Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity
Despite the appearance of sultry winds this week, we are heading toward autumn. Children are back in school, students are returning to colleges and universities. Landowners and their labourers are preparing to bring in the harvest of the land, and in the heavens the sun has begun to tilt comfortably toward the southern hemisphere, shedding a duskier light at morning and evening. The colours change; the world turns — ‘summer and winter, seed-time and harvest’ — as in years and ages past.
The Church has long been attuned to seasonal rhythms, and has used time and changes in time to call us to faithfulness. One way she has done so is by instituting periods of fasting and prayer — times to take stock, repent, fast, give more generously to the poor. In the earliest centuries, these times settled into four fasts a year for the four seasons.
Most of us will be familiar with the fasts around Advent and Lent. The other customary times were before Pentecost and before Michaelmas — in other words: in mid-September, now is the time to fast. And the great model for fasting and prayer, one constantly invoked by preachers down the ages, was the model of the Ninevites, whose story we have heard in part today. Nineveh was a town infamous for its sins, and God sent to them the reluctant, prejudiced prophet Jonah — Jonah, who would rather not go; Jonah, who knew God was ‘gracious…and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love’; Jonah, whose hard heart drove him to flee from the face of the Lord, and then who was more concerned for his own comfort than for the lives of ‘a hundred and twenty thousand people’ and ‘many animals’ besides. A reluctant, callous prophet for a sinful city, proclaiming: ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’
We can probably imagine why the example of the Ninevites made so popular a story. When threatened with disaster and prompted by their miserable messenger, Jonah, they wholeheartedly repented, clothing themselves in sackcloth and ashes, crying out to the Lord. Jonah chapter three tells us that even the King of Nineveh rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, and joined the people in their fast. Even the animals were to share in this universal repentance and were covered in sackcloth. No one was to eat or drink. ‘Who knows?’ said the Ninevites. ‘God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’
Year by year, amid the constancy of the turning seasons, ‘summer and winter, seed-time and harvest’, Christians have turned to this story and its happy ending as a model: personalizing it, reflecting on their circumstances, seeing the ways they too needed to turn away from sin.
Might we do so? Might we do the same?
I almost hesitate to make the suggestion, although we are in the midst of a calamity, as our economies and the foundations of our mighty cities are shaken. Allow me to play the role of the reluctant prophet this morning.
We know that this global pandemic has come as the result of our hyper-connectivity and addiction to travel, along with our continued encroachment upon wildlife habitats. Scientists have been warning us for years about the potential for a pandemic. We just didn’t listen, and our governments didn’t listen. Might we repent?
And the pandemic has now exposed so many of our societal sins, our inequalities, which are real. Take this city and its vaunted ‘prosperity’. So much of its new housing has catered to the wealthiest members of society, who can already afford to live here; and at the same time, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and retailers have sprung up in recent years to cater to their — to our — tastes. No doubt we complain about the high prices in such places.
But consider: if you speak to any of those working there or if they are your friends and family, you’ll discover most of them must live well outside the city or in large house shares with people they don’t know. Workers catering to our tastes don’t make enough to live with us. Cambridge’s prosperity is only for some, and that is true of many British cities. Wouldn’t it be something, if we faced the situation recounted in our Gospel today, where all the workers received their daily wages? Alas, in our society, even those enduring the heat of the day in the fields do not make enough for themselves and their families, nor do shopkeepers, care home workers, and many others. I’m reminded of Leonard’s Bernstein’s lyrics in West Side Story, written in the 1950s:
Skyscrapers bloom in America
Cadillacs zoom in America
Industry boom in America
Twelve in a room in America
60 years later inequality persists, not just in America. Might we repent?
Finally, the pandemic has exposed global sins. As parliament has acknowledged, a great deal of the Personal Protective Equipment used in the NHS was likely manufactured by Uygher Muslims in Chinese concentration camps, and the fashion industry has admitted that 1 in 5 cotton products is produced by such forced labour — British lives saved and British bodies clothed by slavery. Our lives, our bodies.
Might we repent?
The calamity is upon us, the seasons have turned, ‘winter and summer, seed-time and harvest’. The world shudders, as seeds sown to injustice are producing their fruits, and we reap a bitter harvest.
‘But, ‘who knows?’ We might still repent. We might avert the further calamity that our deeds are inviting: further plagues that we have heard are sure to come if we do not change the nature of our globalised consumption; further deepening of housing and employment crises further suffering inflicted on ethnic and religious minorities the world over, whose lives are intertwined with our life and death so intimately, and yet we deny it or we do not care or we feel free to forget. These are calamities, and thank God, in the future they can be avoided.
The Christian Church has many flaws, and it has colluded by silence and passivity and by active participation in many sins. But it has been wise enough, by the grace of God, to institute times of repentance, fasting, and prayer.
In these autumn days, as leaves fall and the light fades, and we head towards the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, let us take the time to consider, to fast, and to turn toward our God — ‘who is gracious … and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love’. He will not only forgive and set us right, but empower and commission, until we his reluctant, his doubtful, his prejudiced, prophet people, speak his Word. And the tumbling world may be overthrown.