that verse indicates the great gift of the Hebrew scriptures to Judaeo Christian understanding is the conviction that at the heart of reality there is both a blessing and a moral demand; an invitation and an ethical imperative. That for me is the word of God which stands for ever. As COP 26 continues, what is at stake, regardless of our cultural differences is not just a prudential calculation- what will save our skins, but an obligation to our children and our children’s children and their children. There is here a moral demand, an ethical imperative, that stands for ever and presses upon us now. [1] Shusako Endo, Samurai, Penguin, 1983, p.163