Recycling seems to be getting more fashionable these days, as the message sinks in that we only have one planet, and once it runs out we're unlikely to get another one. At church we already recycle paper, aluminium foil and cans, as well as saving stamps; now we're going to put in a bin for recycling old inkjet printer cartridges as well, which will make some money for Christian Aid.
Of course, recycling is nothing new. It used to be called more old-fashioned names, like ‘make do and mend'. Crafts like patchwork or rugmaking began when scraps of fabric from worn-out clothes were made into something unique and beautiful. Apparently it's even possible to unravel wool from an old pullover and knit it up again - though I doubt I'd have the patience, unless that was the only way I could get new clothes.
For recycling began out of need - people didn't own enough to waste anything they had. Now we have the opposite problem. Our clothes are getting cheaper and cheaper, but the bargains we buy have been sewn in countries far away, where people are paid a pittance to work long hours in dangerous conditions.
Oh no, you may be thinking - yet another way of making us feel guilty! There are so many factors at work producing everything we wear, and we know so little about any of them that it's impossible to live ethically. So why try? Life's just too short!
During the first few decades of the church's life, Christians were certainly expecting the heavens to open and Jesus to return at any moment. If you were single, Paul advised you not to worry about getting married, or if your loved ones died, not to bother about mourning - all this world was just a temporary resting place, and being in heaven with God was the Christian's real goal.
Unfortunately, when it became clear that the world wasn't going to end all that soon, some Christians kept on the attitude of ‘this world is temporary and only heaven is permanent' as an excuse to do whatever they wanted. If we, being made in God's image, are the pinnacle of creation, they reasoned, the world has been made for us to use. But there they missed the point.
We are indeed made in God's image to live in God's world. But, as I mentioned last month, in connection with our forthcoming Mind-Body-Spirit exhibition in June, that means being made creative. Part of human creativity is the ability to recycle: to put old things together in new ways, making something unique and beautiful. And that doesn't just hold for making new glass bottles out of old, or rugs out of rags.
We human beings can image God's generous creativity in looking at what we have and seeing how it can be used by someone else who needs it more. We have the creative ability to glimpse God's vision of a world where no one has to work in sweatshops, and to see how we can work together with others in new ways to make that vision come true. We can study God's creation and work out ways of making it beautiful and productive again. And we can do all this because God has the ultimate recycling ability: to make new people out of old. God can take the ordinariness in us, the broken bits where others have hurt us or we them, the worn-out and giving-up bits; and God can transform us, bit by bit, into the way God has always seen us: beautiful, unique.