Article
- Date:
- Sunday 20th February 2022
Year C, The Second Sunday before Lent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Eucharist
- Readings:
- Genesis 1.1-2.3
Matthew 6.25-34
You will almost certainly be relieved that I am not going to repeat my previous detailed observations on these two readings, merely reminding us of how a selfish misinterpretation of Genesis has brought us to our current state of planetary degradation and that, in not taking enough notice of the symbolic meaning of the "lilies of the field" we have, as part of the mind-set of the Genesis misreading, become obsessed with what happens next, not what is happening now.
But before I explore some new territory, I want to take up a theme to which I alluded last time and that is to ponder the question of why our society, and others like it, are suffering from catastrophic levels of mental illness.
If we go back to Genesis we will see, at the end of Chapter 1, that when The Lord had finished his work, he found what he had made "very good" but at the conclusion of Chapter 3 Adam and Eve are being ejected from Eden, not into a state of abject slavery nor hopelessness but into a world of physical hardship, pain and work. The text shows that as far back as Israel could remember its ancestors were agricultural, not hunter-gatherers, and life was not easy but from the contemporary perspective we might say that there was no competition for resources, there was plenty to go round. That implies, quite incorrectly, that there isn't now. The major causes of starvation are human derived environmental degradation, human-derived poverty which leaves people without the means to buy food; and human-derived civil wars. The planet is still capable of feeding its whole population if that is what we want it to do.
But now we come to the villain of the piece. You might have noticed that the great mantra of our Government in the past few weeks is that we have got the fastest economic growth rate in the G7; now setting aside the simple fact that we have the fastest growing because we had the fastest falling during the height of the pandemic, is this GDP growth necessarily a good thing. I think not. GDP growth runs directly counter to saving the planet from further degradation but we are addicted to growth; we are addicted to accumulation, to novelty and to impossible ideas of perfection and although we may not understand this personally, we are addicted to competition or, rather, the rich and powerful, the gifted and the well taught and well connected are addicted to competition because they have by far the best chances of coming out on top. But here we have the terrible symmetrical truth: it is the poor and the rich who suffer from bad mental health, particularly in countries where the two groups are at their widest apart.
to summarise this secular part of the argument: our children are persecuted by constant competitive testing and examinations, taunted by their supposed physical shortcomings, warped by on-tap pornography, disadvantaged by the greed of their elders and properly worried about the future of the planet; we have a rapidly increasing number of people, including children, either below or in danger of falling below the official poverty level; and now that the rhetorical of CoP 26 has served its temporary political purpose, we are back to our old ways. Finally - and here's the crunch - we can only fix these problems if we are prepared to lower our own standard of living.
My first message, then, is not deeply principled, it's purely pragmatic; if we don't do the right thing then all of us, except for the very rich, will suffer and the only privilege of the rich is that they will be the last to go as our species becomes extinct. But my second point takes us right back to our two Readings: was this how it was supposed to be? The texts do not say: "Go forth and multiply and exercise such dominion over the earth's resources that you destroy the means of multiplying" nor does it say: "uproot the lilies of the field to build a gated luxury housing estate."
My third conclusion is truly shocking. If we don't get a move on the slide towards extinction will be irreversible; so we must be very careful when we say how much we love our grandchildren, when we are leaving them an impoverished planet and leaving most of them in countries with massive debts that have funded our reluctance to pay taxes. We are already suffering from increasingly unstable weather, we in one of the more temperate parts of the earth; and for a time we may rejoice in the arrival of vineyards but it won't last.
Finally, and you may think rather strangely, both Readings relate in some way to work. The Genesis creation story, at the end of Chapter 2, stipulates that we will have to work to survive; and the image of the lilies of the field remind us that Jesus was talking to daily wage-earners who, if they did not work on a particular day, did not eat which is why he did not want them to worry about tomorrow as today was bad enough. But as our technological development advances even further, we need to understand better what it means to live a fulfilling life if the number in paid work begins to fall and the number incapable of paid work in a high skills economy begins to rise.
As Christians we have to start looking at all people, regardless of their background and talents, as equal children of God. This isn't a matter, as too many Church administrators think it is, of quotas and targets, it's a simple matter of equality in the sight of God. Our report card, as a Church, is grim; but how much pressure have we put on our elected Representatives to the General Synod? How much mental space and time have we given to the major issue of our survival as the People of God, physically as well as spiritually? How long must the poor of the world wait until we have settled our internal esoteric quarrels?