The parish staged a magnificent performance of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde last weekend. All the kids got dressed up as animals, and the choir and orchestra were on top form. They gave two sold-out performances on Sunday afternoon, and raised a great deal of money for AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe - it was cracking stuff.
 
My problem, however, focused on Sunday morning. Because the church had been transformed into one huge ark for the afternoon's show, there was no avoiding preaching about the story. And there's the problem. What to say?
 
So, God drowns humanity and all the wildlife - saving only the virtuous fish and a handful of the rest. Perhaps because I am asthmatic and have problems breathing, I often have bad dreams about drowning. Sometimes, I watch a loved one under the water, struggling for breath. Unable to help, I'm frozen in terror.
 
If I think of Noah's flood as that story, multiplied by millions, I don't see how I can get drawn into the child-friendly bustle of those preparing for the afternoon's show. The story of the flood sounds too much like genocide. To cap it all, one of the first things Noah does when saved from the waters is to get drunk and invent slavery (Genesis 9.20-27).
 
So there I was, pacing about in the vestry, thinking about the sermon and how to justify "This is the word of the Lord" at the end of the reading, when it struck me. I may not know what to do about this reading, but future generations will be damn sure what to do about it.
 
I have never been a keen environmentalist - mea culpa. When the news carries another story about the melting of the polar ice caps, I tend to make a cup of tea. It's all too green for a townie like me. It's a pathetic thing to say, but it just has never been one of my issues.
 
But if it's true, and it surely is, that we are destroying the planet with our lifestyle, then with no ifs or buts, it just has to be the most important moral challenge of our generation. And it's people like me that have to change.
 
Otherwise, at some time in the not-so-distant future, there will be a generation of preachers for whom the flood is not a complex issue of theodicy, but a very simple question of what is happening to the world around them. It won 't be God that will have to answer for that flood. It will be us.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford.