Rearing animals for meat and milk protein for human consumption is of course an age old practice. The Israelites were first nomadic tribesmen who followed their flocks to pasture in the fertile lands of Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq, and wound up in Egypt when a particularly harsh drought left the Nile valley with the only good pasturage in the ancient Near East. They later moved on and became a more settled nation in the lands contiguous with modern day Palestine/Israel. By the time of Jeremiah they no longer lived in tents among their sheep but in large cities which were capable of making war on their neighbours. These cities were places of great temptation for the Israelites who gradually abandoned the commandments and rituals which Yahweh had given to their ancestor sheep farmers and goat herdsmen at Sinai in the wilderness. So sophisticated did the urban Israeslites become that some lived in fine houses with many servants and governed great estates not only of sheep but of vines and olive trees, and of wheat and corn. At one time Israel under the powerful king Omri was so great as to be an empire which ruled over many of its neighbours. But at the same time many of the Israelites themselves were reduced to the status of wage slave, serving the large estates or the empire of Israel with no fig tree or vineyard of their own with which to feed their children. Having once abandoned the communal and simpler society of their ancestors it was only natural that the Israelites would also abandon the worship of Yahweh for the cults of the Egyptians and the Philistines, the Babylonians and Assyrians. These cults represented in gods of gold and diamond, precious stone and carved rock a hierarchy of heavenly beings which symbolised in the heavenly pantheon the social hierarchy of rich and powerful, and weak and enslaved, and even the necessity of human sacrifice; the new gods then more satisfactorily mirrored the social structure of the new urban Israel.
According to the prophets of ancient Israel from Isaiah and Jeremiah to Amos and Micah the Israelites were scattered like sheep without a shepherd because of the judgement of God. Their exile was not just a consequence of the military and political superiority of the kings and nations who conquered them. Rather their exile in the kingdoms of Persia, Babylon and Assyria was the judgement of God for their abandonment of the ways of God – their failure to worship the one God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their worship of idols instead, and their failure to keep the laws of this one God as revealed to Moses. Their exile was also a consequence of their abuse of the land. They so over burdened the land with their animals and the demands of their increasingly bloated armies for bread and meat that the land was turning to desert, losing its fertility, so that one acre of wheat would give only one bushel where once it had given ten, and even their vineyards failed. Nature, as well as God, turned against them because they had abandoned the laws of God, and by abandoning God’s justice they had neglected also the justice not only of human society but of the land itself.
The scattering of Israel then was a political, an ecological and an economic event. So for example archaeologists have found evidence that the once great city of Jericho was rapidly abandoned some time around the 8th or 7th Century because the land around it had become so dry, its soil so depleted, that it could no longer support the inhabitants of so great a city.
Whatever the state of British farming we would not seem to have come to such a pass, or even to be at risk of so doing. But the story of British agriculture is somewhat more complex than that of Israelite agriculture. I read in the Independent while on holiday in France that the Amazon rainforest – the last truly great area of tropical forest remaining on earth – was destroyed at a faster rate in the last five years than ever before. An area the size of England has disappeared every year for the last five years. At this rate of destruction no primary forest will remain in twenty years. And what is the cause of this destruction? One of the main ones, according to the paper, is the European and American demand for animal feed. All these animals which we keep in the often cold and damp pastures of Britain require a lot of feeding. They cannot get by on grass alone, and especially not in the long winters. In Scotland so cold is the climate that cattle in particular are fed cattle cake in sheds for up to nine months of the year, and pigs likewise are reared more indoors than out in Scotland because of the climate. Even sheep need supplemental feeding for at seven or eight months in the year. One of the principal uses to which cleared land in the Amazon is being put is the growing of soya to meet the ever growing European and American demand for animal feed. This demand is so great that it distorts world food markets, and world agriculture to such an extent that in many developing countries more land is given over to the growing of crops for consumption by foreign animals than for consumption by local humans.
All of this would be bad enough but it is made ten times worse by the European Common Agriculture Policy which was supposed to be radically reformed during talks in Brussells in the last six months. But Jacques Chirac on behalf of the French farming lobby ruined any chance for radical reform. The size of production subsidies to European farmers to produce food no one wants remains at over 40 billion Euros, or half the total budget of the European Union. This vast subsidy not only leads to overproduction and overconusmption of precious resources, including Amazon rain forest land for soya production, but it also leads to this excess food being dumped on food markets in the developing world, so devastating farmer incomes in developing countries, and ultimately contributing to poverty and even famine in many countries in the South.
At the same time as Europe is dumping this vast quantity of subsidised food in the South and destroying agricultural markets outside its borders, Europe is also erecting a ring of steel and computers around its borders. We may export food and destroy small farmers in the South, but we won’t allow those whose lives and lands our policies destroy to come and live in Europe. We feed each one of our cattle here in Scotland more protein than millions of families in the South look forward to for their daily diet. But when people from the South come to live among us we tell them they are not welcome, we put them in miserable tower blocks and give them food vouchers, so they will forever be marked out as strangers and aliens.
If there is one thing that living in a global economy means it is that people are exiled from their land, the sheep are well and truly scattered. Because of the global economic powers, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, weak developing countries are allowed no protection from the devastating effects of foreign economic power in the form of subsidised cheap foods or predatory transnational corporations cherry picking resources in the South whether oil and diamonds, or water sources and even telephone networks. And so small farmers lose their lands, tribal peoples are burned out of their forests, fisherfolk lose access to the coastal waters fished by their ancestors, and even townspeople find their savings turned to nothing – as have the people of Argentina or more recently Iraq – as the great warlike machine of the global economy consumes all before it.
‘Remember that you were once without Christ’ says St Paul to the Ephesians, ‘once aliens from the commonwealth of Israel’ ‘strangers to the covenant of promise’ ‘having no hope, without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.’ (Eph. 2. 14, 15)
In the context of all I have been saying these words it seems to me have a greater power than they could possibly have to us just in our own situation as citizens of Britain and the EU. We are in truth inheritors of the promise, the promise of the global economy – we dwell in prosperity, if not always in peace. Our bellies are full, our houses replete with things made by the labour of other nations. It is as if the promises to Israel after exile – that nations would come and serve her once she is reinstalled in the land of promise – have already come true through the power of our governments and the collective power of the European Union. How could we know what it is to be exiled, to be excluded from the commonwealth? We live inside the fence, and only occasionally glimpse what it means to live outside when we see a headline about an overcrowded boat of refugees going down in the Mediterranean, or a lorry with a hidden cargo of human beings having been pulled over in Dover or on the M2.
Globalisation is not a new phenomenon. In the mid nineteenth century telegraph wires were laid across the Atlantic Ocean and steam ships greatly increased the speed with which people and goods transited the global empires of Britain and America, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium. But at that time while vast quantities of money and goods moved around freely there were no passports and so people also moved with much greater ease between territories than they do or can today. If you had the money for the passage you could come to Britain if a colonial farmer had put you off your lands in Southern Africa. But today while we expect goods and money to travel freely, people must remain in their country of origin unless of course they are extremely rich in which case they will be welcomed with open arms. And yet there are more refugees, more stateless people than there have ever been, more people scattered to the winds.
I was asked last weekend whether it would matter if the Anglican Communion broke into pieces, whether the unity of Christians in the North with Christians in the South matters enough in the large scheme of things for a Bishop to be prevented from taking his appointed see. I refer of course to the recent events concerning the See of Reading. In the context of a global empire which excludes more people from the Commonwealth of prosperity and the good life than it includes, it seems to me that the unity of Christians between North and South is no small thing. It is certainly not something to be given up lightly, for the symbolic assertion through the consecration of a Bishop of Western of freedoms and liberalities with regard to long established traditional sexual norms. Through our radical embrace of the Gospel of freedom we may have thrown them off but traditional agricultural and developing nations still retain them and it would for some Anglican Churches in places such as Nigeria be a matter even of life and death were they to espouse the kind of liberal freedoms which we in the West enjoy.
For Christians, our citizenship is not finally of one country, or even of one superstate – it is of heaven and not of earth. Our belonging to the Kingdom of God as citizens then is not analogous to our nationality as citizens. There are no dividing walls in the Kingdom fashioned and brought near by the blood of Christ. Global communion between Christians – full recognition of ministry and Eucharist, conferences between Bishops and exchanges between congregations and Dioceses – these are not incidentals to our lives as Christians but a central feature of our belief that we are not finally defined by our status as citizens of particular countries, that our membership of the Church is of more significance, a truer source of communion, fellowship and unity than our membership of territorial states defined by borders and fences and passport controls. To work as I have done for Anglican Churches on the other side of the world, to have Anglican Christians as life long friends who are from other cultures and live in other climate zones and nation states is a tremendous gift, and it is a gift which we in this local church also enjoy by the membership and visitation of our church of families and individuals from so many places around the world – Uganda, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Kenya and so one could go on. Global Christian communion recognises no cultural or national borders – it represents the most powerful challenge that we could mount to the division of the world between rich and poor, between those whose animals enjoy shelter, clean water and fulsome protein and those whose children die for want of these things. Economic globalisation of this kind is a false, perverted, evil form of global community – it is the opposite of global communion of the kind which the Christian Church, and in particular the Anglican Church, has sought to advance in the post-colonial era.
The idea of global
citizenship is a chimera – we are in truth being drawn into a
global economy founded upon radical injustice, the threat and often
the reality of war, and relations of virtual slavery between rich and
poor. Global Christian communion is though already a reality. It is
no small thing. It deserves it seems to me that we be prepared to
make sacrifices to maintain it, even sacrifices of our freedom. St
Paul frequently reminds the Corinthian Christians who were the most
free sexually and in other ways that they should not use their
freedom to offend their brothers and sisters in Christ, and that
charity comes before the assertion of the right of freedom. Only
through such global communion between people can the false vision of
freedom as freedom to consume, to buy up, to control the labour,
lands and natural resources of other parts of the world be critiqued
and resisted. Christ has indeed abolished the law but in its place
he puts something far more demanding and more precious – he makes
peace, peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near
for through the Spirit we all have access to the Father. So then you
are no longer strangers and aliens but you are citizens with the
saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation
of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.
Our oneness, our citizenship is built not upon passport controls, or
walls, and certainly not on guns and threats of war; unity is a
precious thing, as precious as the oil of blessing dripping down on
the beard of Aaron says the Psalmist. We should not easily cast aside
this unity, either locally or globally. It will stand when the
current global economic empire has bitten the dust.
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