Sermon Archive
Full of Unnatural Goodness
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 10 September 2006
Proverbs 22.1-2, 8-9, 22-23 ; James 2.1-10, 14-17 ; Mark 7.24-37
Imagine an advert where a beautiful girl in a floaty dress strolls in dreamy slow motion through a field of pretty red poppies. 'Opium,' says the voice-over, 'is mother nature's own cure for the troubles of life. Now we bring it to you in simple capsule form. 100% pure, organically produced, full of natural goodness.'
Nature is a deeply ambivalent concept. When used by advertisers it invariably implies a positive value judgement - a product is natural spring water, it uses only the finest natural ingredients, it leaves a natural sheen to your hair. As such it evokes longings for a simpler, more wholesome world somehow lost to us.
So, a loaf of bread, harvested, milled and baked, when full of natural wholegrain is good, when full of chemical additives is bad. An extract of nettle, or pondweed might be proclaimed as mother nature’s remedy against some ailment, whereas a much researched medicine for the same ailment is seen as unnatural and therefore suspect.
That’s the implication - if it’s not natural, it must be unnatural (I don’t think supernatural gets a look in here). And what invariably makes it unnatural (in the tabloid mind) is that it involves too much human intervention. Benign, cuddly nature on the one hand, nasty, intrusive humanity (especially scientists and men in grey suits) on the other. Human ability to unlock the 'forces of nature' is somehow seen as unnatural.
The problem with this is twofold. Firstly, human beings are part of nature too. Our ability to invent and create and interfere is an expression of one of the forces of nature. Our intelligence is natural and the way we use that intelligence is natural. Writing a poem, composing a symphony, splitting the atom or going to war - all perfectly natural to us, even if unusual, special or regrettable.
Secondly, even without human intervention nature is not benign. It is, as they say, 'red in tooth and claw'. Death is natural, mental illness natural, earthquake, volcano, tsunami, rats, predators, Viles disease, cholera, wasps, all perfectly natural.
Which explains why we regard nature with ambivalence. We rush towards it, hands outstretched to grasp its goodness, at the same time as rushing madly away from it, grasping at anything that will shield us from its effects.
Perhaps it is this contradiction that led to the story of the Fall. Nature, according to this ancient story, is disordered, it competes with itself and undermines itself because long ago humans made the decision to sin. Rather self-important, perhaps, but the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the loss of innocence, has a timeless quality to it. It’s a story we live out even now as human beings’ perfectly natural instinct for control over the environment, for greater understanding and knowledge, for comfort and power disorders nature to a dangerous degree.
The trouble is that, taken literally, this story invites further confusion. Has the whole of nature been disordered or only bits of it? And if bits, which bits? It’s an argument that rages at present around the whole issue of sexuality but it could equally be applied to matters of race, or culture, or art - or even, as Jonathan Swift famously suggested, to which end of a boiled egg should be sliced off. If nature is fallen then the whole of nature is fallen, not just the bits of it I don’t happen to like - the whole of nature is unnatural. Which leaves us in a dead end and advertisers with a problem.
The other trouble with the story is that it so successfully plays on our longing for a golden age long ago. Whilst most of us, hopefully, can claim a personal golden age when we were infants, for humanity as a whole the concept is highly dubious. By constant backward reference we not only yearn for a purity and innocence that has gone we also pass the buck for what has gone wrong. 'Guilty, m'lud, but it were me great-grandparents' fault.'
Whether we like it or not the future alone is open to our shaping, not the past. In other words, it’s a matter not of a fixation on a golden age that never existed but a search for our vocation - a call to the future in which we shape the world in God’s way. Not looking back towards Eden but forward to the new city of God's promises. In fact, if you look at today’s readings they teach us something of this vocation by asking us to behave contrary to nature, to behave unnaturally.
It’s in our nature to seek our own interest, to seek justice for ourselves. It’s in our nature to show deference to the rich and successful, both from respect for their achievements and also hoping some of their success may rub off. It is in our nature to favour people like us, our type of people and to be exasperated with those who make demands on us. By that I mean that these tend to represent our default positions - sad perhaps, yet finely honed by the survival needs of our ancestors. The extraordinary thing is that over many generations our religious tradition has tried to get us to change this default.
So, in Proverbs we are warned that in the long term to inflict calamity on the poor will bring calamity ultimately for the rich too, whereas generosity brings blessings. James tells us that the Kingdom of God has come when the poor are found to be rich in faith and when no favour is shown to anyone just because they happen to be rich.
Mark tells the story of Jesus' encounter with two poor people. The first is poor because as a Gentile woman she is excluded from the chosen race. So what if her little girl is mentally ill! She is not one of God's children but, rather, a dog. Hardly a sensitive approach to a pastoral request! Perhaps he’s ironically parroting the prejudices of his own people - perhaps at this point he shares those prejudices. But the woman's response breaks through his guard, helping him to see that her need is not about theology but compassion. 'Even the dogs can eat the crumbs dropped by the children.' The girl is healed.
Next is a man who is impoverished because his deafness has isolated him from human company. This time Jesus is far more sensitive. Perhaps he’s reflecting on the way his own ears had been opened by the Gentile woman as he gently works a healing.
In healing these two people Jesus acts against nature – even, in the case of the mother, against his own nature. And yet we would say that he was turning the universe around the right way. He went with the grain of how God wants things to be. Unnatural, and yet expressing somehow the heights of human nature, the ability to learn, grow, change and show compassion for the weak.
This is our vocation, not to cling to a static and faulty view of a lost past, but to have the courage to set the trajectory of our future lives according to the direction of love. A future where dignity and justice are given to the poor, where generosity breeds generosity and where we find God’s will expressed even in people quite unlike ourselves.
A future enlightened by the extraordinary vision of a universe in harmony, a universe full of unnatural goodness.
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