“DOMINION
OVER THE EARTH”
|
A sermon preached Readings: Genesis
1:1-12, Luke 12:15-21 |
Have you seen the film “Walkabout”?
Made 30 years ago,
it features a very young Jenny Aguter as a teenage
girl with her junior school brother
lost in the Australian outback following suicide of father.
Nearing death by dried up water hole meet an
Aborigine youth on walkabout.
He takes them with him.
Gradually the nightmare turns into a celebration of
the simple pleasures of nature
as they swim and catch and eat food and live simply but wholesomely from the
land.
Of course there is always the anxiety to get back to
civilization -
and in the end the threesome reach the outskirts of modern society.
There there is a sudden
harshness of white men in trucks
killing animals for fun with high power firearms and leaving carcasses to rot
Then entering a small township,
the brother and sister find it difficult to find a welcome at the first houses
they reach -
rather they encounter small minded hostility and petty selfishness.
The last shot shows the heroine, Jenny Agutter, several years on.
She is now back in Sydney or Melbourne with a city slicker boyfriend
talking about his financial prospects of promotion -
and you can see in her eyes the
blank sense of what she has lost.
And then before the closing credits,
Houseman’s haunting lines from the Shropshire Lad -
about an air that “into my heart”
“From yon far country blows -
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
and cannot come again.”
And
sometimes it seems that in every generation
we
are given Eden,
and
we despoil it with so called civilization and progress -
ending up East of Eden in the Land of Nod
Today
on Harvest Sunday we thank God for the harvest -
·
for the whole created order -
·
the sun to warm us
·
the sweet refreshing rain
·
the rich soil
·
the seedtime and the harvest.
And along with our thankful hearts
our confession for the way in which the riches of God’s gifts
have been trashed, rubbished, abused, by our selfishness and thoughtlessness.
The vandalism of humanity is difficult to overstate.
This one world of ours has taken 4600 M yrs to
create.
It is difficult to comprehend those sorts of numbers
-
there is a piece from Greenpeace which I find helpful - it says:
Imagine the earth is a person 46 years old -
The Earth is
thought to be around 4,600 million years old,
an almost inconcievable time-span.
For the moment,
think of it as someone in middle age, 46 years old.
This person is
a late developer.
Nothing at all is known about their first seven years
and only sketchy information exists until about the next 35 years.
It is only at the age of 42 that the Earth began to flower.
Dinosaurs and
the great reptiles did not appear until a year ago,
when this planet reached 45.
Mammals arrived only eight months ago.
In the middle of last week,
human-like apes evolved into ape-like humans,
and at the weekend the last ice age enveloped the earth.
Modern humans
have been around for four hours.
During the last hour we discovered agriculture.
The industrial revolution began just a minute ago.
During those sixty seconds of biological time,
humans have made a rubbish tip of Paradise.
We have caused
the extinction of many hundreds of species of animals,
many of which have been here longer than us,
and ransacked the planet for fuel.
Now we stand, like brutish infants,
gloating over this meteoric rise to ascendancy,
poised on the brink of the final mass extinction
and of effectively destroying this oasis of life in the solar system.
Of course according to Genesis 1,
the world was created not in 4600M yrs but in 7 days.
Now we may differ on our interpretation of Genesis:
most of us would see the story of 7 days as a myth –
but a myth containing deep theological truth -
that God created the world and
saw that it was good -
ie the material world has the potential for goodness
and wholesomeness.
If we would truly thank God for his goodness,
we must show our thanks by caring for the land and sharing its fruits.
Our forefathers took the natural things of life -
wood from the forest -
and created a cross on which the Son of God was crucified.
The
press
coverage of Cancun makes it crystal clear how
our trade policies simply crucify the poor.
Today we still take the good things of life and
create death and destruction,
·
be it in the destruction of the rain forests
·
or the steady creep of global warming,
·
or the avoidable famines of the third world
Thanks
to those who have arranged the displays for Harvest this weekend.
The
farmyard theme includes this wonderful round manger –
symbol of the feeding of the nations.
But
last night I saw that someone had put a fluffy toy puppy in the manger –
so we have a “dog in the manger” –
Aesop in his fables told of the ox who came to the manger
and found a dog in the hay.
Even though the dog could not eat the hay himself,
he would not let the ox near the manger –
he was the original “dog in the manger”
And
so often we take the good things we have and for whatever reason –
spite, selfishness, thoughtlessness, laziness - we
simply refuse to share.
Like
the man in the parable, we gather in great harvests and then build barns.
And when the poor came to Cancun and knocked on the locked barn door
we did not hear because we were taking our rest and sleeping.
God forgive us that false peace of an unawakened
conscience.
But
thank God that for all our sins he does forgive us and love us still,
and though he weeps over his polluted and despoiled and squandered handiwork,
still he loves the despoilers -
saying to us as he did to the crucifiers 2000 yrs ago, Father Forgive
·
So let us thank God for the Harvest
·
Let us confess our misuse of its riches
·
Let us commit ourselves to work for a better world
·
Let us honour our ancestors by passing on a good world to our children.
·
In a few minutes when we get to the collection,
let us fill this manger with gifts for Christian Aid
so that indeed it may be symbol of the feeding of the nations.