Think Global, Act Local

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Think Global, Act Local: A spirituality for Advent; 27 November 2011; The Revd Dr Raymond Pelly

• Psalm 80:7;
• Isaiah 64:1-9;
• I Corinthians 1:3-9;
• Mark 14:24-37

Part of my daily routine in the eight weeks I spent in Frankfurt learning German was to read a German newspaper in my lunch-break; then to watch the TV news in the evening. It came clear to me that our world is now afflicted with three interlocking crises – if we look at the big picture, think globally. They are:

• A financial crisis where some nations are maintaining unsustainable life-styles based on borrowing or credit. Or, to put it another way, a big re-think is on the way about the relationship between the heaps of paper money accruing to bankers and currency traders and real economies where people are making and selling things – whether it be cars, high-tech gear or agricultural produce.

The August riots in Britain highlighted huge disparities of wealth of the order of 1/235, a small fraction of what it must be in the world in general. 1/1000?

• An ecological crisis of global warming (or climate change, as it’s sometimes called) in which deserts are expanding, glaciers melting, sea-levels rising, water supplies either dwindling or arriving as huge unmanageable deluges and floods.

In Europe, the two great rivers, the Rhine & the Danube, are at unprecedentedly low levels. You may have seen the photo in Friday’s paper.

• A food crisis – as in the horn of Africa- where either there is no food available locally or, if there is, it is so expensive that most people can’t buy it. Now millions of people survive on Food Aid alone. One of the drivers of this is the ever-increasing world population: now at 7 billion and rising.

Another part of my daily routine – morning and night – was to read chunks of the Book of Revelation, a text very like our Gospel this morning – what is called Apocalyptic. The burden of Apocalyptic is that the world is in crisis; and that salvation – or how some people, a remnant will survive – will come from a very unexpected quarter: in Revelation, symbolized by a Lamb ‘standing as though it had been slaughtered’ (5:6).

This morning’s Gospel is similar. Even the ‘powers of heaven are shaken’; and then ‘the Son of Man’ becomes starkly visible for all to see; visible, as last week’s Gospel reminded us, in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, or those in prison (Mt 25:31-46). The exhibition in the Cathedral focussing (as it does) on children in Burma is a stark reminder of deliberate and politically motivated human suffering.

This is the big picture, the apocalyptic scenario, and it can be pretty daunting. Not something we like to think about too much. But here I’m helped by a slogan that did the rounds in recent years: THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY. We have just been through a General Election in which we have all had to think about the kind of future we want for our country; and, by implication, what it’s contribution to the world we all live in will be in years to come. Now, inevitably, we are world citizens as well as citizens of a particular country.

But as Christians today in Wellington on the First Sunday in Advent, how can we orient ourselves so that we make the connections between the global and the local?

PRAY! The first thing is to pray – and live your life generally – with your eyes open. ‘Keep alert’ – in the original Greek, ‘Open your eyes, look!’; ‘keep awake’ or ‘wake up’. This is the clear message of the Gospel. When we were kids we were perhaps taught to pray with our eyes shut. That’s OK: God dwells in the heart of each person; we need to be in touch with this, the deepest dimension of who we are. But at the same time we have to put that together with what’s going on around us. A theologian I read while I was away speaks of ‘The Mystic with Open Eyes’ - a spirituality of the person who lives in the real world with their eyes open – isn’t this exactly right as a spirituality for Advent, for a believer in a world in crisis?

WHAT TIME IS IT? Then there is something about knowing what time it is. ‘Keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will return’. In the last ten days (after the flight from Europe) my body has been trying to figure out where it is and what time of day or night it is! You may know the feeling! The Gospel says something much more challenging. ‘The master of the house will come, in evening, or at midnight, at cockcrow, or at dawn’ – and this evokes the story of Jesus: the night of trial and travail; the darkness of midnight; the cockcrow of betrayal, or the dawn-time of resurrection and hope. Does any of this describe where we are ‘at’ now: hopeful and awake, asleep and tempted to give up, betrayers?

GIFT/ URGENCY. Running through the Gospel is also a sense of urgency. The time is short! The master, the Son of Man, will return and visit us at any time. Suddenly! This is not only a reminder that each of us in mortal, that we live in a limited time-frame, it is also, as the Gospel makes clear, a statement that God-given time is always a gifted or ‘given’ time, an opportune time, a time full of possibilities. If the world in crisis is living on borrowed time, the time that God, the master of the house, gives has endless potential for good – if only we can see it!

This has all sorts of implications. If my life is the gift of God, do I come over as a gift to others, to those around me? And do I receive the gift of my particular life joyfully and thankfully, something I can wholeheartedly offer back to God, the giver? This is the essence of what we do in each Eucharist: receive the gift of the fullness of God-given life joyfully and thankfully; and offer it back to God in-with-through Christ, purified and empowered.

It follows from this that if the ‘time’ we’re living in now is God’s time, then what we make of our lives matters. Paul speaks of ‘redeeming – or make the most of - the time’ (Ephesians 5:16). In our Gospel each person is ‘put in charge’ of something, ‘each has his or her work’. This is the opposite of what you might call ‘media time’ where everyone is supposed to be bored and cynical and in need of entertainment, an empty time that is going nowhere and has to be filled artificially.

FASTING, WILDERNESS. In Advent then, as we await the coming of ‘master of the house’ in the paradoxical form of ‘the babe in a manger’, we are urged to go into a time of fasting and wilderness as a time of discerning who we are, where we are and what we should be doing.

In so far as we de-clutter our lives, we become increasingly aware of the state of the world we actually live in.

Equally important is the recovery of the sense of who we are and what God is calling us as individuals or as a Church to be and to do. For is not the ‘big picture’ in the end the sum-total of all the little pictures?

But the perspective in which all this earnest soul-searching is done is one of hope and gift. ‘God is faithful’ (I Cor 1:9). That means that at every moment, in life as in death, God is the one who gives gifts, who opens up new and surprising futures for anyone willing ‘to hear the call’.

In that way Isaiah speaks of the ‘God who works for those who wait for him’ (64:4); and our Psalm contains the prayer, ‘Restore us, O God of hosts, let your face shine, that we may be saved’. That could be our prayer today. Our Advent prayer in a world in crisis!