Earlier this year, on March 2^nd to be precise, Dreweatts auction house in Newbury held a sale which must have had collectors salivating in anticipation. For this was no ordinary sale, but the disposal of the collection which had been on display at the Barometer World Museum in Devon (one wonders if it hadn’t succeeded in drawing the crowds).

As you’d expect, there were lots of barometers, both aneroid and mercury, of all shapes and sizes. There were several vintage clocks, telescopes and microscopes. There were a couple of barographs – the devices you find in weather stations which trace the air pressure onto a long roll of graph paper. There were those little weather houses you can put on your mantelpiece, where a man comes out of one door or a woman comes out of the other, telling you if it’s going to rain or not. And there was even a Wimshurst Machine, where you turn a handle to generate a bolt of lightning – we had one at my school which was demonstrated in physics lessons, I was always a bit frightened of it!

The star item was Lot 87 – a perfect replica of something called a “Tempus Prognosticator”, in fact the only one that’s in working order. You may not know what one of those is, so let me tell you: it’s a device for predicting weather, devised by Dr George Merryweather of Whitby. It consists of twelve pint-sized glass bottles set around a circular stand under a bell surrounded by twelve hammers; each hammer is attached by a wire to a piece of whalebone set loosely in the neck of one of the bottles. The whole apparatus is bizarrely designed in the form of an Indian Temple (with odd Egyptian features thrown in!) and that gives you a clue to its date: for the Prognosticator was to be displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

There’s one very important detail of this device that I haven’t yet told you about, which is what was actually inside those twelve glass jars. Well, each one was intended to hold a live leech. The idea was that the changes in atmospheric pressure that occur before a storm would drive the leeches up to the necks of their bottles; as they did so they would dislodge the pieces of whalebone and so ring the bell at the top of the apparatus. Several leeches ringing their bells in close succession would be a sign that a storm was on the way: which was important to know in a fishing town such as Whitby. Merryweather thought he had a winner on his hands, and intended to produce five different models of his machine. But, not surprisingly, it didn’t catch on. The auctioneers reckoned it would sell for £10-15,000 but I don’t know what it made.

Today we have amazingly sophisticated ways of forecasting the weather using satellite pictures, computer algorithms, observations on the ground and a mass of data accumulated over decades. Jesus and his compatriots didn’t, of course, have access to these tools so technical words and phrases such as “jet stream”, “anticyclone”, “occluded front”, wind shear” or “temperature inversion” would have held meaning for them. But, while they did hold the strong belief that God actually controlled the weather on a day-to-day basis, blessing obedience with good weather and punishing sin with tempest, flood and drought, they also had some understanding of the signs that told them the weather to expect later in the day or on the following one. That’s why I talked about “weather lore” earlier – it’s something which Jesus himself mentioned, but as a metaphor for something deeper.

The passage we read from Luke’s Gospel is curious as it appears to gather together several statements by Jesus which don’t seem related to each other. For we have something about Jesus “bringing fire to the earth” – that may be about future judgement; and then something about his “baptism” – probably a reference to his upcoming ordeal on the Cross. There’s then a section on the way that Christian discipleship can divide families, and finally we come to his comments about the weather and the “signs of the times” which too many people were failing to recognise. Jesus is pretty strong on this point, calling those people “hypocrites”; but we are left wondering, “What on earth was he talking about?” The whole passage seems to be a mishmash of fragments – as if Luke has collected all the little sayings of Jesus that he couldn’t fit in anywhere else into his Gospel and plonked them down here. In fact, as the author and editor, that may be exactly what he did, although it hardly squares up with his declared aim in ch.1, to write an “orderly account” of everything that Jesus did and said!

So what was Jesus saying? I think there are two possibilities. One is basically political: that the people he was speaking to were failing to grasp – indeed, were wilfully ignoring – the signs of impending chaos and disaster that were to befall Israel. They knew that their country was occupied and oppressed by the foreign power of Rome; they also knew that thoughts of rebellion and liberation were constantly simmering beneath the surface and could (and did) break into violence at any time. Tension was constant, first-century Palestine was a tinder-box, ready to burst into flame; but most people, it seems, buried their heads in the sand and carried on with life as if the situation was normal.

Was Jesus being a bit harsh when he called his hearers “hypocrites”? After all, they simply wanted a quiet life; surely he couldn’t quibble with that? But the signs of ultimate catastrophe were there for all to see, even if that catastrophe didn’t take place for another thirty years when civil war broke out, leaving Jerusalem destroyed and turning the Jews from being a major nation into a scattered and persecuted minority. I’m reminded here of what my mother said about growing up in 1930s Germany. Everyone could see what was happening: the frightening rise of Nazi nationalism, the hate-filled public rallies, the thuggery towards those who didn’t conform, the way in which some people mysteriously vanished … yet few people said or did anything to oppose it. Perhaps they feared the consequences of speaking out, perhaps they were entranced by the economic miracle taking place in their country, perhaps they were interested only in themselves – but their deliberate blindness led to world war, the Holocaust, a refugee crisis, and the destruction and division of their homeland.

That’s one possible meaning of what Jesus said. But there is another: it’s that God’s Kingdom was clearly being made visible, yet people either failed to see it or refused to believe. For instance, Matthew 10 tells us of Jesus’ disciples being sent out with instructions to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons – all of them regarded as signs of the Messiah being among them. Equally John 12 says that Jesus performed many signs or miracles, yet many people still did not believe in him. Returning to Matthew’s Gospel, we hear Jesus quoting the Old Testament prophet Isaiah and declaring that people’s hearts had grown dull, their ears were hard of hearing and they had shut their eyes; the consequence being that they would not look [or] listen [or] understand, nor turn to Jesus for healing.

It does seem that many folk in Britain today are almost wilfully ignorant of what God is doing. Christians work selflessly in all kinds of community activity, yet they are often criticised or ignored. Church services may be lively and interesting, but lots of folk never bother to find out. Believers may even testify to miracles of healing or amazing changes in their lives wrought by God, but those who hear are sceptical. So we might ask, with Jesus, “What more could be done to convince people about God when they don’t notice his Kingdom growing all around them?”; and we might answer, “Nothing, there’s no point”. Faith and morality no longer seem to be important to many of our leaders; indeed, neither of the candidates seeking to be the next Prime Minister set out any moral vision for the country until this week. We may live in a secular society where Christianity no longer dominates, but I still think that’s a shame; we must surely reap the consequences.

But are there other “signs of the times” which we can see yet seem to ignore? The obvious one must be climate change; we’ve known for years that human activity is warming the world. This has potentially catastrophic consequences, yet we continue to live as if everything is absolutely fine. I know that some people have deliberately cut back on their car use, have installed solar panels on their roof, refuse to take any flights, buy clothes and wear them until they fall to bits rather than chucking them away after one night out, try to buy locally grown fruit and vegetables rather than transporting them across the world – but they are a tiny minority, counter-balanced by celebrities who seem to revel in using private jets whenever they can. Equally some Governments, including ours here in Wales, have declared a “climate emergency” and are doing what they can to cut back emissions. But they are met with derision (“How stupid to cancel the M4 relief road”) or a sense of futility when others seem to be building more coal-fired power stations or enlarging their airports. You might say that none of this has anything to do with our faith; but we are called to be stewards of our planet, ensuring that what we do doesn’t harm other people or our descendants. Christians should care about these things.

It’s easy to ignore the weather forecast: doing so might simply mean we get wet because we haven’t taken an umbrella, but there are times when it could end up as a matter of life and death. Equally, it’s easy to ignore signs of trouble, or to convince ourselves that they aren’t important. People had smelled gas for a fortnight before the explosion which killed a child in London this week, but had anything been done? Rivets were falling from the first Tay Bridge long before it collapsed, but the engineer told everyone that it was safe. Oil stains on the drive might presage your car’s engine seizing up, cracks in the walls of your house could signal subsidence, frequent computer crashes should warn you of an impending total breakdown, smoke oozing from a volcano could be the first sign of a powerful eruption. Over-familiar actions and inappropriate language could be signs of an abuser. Unexplained phone calls and too many so-called “business trips” might mean that your partner is having an affair. Occasional chest pains can be a warning of a future heart attack. Hearing your elderly mother say that she often gets onto the wrong bus might suggest that dementia is creeping up upon her. We can close our eyes to telltale signs and symptoms, hoping they’ll go away, but we do so at our peril.

I’ve probably plunged you into despondency and gloom by saying all that! But I don’t want you to go home feeling depressed; rather I want you to go looking out for ‘signs of the times’ and, where necessary, making changes to your lifestyle. Equally I want you to go looking out for the signs of God’s Kingdom which really, truly, are all around us.