Sermon Archive
Seeds of Change
Sermon preached by Peter Brand at Holy Communion on Sunday 8 August 2002
Genesis 32 22-31; Romans 9 1-8; Matthew 14 13-21
I have often been told that the lessons I have aske others to read have in some way struck them as appropriate to their particular situation or thinking. I admit to being wary of such happenstances - and I certainly take no credit or blame, as I rarely look at what the lesson is before asking somebody to read it. In a way that protects me from just such an accusation as picking a lesson for somebody. It's happened enough times, however, for me to be fairly sure that the bible is not quite sucha dead series for books as it s so often portrayed. Who would, for example, have related this morning's gospel to the happenstance of a collection in aid of the starving in central Africa? After all, the lessons were laid down a while ago and with all due respect for the rector I doubt if he had arranged for this appeal to occur in association with this lesson; and in any case this lesson only applies to this service.
Nevertheless it is appropriate that we should be reminded of the open-handedness of God expressed by Jesus in this miracle which forms today's good news. Here was need - what could be done to fulfil the need? - yet at the same time bearing in mind the experience of the temptation to feed the starving, buying them off, as it were, in order that they become disciples. 'Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God': that was Jesus' quotation from the story of the Manna during the Exodus and God's open-handed feeding of the nation as they crossed the desert.
My thinking about all this, however, got tangled up with my television viewing, for I had been watching - naughty lad some may say - the programme entitled 'Sex BC'. And no - I am not going to enlarge on the subject matter, except to note something which came out of the words of the pundits who contributed to the programme. They noted the change that took pleace in human evolution when the hunter gatherers of the early Neolithic became settlers and begun to live in larger and more stable, non-itinerant groups. In the early stages male and female could operate more or less as equals, but by the time of settlement happening a change had taken place. That was reflected in the skeletal remains - there was a division of labour between men and women with the women showing signs of hard labour, crushing and grinding in a kneeling position so that the bones of the toe became deformed. Men on the other hand showed signs of having sat squatting without the marks of hard labout. The experts' conclusion was that the nature of society and in it the relationships of men and women had changed.
Ever since I had ploughed my way through some of Teilhard de Chardin's work, influenced by it was by his study into human pre-history and into Christianity, I had been aware of his thesis that human society itself was in the process of evolution; with attendant effects on humankind. This programme seeemed to offer some evidence for just such a thesis, one stage of an evolutionary process not yet completely worked out. That I might add seems also peculiarly appropriate to the story in the first lesson in which Jacob, left alone, struggles with another, whom he later recognises as God. In the process of human development are we not also struggling with and against God? But what marks the Jacob story is that it is the individual who is struggling, not a societal group or species. And in that there is also a warning: an individual counts! Most of us are aware of the Declaration of Human Rights and Citizens which was formulated in the French Revolution in 1789 and it is interesting that this should be so, for at that time, for some, no human rights existed within that particular society. It is a reflection of the nature of human society that the need for a declaration of Human Rights such as that signed in 1948 was recognised and acted upon by the United Nations.
To go back to my musing on the nature of the evolution of human society, back to the recognition afforded by that television programme that the result of living together was the rise of institutions. And with that came a degree of loss - loss of a sense of transiency and the beginning of the dead hand of settledness. It was John Taylor in a book called 'Enough is Enough', now 27 years old, and still relevant today, who remarked of institutions,
One can identify six simple rules for ensuring that the main aims of movements are not lost. These are: Keep the aim limited; keep the organisation small; cherish the weakness of limited means; distribute functions widely; trust local teams with full responsibility; and foster new growth on the fringes.
Some of these I recognise in the activity of the Episcopal church and some I don't; and it may be that some of them are mutually incompatible within modern society. None the less I can see their value in maintaining the possibility of movement, of being able to shift in response to need.
Back to my earlier comments about this miracle - arranged to feed the needy where they were, where they had followed Jesus. How the miracle worked still remains a problem for the literal-minded amongst us. Perhaps we need to go back to the thoughts of John Taylor's book where he says that those who anguish over a starving world with the easy assumption that there is just not enough land and resources to feed them all would do well to go again to the supermarket. Not to shop, but to observe and meditate on what they take for granted. How much of the world's labour went into producing what you see? And the less obvious - how many trees went intot he packaging? How much skilled labour went into the advertising and merchandising? And, while I am at it, what about those things which in the process have not been costed at all - the air and free landscape - in which society pays the costs of pollution; for industry does not fail to leave its mark on the landscape. It's clear though that such things are unlikely to change readily, least of all in mass movements, unless such changes are forced upon us - climate change for example, or the effects of AIDS as another.
The words of the Sovereign Lord remain true: 'Behold I am making all things new' - that is our faith and with it the sense in which the I of the statement is transferred to the individual trusted by God. God's renewals and revolutions begin quietly, like faith itself, just as they did through Jacob, as part of a journey. As John Taylor records, 'they start growing from one tiny seed, the staggering thought "things don't have to be like this"'. And that links with the thought that we may have felt the statement 'behold I make all things new' only refers to physical change. It may also refer to attitude and understand, in which our view of what is, is changed by the Christ who is within us.
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