John 6.25-35
Did you know that
we have a ‘just in time’ supply chain in the UK?
For food, manufactured goods, and of
course petrol.
Much has been
written about the effect of Brexit
on this system of manufacture and
delivery,
creating
bottlenecks of labour shortage
that make it vulnerable and fragile
to changes in customer demand.
What struck me as
I was preparing for today’s sermon on Manna in the wilderness,
is that the recent petrol supply
problems were caused by a change in behaviour,
with the average re-fill of a tank
jumping from 24 litres to 29 litres.
People got worried
by news reports
that they might not be able to get
petrol tomorrow,
so they quite
understandably decided that they had better fill up today,
to ensure they had enough in hand
for the journey they had planned tomorrow.
This sudden
average increase of just 5 litres per petrol transaction
led to the situation many of us have
found ourselves in,
of experiencing
empty fuel stations and long queues,
as the bottleneck of driver
availability
led to an inability in
the supply chain
to respond to the
increase in customer demand.
Well, you may be
wondering quite what this all has to do
with the biblical story of Manna in
the wilderness?
And I want to
suggest this morning that what we have here
is an ancient parable of economics,
that can speak
powerfully to two interconnected issues
that affect our lives today.
I think these two
areas are encapsulated
in the example of the recent petrol
supply problem.
So firstly I want
us to think about politics,
and secondly I want us to think
about our environment.
The supply chain
problem speaks to the world of politics,
the way we choose to order our
society;
and our ongoing
reliance on fossil fuels
speaks to the way we relate to
environmental concerns,
particularly the climate crisis.
These to concerns
are also encapsulated
in two current rounds of political
meetings;
firstly the recent
party conferences,
and secondly the forthcoming COP26
United Nations Climate Change
Conference.
So: politics and
the environment,
two of the defining issues of our
time.
Let’s dig back now
into the book of Exodus
and see what ancient wisdom we might
hear for ourselves and our world.
If you were with
us last week,
you will remember that we were with
Moses on Mount Sinai,
encountering the call of God in the
burning bush.
By the time we
re-join the story in today’s reading
Moses has led the people of Israel
out of slavery in Egypt,
through the waters of
the Red Sea, and into the wilderness of
Sin,
at the start of what will end up
being 40 years of wandering
before they find
themselves at the entrance to the Promised Land.
And when we meet
them here in Chapter 16,
the people of God are complaining.
They are finding
the wilderness hard,
and are indulging in nostalgia for
what have suddenly become
‘the good old days’ of slavery in
Egypt.
They are hungry,
and they remember with longing the
flesh-pots of Egypt,
quickly forgetting
the crack of the whip and the sweat of the brow
of their generations of enslavement.
I think it is
significant here
that the context for the gift of the
Manna from heaven,
is the people looking back with
nostalgia.
There is something
about us, as humans,
that tends us towards and
idealisation of the past,
and this can
seriously hamper our ability
to take good decisions about the
future.
The people of
Israel at this point would rather have turned back to Egypt,
than they would continue their
journey
through the uncertainty
of the wilderness
in the hope of a better future.
And we do this too,
both collectively and individually.
At a national
level, our political discourse is dominated
by populist resistance to change.
Whether the issue
is immigration, education, or taxation,
those who promise to recover the
glories of the past do well at the polls,
whilst those who
offer a less certain road to a different future
are ridiculed and side-lined.
Just look at the
way the prophets of our time,
people such as Greta Thunberg and
Malala Yousafzai,
are belittled and
silenced by those who speak
in defence of the status quo.
And yet we ignore these
prophets at our peril!
If we do not find
a more sustainable way of ordering our society,
and of living with our planet,
the cost in terms
of human suffering will be immense.
But we also
indulge in nostalgia at a more parochial level too.
We do it in church life!
How often have you
heard someone say
how much better it used to be?
Like the
Israelites in the wilderness
we too can look back with rose
tinted spectacles,
to a now-past golden
age,
to the church as it was when we
first fell in love with it.
But I’ll guarantee
you this:
if you went back to that point in
time, and listened carefully,
you would hear someone
saying
how much better things
were in ‘the good old days’.
The truth before
us is the same truth
discovered by the people of Israel
in the wilderness:
we have to stop looking back and
start looking forwards.
This is true of
our society,
it is true of our approach to the
climate crisis,
and it is also true of our church.
At our church
meeting in a couple of weeks
we will be praying and discerning
together
about how we will
rebuild our congregational life
as we emerge from the pandemic.
And we will have
to be honest together
about what has been lost.
In some ways it
feels to me like we are emerging from a time of war.
We have been in survival mode for
the last 18 months,
as the bombs of COVID-19
have fallen on us and our society.
We have worked hard, pulled
together,
and kept the show on the
road.
But now we are
taking stock and realising
that much of what we previously
valued
about our church community life
together
has been destroyed.
For better or
worse, we have passed together through the waters of the Pandemic,
and now we are in the unknown
territory of the wilderness on the other side.
We cannot go back,
no matter how much we might want to,
and looking back with nostalgia will
not help us
in our new vocation of looking
forwards.
And this is where
God comes into the story,
where faith starts to take shape in
our lives,
our community, and our
society.
Because what the
people of Israel in the wilderness had to learn
was that the provision of God in the
present
doesn’t necessarily look like it did
in the past.
The nourishment of God’s people is not an eternal
supply of Christian quiche,
and
we will need to discover together
the new ways in which God will feed us, nourish us,
and strengthen us
for
the journey ahead.
The things that
sustained our community in the past
may no longer be possible in the new
normal of our present,
but God has not
abandoned us,
and God will continue to give us all
that we need
to be the people of God in our time
and our world.
Sam Wells, from St
Martin the Fields,
suggests that churches look to what
they have,
not to what they don’t have, or no
longer have,
because all the
resources we need
to fulfil our calling as God’s
people are already given to us.
The manna for
today, sufficient for today,
is already there on the ground
before us,
waiting to be picked up.
For too long
churches have seen themselves as communities of strength,
either in terms of numbers or
wealth,
and they have
acted out of their accumulated abundance
to minister to the needs of the
needy.
The lesson of the
manna is that it is the daily dependence on God’s provision
that builds the people of God.
We are not called
to do things to others from our
position of strength,
but to act with others to build justice in the world.
This is why our
partnership with London Citizens is so significant,
as we act alongside others,
to bring about
‘the world as it should be’
from the ashes of ‘the world as it
is’.
And so we lift our
eyes from our own concerns as a community of faith,
to the wider issues of politics and
the environment,
and we discover
that the lesson there is that same:
the economy of God is an economy of
sufficiency.
The prophetic word
we bring to society,
and which we live into being in our
lives,
is that enough is enough.
The parable of the
manna directly challenges
the ideology of free market
capitalism.
At the
Conservative Party Conference last week,
the Prime Minister said that the UK
has
one of the most
‘unbalanced societies and lop-sided economies’
when compared to other
richer countries.
He went on, ‘It is
not just that there is a gap
between London and the South-East
and the rest of the country;
there are aching
gaps within the regions themselves.’
And of course he’s
absolutely right.
The rich are
getting richer,
and the poor are getting poorer.
The stories John
told us earlier about the plight of those in prison
demonstrates this so very clearly.
The rhetoric of
‘levelling up’,
based on a commendable aspiration to
address poverty and inequality,
is predicated on
creating opportunities
for those living in disadvantaged
areas to improve their lot;
through economic
growth, job creation,
and attention to health and
wellbeing.
In other words, it
is based on creating a context
where the poor can themselves start
the process of accumulating wealth.
Whether this will
work or not remains to be seen,
and I hope that much good will come
of it.
But I also hear
the words of Jesus
that ‘the poor you will always have
with you’;
and I hear the
lesson of the manna
that the economy of God is an
economy of sufficiency,
where everyone has
enough;
and I wonder what
the reality will be
for those whose experience of exclusion
and deprivation
reduces their capacity
to grasp the new world of ‘levelling up’ opportunity
that will, apparently, open before
them.
Last year I
preached a sermon the idea of Universal Basic Income,
using the story of Manna from
heaven,
and I still think
we need more radical policies of wealth redistribution
than simply creating opportunities.
Will it be the
fault of the poor if they remain poor?
I fear for the
victim-blaming rhetoric
that can so easily creep into our
national discourse,
and I remain
convinced that the problem of inadequate provision at one end of society
can only be solved by addressing the
exorbitant consumption
and accumulation at the other end.
And as Christians,
as the people of God in the wilderness of this world,
we have a role to play in modelling
a better way of being human,
of embodying in
our communities the economy of God,
and of using our public voice to
speak prophetically to our society
that
enough is enough,
and that unregulated accumulation by
the few at the expense of the many,
is
a deficient vision of human society.
This isn’t just
about who you vote for, although it is
that;
it is about how you, how I, how we,
relate
to the resources in our lives,
how we spend our money, how we use
our time.
Can we inhabit
together the economy of God,
which understands God’s gifts of
nourishment and sustenance as sheer gift,
to be held lightly, given
generously, and shared fairly?
Can we become
those who work for justice
in ways that build collaboration
rather than hierarchy,
co-operation rather than dependency?
The manna of God’s
provision speaks of a world
where accumulation is resisted, and
resources are shared.
And this is where
we come to the second strand I want us to consider today,
the way we relate to our
environment.
Hopefully on the
way in you saw our wonderful new banner,
which I find both beautiful and
terrifying in equal measure,
as it shows how
global average temperatures
have risen over nearly two
centuries,
with the stark
band of deep red stripes
showing the rapid heating of our
planet in recent decades.
Manna was a gift
that fell from heaven;
and bread is made from wheat that grows
as it is watered by the rain.
All that sustains
life is a gift given to us
by the planet we inhabit.
Scientists tell us
that there are enough resources on this earth
for all to be fed, and live well,
and to do so sustainably.
But the reality of
our situation is that many starve
whilst others accumulate vast
resources.
We are where we
are because we have constructed
unsustainable patterns of
consumption,
and created mechanism that promote
hoarding.
If we can recover
the notion of gift
in our economic models and systems,
this will subvert
those practices predicated on taking.
If we can learn
the lesson of the manna that enough is enough,
we can offer a vital challenge to a
world
that
needs to change, and change rapidly,
if the worst outcomes of climate change
are to be avoided.
We can’t go back,
and once again nostalgia and denial
are no help to us here.
But by faith I
believe that it is true,
that God has already given us the
resources
to address the demands of the
present.
A better future
is, by the grace of God, still a possibility;
and never has the world needed the
people of God
more than it does right now.
Jesus’ description
of himself as ‘the bread of life’,
spoken in the context of the feeding
of the 5,000 in the wilderness of Judea,
invites us to see
him as the manna from heaven,
as the gift of God that comes by
grace alone,
who calls people
to lives of generosity and justice,
care-full of all that has been made.
It also invites us
to understand our calling as the people of Christ,
the body of Christ bound together by
his Spirit,
to be the
embodiment in this world of the new humanity.
We are called to
be those who respect God’s creation,
and who live lives resistant to the
sin of hoarding.
Can we discover,
with the Israelites in the wilderness,
that the economy of God invites us
into a world of sufficiency,
where
enough is enough.
And can we then
join with others
to proclaim the God-given truth to
our world
that there is a better way of being
human?
This is why I am
so proud of this church’s participation over the last year
in the Just Transition campaign
through London Citizens,
in which we engaged
with the Mayor’s commitment
to make London a Zero Carbon city by
2030,
successfully challenging
him to create 60,000 good green jobs
and upgrade 100,000 fuel poor homes
by the end of 2024.
And it’s why we
are teaming up, again through London Citizens,
with other churches across the West
End,
to challenge every
church in our area to set their own house in order,
by getting their own buildings to
zero emissions
through the Eco Church accreditation
scheme.
For faith to be
meaningful, I believe it must take shape in action,
in ways that are transformative of
our world.
This is the
calling of the people of God,
to say, loudly and clearly, to
ourselves and all humanity:
that enough is enough!
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