Rev. Dr John Evans preached this sermon at Queen’s College Fellows’ Chapel Service at the University of Melbourne this week.
All who live in a university college or associated with a university college know about compromise. There are compromises over the food. My experience tells me there is male food and female food! There are compromises over noise: type, volume and frequency. There are compromises over the calendar – now the debaters are wanting this time, the musicians are wanting a concert at the same time; and of course the footballers have the match of the century on that date.
Family life is about compromise; politics is about compromise. Politics is not called the art of the possible for nothing. So when is a tax on alcopops a responsible social policy initiative; or a cheap money grabbing exercise?
We live in a complex, very complex world and moral universe. There can be so many balancing and competing interests. I am telling you nothing new. In fact I have a hypothesis. The more sophisticated a person believes themselves to be; say sophisticated intellectually, or culturally, even religiously, they believe they can handle such complexity and they delight in compromise. Grey is their favourite colour; they eschew black and white. Indeed, having clear cut choices was what it was like in former times; or for those who just have simplistic view of the world.
Now, as it happens, I too like grey. Certainly as a former lawyer, I am afflicted with the problem of seeing, or understanding both sides of the argument. As a minister I can also see virtue in a more nuanced approach to issues. So I would thus favour a just war approach over pacifism – though I would respect to the hilt the right of a person to be a pacifist.
The teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is not nuanced – it is blunt.
Matthew (and Luke) has Jesus saying: whoever is not with me is against me; a house divided cannot stand. And today: No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
It is either one thing or the other. There is a choice: it is black and white – choose.
And it is true. Persistent compromise; watering down of values does diminish us. When I was a law student in the 1970s, if I was told that my government and its allies in peace-time would even countenance torture or suspending habeas corpus I would not have believed you. But we do, and we have watered down basic and significant values. There is something about the moral high ground in the face of pragmatism which needs to be affirmed. We have come a long way when Michelle Grattan last week could write about the budget and those tax cuts, that the current Prime Minister “has a fetish about keeping promises”. I think she thought it rather sweet – but as a civil society, don’t we lose the plot if we downplay truthfulness and promise keeping? Such has become the expectation that promises will not be kept, that it now descends into a fetish if they are.
The question is, when and where should we draw a line; and say no more?
I think people understand the importance of this in their personal life. Drifting and not standing for anything is a weakness and ultimately tragic. There are points when choices need to be made, and with that there then comes repentance and reconciliation if errors are then made.
This evening I want to suggest to you we are entering a phase in the life God’s creation on this planet, that requires us to sort through all our compromises and understand afresh that we cannot serve two masters: God and mammon. This could very much relate to one’s own life; however, it relates to our planet and its very future.
Concern over our environment has firmly planted itself in our national psyche as being the issue of the moment and the big issue for us in the 21st century. In my now no longer short life, we have experienced cold wars, economic development crises, threats of nuclear war, concerns over globalization and most recently terrorism. And there are many other matters on that list, and we should not necessarily conclude our grappling with them. However, we now have an issue that confronts us starkly as we watch our gardens wither due to drought, or we remain stuck in a traffic jams, or we ponder the elimination of another raft of species. I have not heard of global food shortages since the 1960s – but that is what is now happening again. This time it is affecting the Third World and ourselves.
More often than not, a compromise has got us to this point. No-one intentionally wants to foul their nest, to make this place where we live difficult for our children and grandchildren to live in. But we do need jobs, and houses and transport and much stuff to live a modern life. The economy needs to be thought of; our international competitiveness needs to be considered – and of course we hope that, in the end, science will address this issue and solve the problem – without us having to change.
My challenge for us is that we need a massive effort to know when we cannot actually serve two masters; and say, for God’s sake and for the sake of our God given world, for which we humans – at least according to the Biblical narrative – are given a clear responsibility to care for, enough! and not compromise.
The learning which this great University offers can help us; the learning that the students which we will meet tonight can help us, and I believe they are keen to do that – and the church must clearly indicate that this is not just an environmental issue, or an economic issue, or planning issue even a moral issue – it is a spiritual issue. It is about serving God.
There is a challenging saying from the Cree Indian Nation from America that when we have destroyed all the forests and all the rivers and caught the very last fish we will realize we cannot just eat money. We can slip and slide our around about our own moral compass – of course at our peril; but we have reached an amazing point in the very future of our planet.
Jesus said,
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
