I
wonder how many people you’ve depended on so far this morning, how many people
have helped you? There may be some obvious answers. Perhaps someone’s made breakfast for you, or given you a lift.
Here in church, people have given you hymn books, musicians have sung and
played, people have set up the church for the service – we soon discover how
much we need them when they aren’t there and everything goes to pot!
But
you will also have depended this morning on many people who you’ll never see or
know; those who produced the food you ate for breakfast and transported it to
the shops you bought it from, those who maintain the infrastructure we all
depend on, who provide electricity, gas, clean water and so on.
And
it doesn’t stop there. Behind the people who help us in the here and now is a
vast number of others stretching back into distant history whose work has made
possible what we enjoy today. We can follow the service because people taught
us to read – teachers or parents – and those who campaigned and worked for free,
universal education. We may only have lived to see this day because medical
professionals and scientists over the ages have laboured to discover and
develop treatments for the diseases that would once have finished a lot of us
off prematurely. I could go on, but you
get the message. It’s only 10.2am, but we’ve already depended on an army of
people today.
But
how many of them have we consciously thought about this morning, let alone
thanked? Probably not many, and my experience is that most of us prefer to
think of ourselves as independent, self-reliant, self-sufficient, in charge of
our own lives – not needing others. We like to think that we are “self-made”
people.
The
term “self-made man” only entered the dictionary in 1832 – US senator Henry
Clay seems to have coined it to describe those pioneering people who made new
lives for themselves in the USA. They’d had to reinvent themselves as they’d
colonised what was, for them, uncharted territory. Some had chosen to come.
Others were forced from their old ways of life in Europe by persecution,
pogroms or famine. It’s easy to see why they might have felt as if any success
they’d had was down to them alone and to their determination and grit. No
wonder the myth of the “self-made man” or “self-made woman” caught on so
stronglyin the USA – it’s something that Donald Trump is noticeably playing
into.
But
it is a myth. In reality, those pioneers were drawing on all sorts of
support in order to survive; the lessons they’d learned growing up, the
accumulated store of wisdom developed in their old countries which they’d
brought with them, the political and financial backing of vested interests who
wanted them to colonise this vast country. There is no such thing as a “self-made”
person.
And
when we read the Bible, we discover that that’s how God intended it to be. Christians
believe that each of us, and all the world, is made by God, that God
“intricately wove us in the depths of the earth” as Psalm 139 puts it, that God
shaped us before we were born, and sustains us through life and death. But you
don’t have to have a religious belief to see that none of us is entirely our
own creation. At the most basic level, we
are all made physically from the DNA of our parents. We arrive in the world
with many of the building blocks of our temperament and personality already
formed, as well as our physical characteristics. Our bodies are made from the
food we eat, and the communities we grow up in shape us socially, psychologically
and spiritually. The things that happen to us, for good or ill, profoundly
affect our lives too. I saw a moving interview with young Rohingya people
growing up in refugee camps in Bangladesh this week. One 15 year old girl had
married a man in his 60’s and was carrying his child, another had become a sex
worker. It wasn’t what they’d planned for their lives, but they’d lost their
families and their schools. They’d found themselves on their own, unsupported, so
they’d had to make choices from which there could be no going back. How might
our lives have turned out if we had been put in the situation they were? None
of us can know.
The
idea that our lives are entirely down to us, that we can do whatever we want to,
if we only have enough grit and determination is wishful thinking. Of course we
have choices, but we are never totally in control of our lives. And let’s not
be blinded by that military imagery in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and in
some of our hymns this morning. They may sound like anthems to the self-reliant
hero, but the point Paul, and the hymn writers are making is that soldiers need
strength and armour beyond themselves to survive the battle Paul calls it the
armour of God to emphasize that. It’s not their own! All they can do is
choose whether to put it on or not.
In
our Old Testament reading, Joshua calls the Israelites to make a choice too.
They’d struggled across the wilderness for forty long years, led by Moses. But
now they’d finally reached the Promised Land, a land “flowing with milk and
honey”, a fertile land, where they were starting to grow crops that had been
unimaginable in the desert. Everyone is heaving sighs of relief. At last that
terrifying time in the desert has ended! They can put it behind them. But the
danger is that they will also put behind them the memory of how they survived,
that it was God who rescued them from Pharaoh and sustained them on their
wandering. And if they forget that, there’s a danger too that they’d forget the
lessons he taught them. Through their hardships, God had formed this bunch of
slaves into a people, given them patterns of life to follow, patterns of
justice and compassion, of care for each other and for the world. God had given
them a sense of dignity and agency. They had learned that they were beloved by
God. He’d gone to all this trouble for them – for them! These were lessons they
would need to hang onto if they were going to build a society that reflected
God’s priorities. But remembering God would mean remembering their need and
vulnerability too – that’s something we all sometimes struggle with when we’ve
come through hard times. We just want to move on, to say “I’m ok now. I’m fine. I don’t need help
anymore.”
Joshua
fears that they’d prefer to worship the local gods of Canaan, gods associated
with lush green pastures, fruit trees, grain fields, grape vines, comfort, ease
than the God who reminds them of a time when they were powerless and hungry. His
fears are realistic, as it turns out. Although they promise to “choose God” at
this point, the reality is rather different, and they soon fall away from that
promise.
It’s
no accident that the book of Joshua, along with much of the Old Testament, was
written during the time the Israelites were far from home and in deep trouble
all over again, in exile in Babylon. Once again they were desperate, and asking
what had happened, why this disaster had fallen on them. The Old Testament
writers drew on ancient oral tales, but they shaped them into a bigger story, a
story of God who had been faithful to them, even when they hadn’t been faithful
to him. It was as if Joshua was standing before them now, in Babylon, and
offering them the choice all over again. Who’s really had your back all these
years? Who’s really cared about you and been there for you when you’ve needed
it? Is it the gods of Canaan? Is it the god you have made of your own strength
and capability?
In
the Gospel reading, people are struggling with the same dilemma. Jesus has fed
5000 people on five loaves and two fishes out in the middle of nowhere – and, yes,
that is meant to remind us, and them, of the experience of the Israelites in
the wilderness. People have been very grateful. But then Jesus tells them that
they need far more than loaves and fishes to be really alive. They need to feed
on him. It’s all too much. For a start it sounds suspiciously like cannibalism,
which is rather yucky, but even if they can get past that, Jesus is
unmistakeably talking about a commitment to him, a choice they need to make, and
that’s far more than they’d bargained on.
Many
of his followers quietly slope away. In the end, there’s just Peter and a
handful of others. “Are you leaving too?”
asks Jesus. But Peter has made his choice, and he speaks for all of them. “Lord,
to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe
and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Like Joshua, they’ve seen what
God has done for them in Christ, and they can’t unsee it. They’ve known what it
means to stick close to Jesus; not just a belly full of bread and fish, but a
new-found sense of dignity and worth and purpose, and to give it up, however
hard the path, would feel like death to them now. They need him. They need the life that he’s
given them.
Living
well, living fully, living the lives God wants for us isn’t necessarily complicated,
but it’s often difficult. It’s about loving your enemies as well as your
friends, praying for those who have it in for you, working for justice and love
when everything around you seems unjust and hateful, holding onto hope for
others as well as yourself. We can’t do it on our own, however self-reliant we
may think we are. We can only do it if we are prepared to admit our need of
God’s help. That may come to us through prayer, through reading the Bible,
through the love of others, through the worship which draws us close to each
other and opens our eyes to what is beyond us too. We’re offered a choice. Will
we give up the myth that we can be “self-made”, that it’s good to be
“self-made”, the myth which leads us to worship ourselves and our own strength?
Or will we learn instead to rejoice in our need of God, and let ourselves be
the “God-made” people he wants us to be?
Amen.
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