Worship - 4 October 2026

Summary Of This Week's Theme

UNESCO declared Menorca a Biosphere Reserve in 1993, recognising the balance sought between economic development and the conservation of the environment and local traditions. Sustainability is a vital part of that commitment. 

The Biosphere Reserve is described as “much more than just a name”: it is “a way of life, a way of experiencing the island, of thinking and acting in a different way” – safeguarding Menorca’s biodiversity, heritage and identity so that future generations can continue to enjoy it. 

When I read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Jesus’ parable of the vineyard, I can’t help thinking that it applies to rather more than a group of errant Pharisees. As with so many of Jesus’ parables, its reach is much broader. We might think of the whole planet as a cosmic vineyard, entrusted to us as tenants, expected to produce the fruits of God’s kingdom.

The Ten Commandments give us something of a framework for careful living – living that is full of care. They are about respect: respect for God and respect for one another. As Jesus summarised the Law, love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Life is not about competing with people whose gifts, backgrounds and cultures differ from ours, but about combining them for the wellbeing of the whole.

The tenants in Jesus’ vineyard have forgotten that. And perhaps that is where the parable challenges us. Do we imagine ourselves to be the good tenants, while everyone else is the problem? Or do we become so absorbed in our own priorities – security, prosperity, national interests, the latest global crisis – that God’s agenda gets pushed aside?

Crises come and go. But when each crisis has become history, we will still be here: breathing the same air, drinking the same water, growing the same crops, depending upon the same resources. And we may find ourselves wondering why the air is harder to breathe, the water harder to drink, and the land harder to cultivate.

The twelfth-century theologian Hildegard of Bingen had a very different vision of creation. Looking into the unpolluted night sky, she saw a universe held together in the life of God. Creation was not a collection of disconnected things, but a living whole, united in God.

I remember experiencing something of that wonder on the Camino de Santiago, waking in northern Spain to a sky filled with stars. We see so little of the cosmos, and yet even that glimpse reminds us how small we are.

Small as we are, we have nevertheless been entrusted with this vineyard – our little blue and green planet floating in space. What God expects from us is not simply productivity, but the wellbeing of the vineyard: that all its inhabitants, human and otherwise, should flourish.

That is what it means to be faithful tenants. Not to possess the vineyard, but to care for it. Not simply to survive within it, but to enable it to thrive.

The Biosphere Reserve has to be more than a name. And so does our faith. Both call us to a way of life – a different way of experiencing, thinking and acting – so that not only the island of Menorca, but this extraordinary island planet entrusted to us, may remain a place where future generations can flourish.