A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on October 29, 2023 by Revd Dr Sam Wells.
There is too much of everything. If you think about the number of human beings born since human life began: it’s currently running at around 117 billion. Surely that’s more than we need? But we’re adding human lives at a rate of 140 million a year. Surely way too much life. But after all we’re only one species. Apparently there are around 8.7 million species on earth. It’s fair to say a good bunch of them are insects. Even so, that’s a good amount to be getting along with. We can hardly say there aren’t enough. But again, we’re only one planet. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around 200 billion stars, and our galaxy is probably one of around 300 trillion galaxies in the universe. I think we’ve got a good number of stars and galaxies to be getting along with. There’s way too much of everything.
But see how we’re captivated by the perception that there’s not enough. We live under the illusion that, if we had enough time, we’d be capable of anything – everything; that there’s no flaw in our abilities or relationships, the only flaw is that we don’t have enough opportunity to manifest our talent and realise our ambition. If something doesn’t come to pass, there must be someone to blame, and in that blame lies a sense of something having been stolen – our right to the fulfilment of our dreams. When a loved one dies, we invariably wish there’d been more time, more opportunity, a longer and more extended period in which… – in which what, exactly? In which they and we could have fulfilled our fantasy that everything can be achieved, and all that hasn’t been possible in this life can nonetheless occur.
So this is the paradox of existence: there’s way too much of it, but when we try to garner it all for ourselves and for our possession, we find there’s not enough. And we fixate on the not enough, and the injustice of it, and the unfairness that others seem to have more, and the regret that if only things had gone differently we could have had all things, and the bitterness that if it wasn’t for someone’s intervention we could have had everything, everywhere, forever.
Which is why the account of the feeding of the 5000 in Matthew 14 is such an important story for every Christian, for the church, and for the church’s witness to a society of too much in which we all think there’s not enough. I don’t want you to focus on the five loaves, representing the five books of Moses, or the two fish, representing the law and the prophets, or on the abundance of the feeding, reenacting the feedings by Moses with the manna and Elisha at Gilgal. I want you to focus on the sentence near the end: ‘And they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.’ The wonder of this story isn’t just that Jesus turned scarcity into abundance, or that he had pity on the hungry, or that his compassion contrasts with the garish pomposity of Herod in the feeding immediately before in which John the Baptist’s head is served up ion the banqueting dish. The wonder of this story is that nothing was wasted from that great abundance and every last morsel was gathered up and there were 12 baskets left over. Where the baskets came from is anybody’s guess; but we won’t dwell on that.
This is the good news of All Souls. All Souls isn’t for those who’ve got everything right. The curious thing is this is usually thought of as a very Catholic festival but it’s actually a very Protestant one because it recognises there’s nothing we can do to be worthy of God’s love – we can only accept grace as a gift, never an entitlement or reward. The good news of All Souls is that nothing is wasted. All those things we ponder over – the last conversation that never happened, the graduation never attended, the daughter’s wedding when he wasn’t around to walk up the aisle – nothing, nothing whatsoever is wasted. Not only would the sense of completeness never be what we imagined it would be, but the sense of incompleteness will be ultimately resolved in God’s fulness of time. All Souls is ultimately a Christological festival – one that recognises that if even the death of the Son of God was not wasted by redeemed in the resurrection, nothing whatsoever in all creation will finally be wasted, but gathered up into the twelve baskets and used for God’s glory.
If that’s the theology of All Souls, then the ethic follows neatly. Our lives are to be made up of gestures that look like wastefulness until you realise that in God’s realm, nothing is ultimately wasted. When I lived in Norwich I was intrigued by the bosses on the roof of the cathedral. No one could see them from floor level. There must have been many years of effort and skill put into those extraordinary artistic creations; but no human being would ever have been able to understand the stories they told. The artists didn’t mind. They were not for human consumption. They were for God and the angels to enjoy. They were an utter waste, redeemed in the realm of God. Then think of the gestures made by a nun such as Mother Theresa or an aid worker in Gaza right now: of the injured and sick and abandoned, only a tiny fraction could be saved or healed or restored: a depressing thought if you live in an imagination of scarcity; but if you abide in a world of abundance, where in God’s realm, all in the end will be gathered into twelve baskets, nothing is wasted. Look back on your life right now: all the disappointments, frustrations and waste. How different everything looks if you realise all such things are not wasted but gathered into the baskets of God’s abundance. It’s not that there’s not enough: it’s that there’s too much, too much to remember, too much to celebrate, too much to redeem; except by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So how then should we live in the light of All Souls? As people who live without the fear of waste. As people who cherish life for the abundance in every moment, not to crave and cradle every passing second in case it slips through our fingers. As people who are bursting with gratitude and joy, not in miserly fashion counting up unforgiving minutes as if we’re about to be deprived of our birthright. As people who rejoice that we’ve been made of millions of species amongst billions of people amidst trillions of galaxies, and there will always be more than enough, far more than we can desire or imagine, not only now but forever. That’s the reason we gather at All Souls: not to grieve what we’ve lost, painful as it is to let go, but to rejoice in what it means to belong to such an astonishing inheritance, in the glory of God’s endless mercy, in infinite space and endless time, forever.
