09.03.03 Michael Somewhere over the rainbow Genesis 9: 8-17
In the London School of Economics this week the economist Richard Layard delivered three lectures on the results of a survey into happiness and wealth which revealed, to the surprise of economists, that increased affluence in Britain and America, measured by such things as better homes, more clothes and longer holidays, had not translated into a general increase in feelings of happiness or personal well-being. Layard draws on a number of other surveys which reveal for example that 29% of women under 30 reported suffering problems with nerves or depression in 1990 compared to only 16% in 1982.
Modern politicians in Britain and America believe that the road to the end of the rainbow is paved with gold – provide individuals with more spending power, reduce taxation, make the labour market more mobile and advance economic growth and the result is a collective rise in welfare, wellbeing or happiness. Layard’s results though show that on the contrary marginal increases in affluence have little effect on happiness of the comfortable, whereas poverty in the midst of affluence, and unemployment, are the two surest indicators of unhappiness. So if the politician wants to increase happiness the answer is simple – raise taxes, redistribute wealth and manage the economy for full employment. But so long as politicians and the media continue to promote individual selfishness and consumer satisfaction in the market as the means to increased well-being for all, they will inevitably achieve the opposite result – greater collective unhappiness and misery.
One particular aspect of this misery is that when people in Britain are asked the question ‘do you think that most people can be trusted?’ the proportion of trusters has fallen steadily from 56% in 1959 to only 31 per cent in 1995. A similar decline in trust has occurred in the USA but NOT in Continental Europe. It would appear that as the US and the UK have promoted an individualistic, low tax and privatized economy so the levels of both happiness and trust have fallen correlatively in both countries. In other words people feel less bad about pursuing their interests regardless of others, but as a result they trust others much less as well.
The story of Noah is of course a story from an ancient society in which something similar seems to have happened. So selfish and untrustworthy had the general mass of humanity become in the days of Noah that God sent a flood which killed almost all of them, though he saved Noah and his family, who in turn he instructed to save the animals by building the ark. When the Ark finally came to rest on Mount Ararat we can well imagine the feelings of trauma that Noah and his family must have had – no doubt the animals too - by the long tyranny of the waters over the land.
And in response God makes an everlasting covenant of fertility and blessing with Noah and his descendants wherein God promises never to wholly destroy life on earth again and God makes a covenant not just with humans but with ‘all flesh’, with ‘every living creature’. The covenant is sealed with the sign of the Rainbow in the sky, which is the recurring sign that God will be faithful to the earth even were its inhabitants again to be as wicked and rebellious as they had been in the days of Noah. And of course God’s covenant with Noah is no fraud, he does not send him on a mission to discover in the end that God is no God but only a fraud – the covenant God makes with God’s people, despite their frequent testing of it, is one that God honours again and again.
We learn from the Covenant something very fundamental about the nature of God which is that God does not set up the world and just leave it to go its own sweet way. This is a God who makes covenants with his creation and who makes and keeps covenants again and again. And even when his people let him down, he goes on declaring his intention to be faithful to them. This God is not an aloof God, or an abstract deity. This is a God who desires to be known through concrete relationships, who calls a particular people and chooses to sustain them and remain faithful to them, to be bound to them and so to reveal the great and mysterious depths of the love of God.
And of course this choosing of a particular people is not just for their own sake – no Israel are called to be a light to the nations, and ultimately to all creation. Just as the covenant with Noah was also with all creatures, so the Messiah of Israel was to be the ‘light of the world’.
Fidelity then is central in the Biblical view to the love of God. There is no real difference in fact between God’s love and God’s faithfulness.
How different this is to the modern understanding of love. Love in popular songs is more often described as a magical happening, often also a temporary one; love maybe the ‘sweetest thing’ but it is also fickle, it moves on, people fall into it and they fall out of it. And of course it is not just relationships which are becomingly increasingly impermanent in our culture. Everything is becoming less permanent in our new extreme capitalist society because the market works by a constant process of so called ‘creative destruction’; as new technologies come on stream old jobs are destroyed or move to places where labour is cheaper, as companies amalgamate old loyalties are torn up, workers fired. Marx talked about this tendency of capitalism to destroy everything when he described capitalism as a condition in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’. The greatest irony of the politics which has dominated Britain since 1979 is that although it was conservative in name it was revolutionary in nature. Faithfulness to local custom or tradition, loyalty to hallowed ways of doing things was torn up – nothing was to get in the way of the magic of the market. But as Layard’s work shows two of the biggest causes of unhappiness in our society are unemployment and divorce. And as the market, and the culture of me first, was let rip these were precisely the social diseases which inexorably increased; we may now be collectively richer in monetary terms but we are collectively a sadder, less trusting and less faith-ful (in every sense of the word) society.
Impermanence is also a feature of consumer capitalism and the throw away society and perhaps this is just one more reason why Britain is so far behind the rest of Europe in recycling and reusing natural resources. Extreme capitalism accustoms us to waste, to disposing of things, to things turning rapidly from fashionable lifestyle necessity to junk, waste product, landfill. These days loads of things are disposable; razors, pens, contact lenses, cameras, mobile phones, even computers are becoming disposable as software or fashion changes consumer ‘needs’.
How does living in a disposable culture affect the Church? Well the ‘don’t count on me’ philosophy is not a good one for building stable and supportive communities of the kind in which the fruits of the Spirit such as patience and love and faithfulness can be learned and shared. Equally faithfulness to traditional belief, trust in God as the one whose love is the source of our truest happiness, become harder to sustain.
This is because it is not just that the culture discourages us from being faithful but that it disposes us to be faithful to certain things, fidelity, loyalty to which calls into question our Christian commitment. Perhaps the strongest form of faithfulness our culture inculcates in us is fidelity to ourselves – to thine own self be true could be the motto of our age. But such a motto means we are discouraged from taking seriously duties and obligations that our relationships with others place upon us. Equally our culture may enjoin us to be loyal to a brand or a corporation or an employer even when we find evidence of wrong doing or of the pursuit of unworthy ends. The whistle blower is regarded with considerable unease by organisations these days as the demands of managerial control and market survival are set above faithfulness to old-fashioned concepts of right and wrong.
Perhaps the most obvious abuse of such loyalty at the present time is the loyalty President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are demanding of their political parties and of their citizens as they prepare to launch an all out attack on a country already decimated by more then ten years of war and rationing and tyranny. When opponents point out the fickleness of their plans and intentions regarding Iraq – for example the fact that the British government secretly built a chemical weapons factory in Iraq in the 1980s with the use of tax payers money – they are told that this is nonetheless a war in the name of morality, and a struggle of good against evil.
Telling the truth is of course a central part of learning to be faithful. So also is forgiveness. I am not suggesting that Saddam can just be forgiven, let off for his crimes. But what about the Iraqi people. They have been reduced to medieval living conditions by the destruction of their water and electricity supplies in the last Gulf War and because of sanctions food and medicines are rationed and rationing has given far more power to Saddam than he would have had otherwise. It has also made it so much harder for Iraqis to resist and develop democratic alternatives to this terrible man and his regime. And yet when one sees Iraqis interviewed on television they are still among the most articulate and well educated and genuinely open Islamic countries in the world – far more so than countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan which America counts as allies but which through their extreme versions of Islam have actually sponsored so much of the terrorism which the war is supposed to be about.
Forgiveness is for Christians an absolutely fundamental part of fidelity. This is true in marriage and it is true in friendship. Without forgiveness we cannot be constant to one another because we are human and we let one another down. We put our own interests first, we are unfaithful, we are self-absorbed. Without forgiveness our relationships, the promises we make to each other, would be shredded each time we lived as though we had not made them.
For the Christian true faithfulness involves acknowledging the potential of the other to become God’s friend, to reflect God’s image, to love God above all things – sin obscures our companionship with God, mars God’s image in us, misdirects our loves but when we love God above all things, and when we recognize the transforming potential of this love in others, all our other loyalties and faiths and loves are ordered aright. It was this potential which God acknowledged when he promised fidelity to the sons and daughters of men – as God says in Genesis 9: 6 – the only wickedness which will not be forgiven without sacrifice is the shedding of human blood ‘for in his own image God made humankind’.
And as over time the sacrifices of bulls and sheep and doves failed to turn away the sin of the people of God, or to atone for their shedding of the blood of other people, God sent the Son of God to demonstrate his ultimate faithfulness to God’s people. Jesus Christ comes into a far country, under the power of an alien empire; Jesus Christ accepts baptism for sin though he never sinned even when tempted by Satan in the wilderness; Jesus Christ comes to preach the good news which is that when the people of God repent of their ways and turn back to God, that God will forgive them, will turn aside from their sin, and heal their diseases. The Cross is the final shape that God’s faithfulness, God’s constancy in love and friendship to humankind, takes and the Cross is presaged in the words ‘You are my Son, the Beloved One’ which is precisely the phrase the Greek translation of Genesis used of Isaac whom Abraham was about to sacrifice on the mountain when God provided the ram instead.
God is so passionate about keeping faithful to God’s people that God tears open the created boundary between earth and heaven in order to bring about God’s will to restore them, to make them again the friends of God: the heavens are torn apart, just as the veil of the temple is ripped at the death of Jesus. God has come so near to us humans in Jesus and his sacrifice that every separating veil disappears between God and humans as well as between peoples.
The world tells us that human welfare can only be advanced by a constant process of tearing up of promises, of ripping down of old ways and loyalties, of abandoning traditional beliefs and spiritual practices. But the Bible from beginning to end tells a different story; that the faithful one, the righteous one, the happy one is like a tree, planted by the waterside, drawing from its gradually spreading roots and branches the goodness of creation for its flourishing and growth and well-being.
Lent is a time when we seek to reorder our loves, to give up some cherished comforts, to open ourselves anew to God’s passionate embrace. The Bible tells us that human promise keeping, truth telling, trust between strangers, security between nations is only possible when we acknowledge our inconstancy, our unfaithfulness, our lies, and yet at the same time hold to the loving fidelity, the incredible constancy, the transforming truthfulness of our gracious God:
Gracious and upright is the Lord; Therefore he teaches
sinners in his way.
He guides the humble in doing right And teaches his
way to the lowly.
All the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness
To
those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.
For your name’s sake,
O Lord
Forgive my sin, for it is great (Psalm 26 8 – 10)