SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
and at St Luke’s, Augathella
NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (1st August)
2004
Hosea
11.1-11
Psalm
107.1-9Col. 3.1-11
Luke 12.13-21
Every time we gather, or on occasions when I join
with a family in private, to baptise a child, we promise to “reject selfish
living and all that is false and unjust.” Many of us feel a degree of
sorrow that such a promise, along with those to “turn to Christ and reject all
that is evil” and to “repent of my sins” are made glibly in baptismal
gatherings. We perjure ourselves within a context of worship of the God we call
Truth, uttering commitments we have no intention to keep. Many clergy have
responded with harsh programmes of preparation for such rites. I haven’t,
because I am aware at baptism after baptism that the congregation gathered also
promise “to support these our brothers and sisters in their calling.” We to a
person fall short of that serious undertaking, too.
I recall too, at each baptism, that I cannot claim to
have upheld my promise to “reject selfish living and all that is false and
unjust.” I am reminded each time I look into the eyes of a photo of a Sudanese
child, or any of the other dying children of the world, that ours is a world
based on Darwinianism gone mad. Our globalised world is based on survival of
the fittest played out to its utmost degree, a survival struggle in which the
rich nations get richer and the poor get poorer, and the rich within the rich
nations get richer and the poor get poorer. That attitude, driven sadly by the
once Christian nations of the West, fuelled the fires that produced el Qaeda
and its cohorts. Strangely, this cruel form of Darwinianism is most strongly adhered
to by those flat earth churches that reject Darwin’s theory of evolution,
though that is a discussion for another time and place.
Our post-Christian European world is based on
capitalism, a creed that decrees that the acquisition of wealth is the greatest
purpose of being human. Our capitalist society is built on the same desire we
claim to reject at baptismal ceremonies, the desire to have better than others
have, better than we already have. The desire to have the coffee or the car or
the clothing that advertisers tell us we don’t have and do need if we are to be
more fulfilled than we currently are. The father of capitalism, Adam Smith,
wrote “it is not from the benevolence of
the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their
regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but
their self love.”[1] Capitalism
means that the baker grows rich by feeding us, but he or she doesn’t need an
ounce of compassion. If the Sudanese children are dying so what, says
capitalism, because they can’t pay the butcher’s or the baker’s bills in any
case.
Yet says our baptismal service, and our reading from
Colossians, we the people of God, are called to be a different culture, a counterculture: Put to death… whatever in you
is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is
idolatry). Put to death that part of ourselves that is sold products by the
sight of Elle McPherson or our new Miss Universe: because that is what
fornication in part is, says Jesus who warns us that we all sin if we cast a
wayward eye. Put to death that part of ourselves that, as a nation, spends more
than $2.2 billion per annum on pet products, $200 million more than we spend on
foreign aid. For that is impurity. (That figure, incidentally, includes
expenditure in some households on upmarket pet foods at over $100 per kilo).[2]
A still more obscene form of this is the aberrant
Christian doctrine espoused by many Pentecostal churches, that the sign of our
faithfulness to God will be the size of our hip pocket, the so-called
prosperity doctrine. Buy a Bentley as a sign of God’s graciousness to you,
and turn off your television, presumably, or watch rubbish news services, or in
other ways deaden your conscience, as refugee camps of Eastern Chad swell with
desperate women and children fleeing the killing fields of Sudan.
In our liturgical rites as Anglican Christians, we
gather and confess our need for God’s forgiveness. We need (I speak to myself
as much as to anyone here) to recall before God that our hearts are hardened
by the scleroses of media: a coffee ad may well impact more on our
consciousness than the need for compassionate aid. We need to confess that for
ourselves, and, as a priestly people, to confess it on behalf of a world too
busy or disinterested to have a conscience left over such matters. We need too
to thank God where there are compassionate organizations, Christian and others,
carrying out works of salvation and of justice and of love.
We need to prioritize. Do we care even for the work
of the people of God at a local level? Do we care for the existence and the
continuation of the church
of God
Wealth or riches are not evil in themselves, but an opportunity
to exercise that ancient principle of largesse.
That principle we might say theologically was lost in Fall, in the greed of
being fallen humankind. We might also say historically it has become even more
lost since the greed-stricken ’80s and ’90s of last century. Possessions are gaseous, spreading out to fill
the space of our lifestyle and tempting us to leave no room for the needs of
others.
We are challenged by the author of Colossians and by
our baptismal vows to live a conspicuously different lifestyle. We are
challenged by our baptismal vows and by the author of Colossians to create a
counterculture of carelessness, not in the normal meaning of that word, but
living without a care for material wealth and riches. We are called to live as
a community whose only care is the advancement of the reign of God, advanced by
acts of compassionate love, justice, by proclaiming the values of God revealed
in Christ the Christ of the gospels. We are called to live out a counterculture
by our standards of care.
Such is the challenge of the author of Colossians,
such is the challenge of our baptism.
TLBWY
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