Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”
Nada, nothing, nihil, ouden. Simon Peter’s word captures the empty nothingness of our culture and our church. Nihilism is the default position of both. We have toiled or worked, everyone thinks and says. But to what end? Nothing. What does that mean? It means the discovery that our labours, our work, if measured in worldly, practical and economic terms, and in social and political terms, have really all come to nothing. There is only disappointment and uncertainty, fear and anxiety and a whole lot of anger and despair. Just consider the remarkable state of affairs politically, socially, and, economically, in England and the United States. Ask yourself what that is all about. Recognize that while there are many, many factors, much of the phenomenon in England about the European Union and in America about the presidential election is the profound disconnect between a great number of people and their ruling elites. I think that is a fairly obvious and rather banal observation, hardly controversial.
Take it one step further and ask why. The answer, equally obvious, is that there is an obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and no hope whatsoever especially for a younger generation or for anyone else for that matter. And no, they are not simply spoiled millennials. The folly of the entitlement culture is deeply entrenched and runs across generational lines whether it is about education or health care, to name but two concerns. The problem is a world caught between the largely unregulated market economy of neoliberal capitalism, on the one hand, and the leviathan of the modern market state, on the other hand. Either in collusion or in competition, they contribute to a world of vast inequalities of wealth and a denigration of human labour; in short, to a profound unease. We have begun, it seems, the summer of our discontent.
We face a world where humans increasingly do not matter and the more that people invest themselves in technology as the solution the more alienated and empty and inhuman our world becomes. There is literally nothing to live for in the dystopia that we have created and in which we are all implicated.
