Eco-Church Sunday
Sermon
2 June 2024
The Reverend Dr James Gardom
Deuteronomy 5.12-15 Psalm 81.1-10 2 Corinthians 4.5-12 Mark 2.23 – 3.6
We have just heard a reading about the disciples breaking the sabbath by reaping grain as they walk, and Jesus breaking the sabbath by healing in the synagogue. In Mark’s Gospel, today’s reading comes at the end of a whole series of controversies stories. Jesus breaks the purity law by touching a leper, as he heals him. A paralysed man is lowered through the roof and is healed by having his sins forgiven – although only God can forgive sins. A tax collector, who is by definition someone who profits from the Roman occupation, is called to be a disciple. Jesus sits down to dinner with a whole collection of people he should not be eating with, tax collectors and sinners. On a day set aside for fasting, Jesus’ disciples are cheerfully and visibly eating. As they walked to the synagogue the disciples were making use of the humane provision which allowed informal reaping to quench hunger, but were doing so on a sabbath, when this counted as work. Once in the synagogue, Jesus heals a man, again on the sabbath, and of a condition, a withered arm, which could not be reckoned a medical emergency.
What these stories have in common is the sense that Jesus is pushing back at the way that society, legal interpretation, and convention have managed to take on a life of their own, and to displace the needs of human beings – a leper, a penitent, a hungry traveller, a disabled man. By these actions Jesus teaches us that the law and the patterns of life that surround it were made for human flourishing, and that they have lost their way. I think we often have a sense of laws and patterns of life that have lost their way. We find that things have taken on a nightmarish life of its own, and are producing perverse outcomes, that nobody is happy with, and nobody can do anything about. To think of a few that may be familiar – our immigration system, our prison system, the Windrush scandal, the post office Horizon scandal, the contaminated blood scandal. On a different scale, Geoff might mention the faculty system that has delayed our solar panel project for years.
Today we are keeping Eco-Sunday. In relation to our environment and our economy, I have a strong feeling that there is a similar sense of nightmare.
With the environment and the economy, we are enmeshed in a system we cannot get out of, but which is not working for human flourishing. From a human perspective, we all believe in the sustainable development and equitable sharing of the world’s resources with all God’s creatures. To put it another way, “The economy was made for human beings, not human beings for the economy.” But we find ourselves hopelessly enmeshed in a system where the needs of the economy, and our own personal needs, seem to make us do things that we know are destructive. We also know that the victims of this destruction, in the first instance, the most vulnerable, precisely the people Jesus has called us to protect.
Jesus proclaimed freedom to people who were caught, stuck, paralysed, immobilised by demons, social systems, ideas and power structures they could not control. God’s key gift to us in Christ is freedom. Freedom from sin. Freedom from fear. Freedom from structures that crush humanity. Freedom from despair. Eco-church is a part of claiming and making that freedom. We feel ourselves stuck in a system under which we have no control, and which is destructive to the environment, and to the lives of the most vulnerable. Because we believe in the power of Christ to create freedom, we choose to take the first, rather small, steps to liberate ourselves.
How does it work?
It begins with a survey – actually thinking about what we need to do. It is something like the examen, but for the environment and our church life. The survey looks at Worship and teaching, buildings, land, community and global engagement, and lifestyle. It responds to distinctive the fact that we are a church community, and that our impact is much to more to do with who we are and how we teach, than the, inevitably fairly small, impact we can have just in are not very large building on a very small site.
The actions we take in connection with St Bene't's building, the life we share here, and the resources we expend, are important in themselves – these are the kinds of things everyone needs to do. The self-education that arises from this is more important still. These local actions are symbolic of decisions we must take in other departments of our lives. Decisions that we take as Voters, householders, people with influence in our organisations, as citizens.
We may, properly, have a sense that even these are too small. But as Christians we know two things which give us hope.
Firstly, we know about the power of symbols. The faith has changed the world more by the power of tis symbols than anything else.
Secondly, we know about the power of God.
It is characteristic of God in Christ but when we are dismayed, stuck, unable to see a way forward, and we turn to him for grace and help, he will heal us. It is characteristic of God in Christ that he honours our small efforts and human attempts with the grace and blessing of the Holy Spirit, and uses them in unexpected and transformative ways. We are at the very beginning of thinking, as a Christian community, about our relationship with the world God has given us, and the systems we have created which are destroying that world.
With God’s grace we proceed in hope, and in the knowledge that God will use what we can offer, beyond our expectation and understanding.