Whose world is it anyway?
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Whose World is it anyway?: 21 November 2010: am: Dr Raymond Pelly
- Benedictus (Luke 1: 68 – 79)
- Jeremiah 23: 1 - 6
- Colossians 1: 11 - 20
- Luke 23: 33 - 43
Today the Church invites us to ask a question, simple yet profound: What sort of society (or world) do we want? And what has this got to do with Jesus? Or, to put it more theologically, when we pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven’, what do we think we are doing?
What follows is a collection of quotes & snapshots to help us get a handle on what is at issue.
First, if there is a problem, what is it?
In 1770 Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem called, The Deserted Village. Two lines from it read:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
In September of this year a perceptive Italian Socialist, Raffaele Simone, commenting on Berlusconi’s Italy, wrote of,
… the rise of the ‘sweet monster’, a consumption-driven, entertainment-obsessed society in which unbridled egotism reigns and compassion for the less fortunate is considered an expensive luxury.
How this comes over to us via the media is neatly summed up by George Monbiot in a recent article. He points to,
[The medias’] fascination with power politics, their rich lists, their catalogues of the 100 most powerful, influential, intelligent or beautiful people, their obsessive promotion of celebrity, fashion, fast cars, expensive holidays …
Lots of idols are named; and to that we might add the unanimous testimony of the Bible that, he or she who worships an idol is in love with death, not the living God.
Our first reaction to this might be: Isn’t all that a bit extreme? Do we come to church to hear this kind of thing? Don’t we actually need comfort, encouragement, and reassurance? Well yes, but consider this.
If we read our daily newspapers (or watch TV) attentively, certain things stand out: that the world is teetering on the brink of two crises, one economic, the other environmental. Take the global economy. Several countries are on the brink of bankruptcy, the latest being Ireland. Why is this? Simply because many nations want the kind of consumerist life-styles alluded to above. They have achieved this by borrowing huge sums of money, but now they’re finding they can’t pay the interest on the loans. Reactions to this vary: turn to some nation or agency that (once again) can bail you out; have an artificially undervalued currency so that your export trade flourishes; have access to a brutally underpaid workforce; or just print more and more banknotes without regard to what they’re actually worth.
If we now turn to the environment, the picture isn’t any more rosy. The progressive loss of biodiversity is the symptom of a climate change that shows itself in rising temperatures worldwide, loss of arable land, water shortages, destruction of forests, exhaustion of fossil fuel resources, over-exploitation of the world’s oceans – and in many other ways. In a world with rapidly rising populations, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that this is a recipe for conflict. For there can be little doubt that nations with environmentally costly lifestyles – or who aspire to such – will use their power (military or economic) to get their hands on the resources they need to feed their extravagant life-styles.
In this scenario, the ones who go to the wall are the weak, the poor, the defenceless, in numerical terms the vast majority of the world’s population. So we’re talking about ‘the survival of the fittest’, a valid scientific theory to explain evolution, but one which, when translated into ethics, can only lead to disaster, a politics ‘red in tooth and claw’.
And what of the victims in all of this? Will we in years to come see a series of ‘slave revolts’? Are the growing disparities of wealth in nations or the world in general threatening to de-stabilize humankind? History shows that when people are starving or under mortal threat, they throw all caution to the winds. Is the growth of terrorism a warning in this regard? And what if poorer nations realize that the only way to be taken seriously by the rich and powerful is to obtain nuclear weapons?
But enough analysis. Now to some ways in which the Lordship (or kingship) of Christ might be re-asserted.
I turn first to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here is how his friend & biographer, Eberhard Bethge, sums up his life.
The question, ‘Who is Christ for us today?’ and the answer, ‘Jesus, the man for others’, were expressed in three different ways. First, it was the cause of peace against nationalistic militarism; then, the fight against anti-Semitic racism; finally, the “being below” of the Church.
On the latter, Bethge comments: Bonhoeffer seems to have had a premonition of the extent to which the ethic of our bond with the disadvantaged of this world would become a controversial subject in modern Christianity.
Bonhoeffer’s own comment was, that to be a disciple of Christ means to put your life and reputation at risk in the service of others; just as Jesus did, ‘the man for others’; in turn expressing the yearning heart of ‘the God for others’. The kingdom of God.
Listen now, if you will, to a theologian trying to put into words what the life of Teresa of Avila was all about.
Throughout the 16th century Europe was suffering from a crisis in all its aspects. Everywhere problems and solutions were planned and enforced in the horizontal line. The answer of the Carmelite nun has only a single tune: holiness. But not holiness in the nature of selfish self-reform … but a true holiness as an end in itself, because the ontological weight [meaning: the deepest significance] of a divinized person is greater than anything else, because the meaning of life on earth – this ‘bad night in a bad inn’ – is not to organize heaven on earth, but to move earth into heaven.
In our jargon, are we passionate enough about God to be passionate about other people? And vice-versa. Are we passionate enough about others to be passionate about God, the true God? All I can say is, ‘we’d better be, because the time is short’. Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven. Starting now.
What I’ve said so far should give us the message that ‘we’re all in this together’, that we can’t talk ‘salvation’ without including people whose lives are a living hell, nor without reference to the beloved planet earth that sustains us and gives us life. At the end of a book called, ‘Can You Drink the Cup?’, Henri Nouwen says this:
[Here and now] it is the life of Christ and our life, blended together into one life. As we drink the cup, we drink the cup that Jesus drank, but we also drink our cup. That is the great mystery of the Eucharist. The cup of Jesus, filled with his life, poured out for us and all people, and our cup, filled with our own blood, have become one cup. Together when we drink that cup as Jesus drank it we are transformed into the one body of the living Christ, always dying and always rising for the salvation of the world.
This, surely, is what we are engaged in this morning as in word or action we pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. I end, then, with the beautiful words of a poem by R.S.Thomas called, The Kingdom.
It’s a long way off but inside it / There are quite different things going on: / Festivals at which the poor man is king and the consumptive is / Healed; mirrors in which the blind look / At themselves and love looks them / Back; and industry is for mending / The bent bones and the minds fractured / By life. It’s a long way off, but to get / There takes no time and admission / is free ...
