Sermon by the Rev. Dr James Currall

It is a great pleasure to join you in St Aidan’s as part of your harvest celebration. I must say that as we arrived here tonight agriculture was not much in evidence, the nearest that we came to a field was a golf course and a park. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that this celebration is still very much a part of the Church in the UK, even though most church-goers live, as they do in Clarkston, in an urban environment. But as our New Testament lesson said “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us from God.” That is what this celebration is about!

In our reading from Joshua, the people of Israel are approaching the promised land of Canaan. They have travelled for many years, first under the leadership of Moses and now under Joshua. They have faced many trials and tribulations along the way, but with Yahweh’s help, they have come through it all. They have arrived at the Jordan Rift Valley, a major geographical feature that runs from north to south, this is all that separates them from Canaan. They have just left the fertile lands around Jericho, descended across the arid wilderness of the upper part of the valley and then down to densely vegetated flood plain. We hear: “Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest.” A river in flood and a large river at that. A bit of a problem this, so what are they to do?

Ever since this people received what we usually refer to as the Ten commandments, the tablets on which they are inscribed have been carried with them in their wanderings in the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark also houses the teaching of the people of Israel - the book of the covenant - and a jar containing some of the manna with which Yahweh fed them in the wilderness. But the Ark isn’t just a conveyance, it serves as a symbol of the religious, ethical and social relationships of the people and their God. Their approach to crossing the Jordan takes the form of what we might consider to be a liturgy, which draws on this symbol of unity, in which twelve priests (one from each of the tribes) carry the Ark into the edge of the water. They are following the instructions that the Lord has given to Joshua. They are walking behind the Commandments that were given to Moses on Mt Sinai. And they are trusting in the Lord. So in three different ways they are ‘following the word of the Lord’. One of the things that I really like about the Hebrew Bible is the layers of meaning, both literal and metaphorical that it possesses, and this bit is rich indeed.

So they don’t set up a working party, they don’t try to figure out how to cross the water by bridge, dam, boat, trusting in their own wisdom; they trust in the wisdom of the Lord. And what happens, somewhere upstream at a place called Adam (modern-day el-Damiyeh) where the inner gorge of the Jordan is narrow with high banks, the water piles up; the Jordan stops flowing and the priests carry the Ark into the middle of the now dry river. This enables the people to continue to follow the word of the Lord and cross to the other side where they can climb up out of the valley into the fertile land of Canaan. There have been two well-documented landslips that have blocked the Jordan at el-Damiyeh in the last thousand years and so it is quite possible that such a thing happened then. The question is, does it matter whether or not we are ‘clever’ enough to be able to know how the water piled up? Does this make it any less the work of God? It happened then, at the moment when the people of Israel needed to cross the Jordan - does that not reveal the hand of God, whatever the physical cause? Answering the question how, doesn’t answer the question why! “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us from God.”

Scientific advance is a wonderful thing. It shows that humankind has been able to make good use of the intellectual gifts given by God. But the scientific method is a human-devised way of knowing, always provisional and like all human-devised things imperfect. It is wisdom of the world and the process depends crucially on the scientist asking the right questions. If in the process we overestimate just how clever we are, and fail to acknowledge that we can never be all-knowing and just how much we depend on God; if we reject God as a relic of unsophisticated people of the past who used it to explain anything that they didn’t understand; we are seriously in error.

In the 1980s, the idea occurred to geneticists that slow plant or animal breeding, could be replaced by chopping up genetic material and splicing useful bits into existing varieties of plant or animal to produce new varieties very quickly. This was hailed as a development that would propel humanity into a new age of plenty - a promised land of designer organisms. GM was born. We could introduce super-tolerance to a herbicide into a crop-plant like soybeans or maize or cotton, then spray the crop, whilst it was growing, with a herbicide that would kill all the weeds. What a clever idea! In 1996 soybeans with such transgenic modification to tolerate glyphosate were planted in the US. The first GM crops. Sixteen years later, there are two dozen species of weed that are completely resistant to glyphosate and instead of needing lower levels of herbicide, the farmers need more. By 2009 100,000 acres in Georgia were infested with resistant pigweed up to 6 feet tall. Today 12 million acres of the US are affected by such resistance (which is about 2/3 of the land area of Scotland) and this figure is rising rapidly. Mankind is looking to be just a little less than in control now.

Science and God can live in harmonious relationship only if scientists are prepared to show humility and understand the tentativeness of their system of knowing. Anyone in the early 1990s who suggested a little more care in the examination of the side-effects was said to be a Luddite, an enemy of progress. So what do the scientists propose to do? Well there are applications for licences to develop and plant transgenic crops resistant to 2-4-D, an important component of the ‘agent orange’ that was used to defoliate large areas of Vietnam and is much more persistent in the environment than glyphosate. “For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. ... Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually.”

Some writers on the Bible and the environment trace this lack of respect for the natural environment and the plants and animals with which we share this planet to St Augustine of Hippo’s teaching on the creation myths in Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’” I suggest that Augustine’s teaching included much about the exercise of human reason. It was not about using animals, plants or land as ends in themselves, which he would have regarded as idolatry. It was not about humanity enjoying itself at the expense of fellow creatures - human or otherwise, which he would have regarded as a combination of covetousness and greed. This arrogant complacency is a failure to “understand the gifts bestowed on us from God.”

The Jewish Autumn Festival - the Feast of Tabernacles - happens at the end of September or beginning of October at the time of the in-gathering of fruit, wine and oil. It celebrates Yahweh’s victory over chaos at creation replacing it with the order that produced what we call ‘the balance of nature’. The tabernacles or booths are small huts with roofs of palms or other vegetation which symbolise the temporary dwellings of the people during the exodus that nears its end in our Joshua reading.

Another Augustine (Augustine of Canterbury), when considering how to evangelise England was advised by Pope Gregory “The idol temples of that race should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them. For if the shrines are well built, it is essential that they should be changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.” ... “And because they are in the habit of slaughtering much cattle as sacrifices to devils, some solemnity ought to be given them in exchange for this. So on the day of the dedication or the festivals of the holy martyrs, whose relics are deposited there, let them make themselves huts from the branches of trees around the churches which have been converted out of shrines, and let them celebrate the solemnity with religious feasts.” ... “and let them give thanks to the Giver of all things for His bountiful provision.” So today in St Aidan’s we are continuing in a long tradition of celebrating the “the gifts bestowed on us from God.” adopting and adapting to our current circumstances, so that we can see God at work in our world and our lives - as Paul said to the Christian community at Corinth “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us from God.”

Amen