Lent 6 The Reverend Dr Joan
This week I sneaked off on my way to a meeting, in London, to look at a
fascinating exhibition at the British Museum. It was all about the first
expeditions to American and specifically the drawings of a gentleman artist,
called John White who made the journey five times. He was employed by the
expedition organiser, Sir Walter Raleigh, to make pictures of the unfamiliar
birds, flora and wild life in and around the coasts of this new world. They
renamed the area Virginia, in order to suck up to Elizabeth I the Virgin
Queen.
White’s drawings are bright and beautiful even after 400 years and show his
great excitement in recording new and previously unseen creatures. There was
a picture of an “allegatoor”, in fact a fresh water crocodile.. What the
visitors to this New World found was a richness and diversity, the bays
teeming with fish, oysters, crabs, scores of edible birds and animals, and
wild and wonderful plants including potatoes, tomatoes and a plant smoked by
the natives called tobacco. And they met the people, who have to be called
now, First Nation, not Red Indians. They found the resident Americans to
have a rich and strange pagan culture, in which dead ancestors were
carefully skinned and preserved in a temple, where there were ritual dances,
gatherings round fires. For the most part the English visitors were
entranced. They thought they had found Man in his natural state, with
simplicity and dignity, living easily off the richness of the land God had
created. They duly sailed back to England declaring that they had found a
New Eden. In Eden, you remember, Adam wasn’t required to farm or toil to
earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, all that he needed was there for
the taking.
White carefully coloured with his images with paint, put them into a huge
album and passed them round the folks back in London. Raleigh’s plan was to
try and persuade investors to fund settlers in this brave new world where
the land could easily be farmed and money would be easy to make. And so a
party set off, one hundred and nineteen souls in a tiny ship, about ten
years before the more famous Mayflower. They started off being helped by the
kindly residents and ended up killing them. Paradise turned to starvation,
and while White was back in England getting more food (because they didn’t
know how to gather up the fruits of Paradise they found) all the settlers in
Roanoake disappeared, without trace and were never heard of again.
Now this sad, vivid story has many morals to it but I
want to stay with the idea of the perfect society. The dreamers who settled
America in the seventeenth century were inspired by the desire to make an
easy living but also by the dream that they could establish in this empty
land, a perfect new society. Waves of brave or tortured souls set off to the
distant shoes of America determined to build the ideal society based on
their brand of Christianity: the famous Puritan settlers, the Royalists who
fled from Cromwell, the Quakers who set up Pennsylvania in order to live and
worship in freedom.
The early history of America is full of dreamers who
believed in Utopia. Humans at their best are ambitious for themselves and
often believe that if they could only start society all over again, then
they could be the moral beings God intended. Well you don’t need me to tell
you that for the most part, the dreams unravelled and these idealists began
to reveal the worst as well as the best aspects of human nature.
In the passage from the Gospel according to John we
read today, we hear Jesus’ dreams for humanity. The extract is part of the
long series of instructions that Jesus gave his disciples when he knew he
was to part with them forever. The speech has all the power and urgency of a
last will and testament. I want to point up the hope for humanity which
underpins all Jesus’ teachings. He did not feel that humanity was beyond
redemption, doomed to sin. He knew that through grace and the power of the
Holy Spirit, humanity could do better, bring about God’s Kingdom on earth.
Jesus didn’t say that the building of the Kingdom would be easy. He knew
that it is hard for us to keep the Great Commandment to love God and love
one another. Jesus believed that we could do it and sent the Holy Spirit,
the Counsellor, to inspire and empower us. We need not be cast down by our
weakness, sinfulness and the evils of humanity because we can be redeemed
through God’s love. The mistake made by the Utopian dreamers was that their
conviction that they could a perfect society from the outside, by bringing
in new laws, engineering the social order, enforcing a new way of life. Into
this new order they placed flawed humanity and the result was inevitable. It
is only God who can change men’s hearts and minds, and he is eager to do so.
God believes in us, is optimistic about us and so we must continue to dream
dreams and have visions of making this world a better place. Not by going to
another place, setting up a colony in America or on the moon but by getting
stuck in here and now. Drawing upon the power of the Holy Spirit, the
teaching of Jesus and the Bible we can constantly strive to build a better
world starting not from the external but from within ourselves. If we all
strive to improve the relationships that God has given us, in the place that
God had placed us, then the Kingdom will become nearer. And when we fail to
find the perfection we seek, in relationships or at work, or at church, we
should not run away and start again but stay and try to rebuild, brick by
brick. If Jesus was optimistic about humanity then we must not be fatalistic
and feel we are hopeless and doomed: we must draw upon him for courage and
inspiration and keep working for a better world. Amen
