Sermon for the 30th of July - St John the Baptist Mars Evensong

This extraordinary Mars installation gets us thinking about the extraordinary world in which we live. We soon become aware of a profound paradox. We look at creation, and see it as good and beautiful and awe-inspiring. And yet, it’s also, as the English poet Lord Tennyson put it, red in tooth and claw. As this amazing exhibit demonstrates, with the red lighting reminding us, that Mars is the god of war in Roman myth.

Violence seems to be built-in to the evolutionary process, going back some three billion years. It’s only about 40,000 years ago that we moved from being hunter gathering and foraging tribes, to agriculture-based civilisations. And part of this journey involved the creation of myths, creation stories, and ideologies. These helped make sense of existence as well allowing societies to better cooperate, which increased their chances of survival. [It’s described brilliantly by Yuval Noah Harari’s book called Sapiens.]

From nascent civilisations came things like a sense of a group identity, honour, pride, and self-defence. There formed an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. There are enemies and there are friends. And as a result, humanity has a long history of war making, continuing to this very day with conflicts throughout the world. It seems as though we can’t learn from history. We have invented a thousand clever machines for making war, but not one that makes peace.

The Judeo-Christian tradition offers another path. It’s affirmed in our first reading, which speaks of harmony between species. The poem describes a ‘paradise restored’, a time when ‘The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid….and a little child shall lead them’. We have a pet blessing service each year here, but we’re not quite ready to let lions loose on our dogs and cats!

Although you might know the story of the zoo keeper who was able, with great satisfaction, to show visitors a cage in which a lion and a lamb were living peacefully together. “How do you manage that?” the visitors regularly asked. “Easy,” replied the keeper. “We just put a new lamb in every day.”

Isaiah presents a prophetic vision of harmony, but it will remain an impossible utopia, unless we have a practical programme of action. Which is why Jesus affirms in our gospel reading, Blessed are the peacemakers …. They truly are children of God.

If we are to have peace on earth, we will need harmony not only between species, but between humanity.

This is what Martin Luther King preached on Christmas Day in 1967, stressing the interrelatedness of earth, nations, and all life.

….if we are to have peace on earth…we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world…

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny... We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.

Religion is often accused of being the cause of war. But what is often called ‘holy war’, is in fact, unholy war. It’s a desecration of the image of God in humanity.

Yes, terrible evil has been committed in the name religion (as well as secular causes). Religions have been used to dehumanise and scapegoat others in justification of such evil. But the answer is not eradicating religious faith. What we need is not no religion but good healthy religion.

Take the word religion…it’s often dismissed as being inauthentic dead tradition, in contrast with spirituality, which we much prefer using today. But at its root, religion means re, ‘again’, and ligios, ‘connection’, like ligaments connecting muscle to bone. Religion is meant to connect again what has been separated.

We have a profound need to reconnect with the fullness of life, to reconnect with the whole, the sacred. But what we’ve created is more like disligion: disconnection from people unlike us.

Many of us, whether we go to church or not, feel closest to God while we are in nature. A glorious sunset can summon a deep-felt sense of thanks and it feeds our soul. Even a simple gaze at the stars, or Mars, can be a spiritual experience if we are mindful enough.

Because it affirms that humans are made to engage in life-affirming conversation with the whole, a world perspective with a sense of the holy web of life. And that includes engaging with all those who are not like us. All those who we tend to exclude because of nation, colour, religion, class, sexuality or even political views.

That’s what we attempt to do here at St John’s. We never get it right, but that’s our vision, and that’s what we pray and strive for. As we heard in the gospel reading, God is calling us to hunger and thirst for righteousness, calling us to be merciful, and calling us to be peacemakers. And we try, however imperfectly, to respond to this call because we believe that God is a God of life, not death; of compassion, not cruelty; of love, not hate; and of peace, not war.