SERMON
by
Revd. John Papworth
in
St. Mary's Church, Purton, Wiltshire

on
Sunday 16th September 2001

I sometimes have a feeling I am living on two different planets.

Every day my newspaper is delivered, the postman drops a pile of letters on my doormat, the milk is on my doorstep, I get up and have a marvellous shower with plenty of hot water, I make a cup of tea with a gas fired stove, I have plenty of electric light, there is plenty of food in the fridge, and lots more in the shops, the shops indeed are full of every kind of food from every part of the world and I often ponder the connection between what is on sale and the collection tin on the counter for cancer research.

The streets are full of cars, the buses are running, there are trains to take one anywhere. There is an excellent telephone service, we can fax messages instantaneously to anywhere on the planet and on the computer thing one can do almost everything except make a Christmas pudding or have a haircut.

In short one may well conclude that God's in his heaven and alls right with the world.

But then I attend a conference in Swindon. I hear one speaker declaring that we are heading for the most awesome disasters which will engulf the lives of billions of people. That our factory farming methods are transforming huge areas of the food producing countries into desert, so that in a short time the millions currently dependent on their food-exporting capacity will starve.

He spoke of the melting of the polar ice-caps caused by burying fossil fuels and the destruction of the rain forests - which still goes on and will cause the oceans to rise about 40 feet so that many of the low lying cities of the world, such as London, will simply disappear.

Another speaker, an eminent American author, declared that the events last week in New York and Washington are powerfully, horribly symbolic of the vulnerability of the American way of life to the excesses on which that way of life appears to be based. He even went further to say that the USA will go the way of all former empires and that it will collapse in the next twenty years.

Well, I ask myself, which planet am I living on? The answer is of course I am living on both. That in fact I am only living on one, but that that one encompasses a monumental division between those who live for today, who want to enjoy whatever is going, and who don't know or don't care about how this consumerist lifestyle is sustained, who are oblivious or indifferent to the wholesale destruction of God's creation going on in so many ways, and who would strongly oppose any attempts to make our way of life less demanding on God's abundant resources.

On the other side of the divide are those who are concerned about the fate of our children and our grandchildren, who are concerned about the titanic wastefulness and destructiveness of our way of life, who are aware of the underlying realities that now have the world in their grip, who are concerned to promote love and reverence for God's creation rather than the dangerous ecological hooliganism that now prevails.

There is a need, I think, to see the terrible events in America last week in the light of this division, for what emerges from them is an awareness that whilst our profoundly anti-Christian lifestyle provides a comfortable life for many, that same lifestyle is promoting the most monumental degrees of frustration, misery and despair for many many more.

There are attempts being made to designate the monstrous tragedy of the hi-jacked aeroplanes and the murder of thousands more in a giant two-towered complex as simply 'terrorism', as though it was a product of a small minority who are the 'baddies', whilst the rest of us are the 'goodies'. We should be cautious about accepting so superficial an interpretation.

Only a few weeks ago I was trying to explain the significance of the world trade in armaments. Tomorrow morning hundreds of thousands of people will start work at 9am. They will be working in offices, in factories or laboratories, and they will all be concerned with one objective, to produce the most sophisticated and efficient ways of killing their fellow human beings.

Every year these same people promote an 'arms fair', an exhibition of the most efficient bombs, guns, tanks, rockets, planes, warships and other means of murder that can be devised, in order to sell them to any government that may want to buy them.

So America buys them to give them perhaps to India, or to Israel, whilst China buys them to give perhaps to Pakistan or to the Arab world and so on. "A nation armed and prepared for war can no more avoid going to war than a chicken can help laying an egg".

So let us step back from this monstrous tragedy in New York and see it in the perspective of the disposition of many governments and businesses to push matters to excess in so many directions. Directions which are creating an increasingly dangerous world, a world seemingly bent on destroying God's creation and on destroying those fragile, tender bonds of love, fellowship and community concern which are the stuff of life.

"Fellowship is life
The lack of fellowship is death".

One reaction I heard from someone watching a TV screen of the news was, "How can God allow such things to happen?"

One may well ask the same question of every terrible event in history. Why did God 'allow' the first World War? The communist tyranny, the Nazi tyranny and the holocaust in which many millions of innocent people were murdered. Or the barbarity of the US bombing of Vietnam on a scale so vast it simply beggars the moral imagination. One US General even went on record to boast that they were going "to bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age".

All such questions are simply attempts to view God and the problems of life through the limits of our all too human powers of conception.

I would only say this in reply, "I do not understand many of the problems of life and of the nature of God. But it is a matter in which I do not feel I have a choice. I simply have to believe and have faith that the creation of the universe has a purpose and that the creation of life and of human life has a purpose, that that purpose soars above all other human purposes and that life has no meaning if I do not devote myself to increasing my understanding of that purpose and in seeking to serve it with all the strength and ability God has given me.

So how can we best mark the tragic deaths of those who died last week, so needlessly, so abominably?

I suggest many of us may be content to swan along in a surfeit of material well-being rather than to ponder and question the deeper currents that are flowing around us. Currents that are evil in themselves and which are promoting consequential evil in so many ways.

I want to urge we try to adopt an attitude of critical appraisal of these currents, rather than passively to accept them. If we want to rid the world of evil we need to fight evil wherever we meet it and however persuasively the advertising industry (an evil in itself) promotes it.

A Quaker friend said to me recently "Years ago many Quakers were in prison from protesting at the prevailing evils, today nobody is in prison, but the evils are infinitely greater. Why is this?"

There is no need for us to all go to prison, but there is a need for us all to become more aware and better informed of the terrible evils which are integral to the everyday way of life we pursue.

Some time ago the Vicar reminded us in a sermon that prayer is not simply a matter of being on our knees and closing our eyes. That is a suitable enough posture when confronted with the glory, the power and the majesty of God. But he urged that prayer is also faith in action and how we work and conduct ourselves.

And only yesterday I was hearing our Bishop of Swindon explaining that all the main faiths, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish and others, all had as the core of their message the need for peace, love and reconciliation. So that, in the light of this teaching, how do we respond to the evil world around us?

We have made a world at war, at war with its own God- given beauty and diversity, at war with the fragile bonds of community life, at war with the dignity and the glory of human nature, at war with our human heritage and at war with human destiny, at war, that is, with the fate of our children and grandchildren and theirs.

So which side are we on? Are we on the side of the pocket and stomach brigade, those who live for today and accept what is going on around us as normal, natural, perhaps inevitable, as we speed around in cars, shop at supermarkets, promote brain tumours with mobile phones and simply accept, passively and unthinkingly, the evil non-stop propaganda of consumerism which saturates TV and the tabloids?

Or do we stop to question, to appraise what is going on in the light of the teachings Christ gave us, to understand the anti-Christian nature of the life-style we are living and resolve to combat it and to promote a life-style of Christian restraint and self-denial, one which expresses a full love, reverence and compassion for every element of God's creation?

As I stood in prayer at the war memorial in Swindon yesterday there were many flowers left in tribute to those who had died, and I defy anyone not to be overwhelmed with grief by the message from two children which was attached to one wreath. It read simply, "Dear God, please take care of all those who have lost their mummies and daddies."

It reminded me of a prayer I had composed after making a pilgrimage to Nagasaki, where I prayed at the shrine to peace on the spot where an atomic bomb had been dropped, killing many thousands of families. Perhaps you will join me in this prayer. It is based on an old much loved prayer of St Francis of Assisi:

published by the Fourth World, 26 High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE
Revd. John Papworth,
Editor, FOURTH WORLD REVIEW
26 The High Street, Purton, Wilts, SN5 4AE.
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