If Poppies could Weep
Preacher: Revd Ewen Gilchrist, Church of Scotland Minister
Readings: Amos 5:10-13, 21-25; Matthew 6:19-21
One of the best definitions I’ve ever heard of a prophet – Biblical prophet, not the financial one – comes courtesy of the blessed John Bell: “A prophet is someone who stays thirty seconds ahead of his critics.”
Which explains, succinctly and darkly, why it is so difficult for parish ministers and vicars and priests to be prophetic in their local ministries – because survival gets rather tricky if you’ve thundered against the godless masses in the Sunday sermon and them have to stand next to some of them in the PO queue on the Monday morning. Or a pint in the pub on a Friday. Small talk becomes difficult!
That’s does not mean that a rich, faithful and creative pastoral parish ministry is impossible – just that it helps if you can keep on reasonable terms with the natives.
Amos gave up on that prophet-pastor balancing act, apparently. He was a prophet from long ago. Hard to imagine that many folk would invite him home for supper after his rant against the high heid yins of his day – the political and religious leaders of 8th century BC Israel – who were absolutely ticking all the boxes of respectability and conformity. But, nevertheless, said Amos – you’re mostly a waste of space, almost all of you.
To set the scene – allow, please, a brief moment of boring Biblical history – the Kingdom of Israel is unusually stable, secure, prosperous and aspirational. Trade is booming, the shekel doing nicely, mansions are being built, vineyards planted.
And organised religion is part of that momentum – the priests have never had it so good. Although that meant it was a bad day for pigeons, lambs and the occasional ox. Nobody saw or was willing to see the contradiction between the busy business of worship….and the casual neglect of the poor.
In short, the fancy foot work, the caressed choreography, the sacrificial slaughter of countless creatures, the luxurious liturgy, the beguiling mist of incense and chanting of priests…. had turned worship into a circus act. Come and watch, but pay your admission price first. Come and be awed into submission. Come and be amazed by the pyrotechnics of the Mighty God.
Then Amos turns up, a shepherd and olive-grower from the countryside, from the sticks, from the kingdom next door – you know, Pittenweem – not knowing how to handle a tea cup, not knowing what an agenda is, and no idea at all what AOCB means….but despite the dodgy CV, he thunders out God’s truth….. “I hate, I despise your religious festivals……I cannot stand your assemblies……stop your noisy songs…..I do not want to listen to your harps ….I will not accept the animals you have fattened to bring me as offerings….instead like justice flow like a stream; righteousness like a river that never goes dry.”
He’s challenging the immense edifice called organised religion. And the System. He’s thundering against the leaders of his day – political/military/religious (they have a habit of blurring into one self-interested cabal when any one of them is threatened). Amos is proclaiming the unfashionable and unacceptable truth that God doesn’t want fancy footwork from his ornately dressed priests, nor does he want animal slaughter and sacrifice on an industrial scale – he wants compassion, justice; a society which cares for those on the edges, not just those on their gilded thrones.
Some chance. Amos was spitting against the wind. He was so out of step with his society, so out of time with the aspirations of his leaders, so out of synch with the immense political, cultural and religious machinery of the day which proclaimed: “God only does big – big shows, big rituals, big sacrifice. And only we – the priesthood – can deliver that. You should be grateful we’re here.”
Meanwhile the gap grew in Israel – and we must be wilfully deaf if we don’t hear its echo today in Britain – between those who have and the many who don’t. And Amos holds all God’s people – not least those with power, wealth and influence – he holds them all accountable for the suffering of the many. Sure, there was financial success, stability of a kind, prosperity for the few – but all the time it’s underwritten and propped up by the convenient neglect and forgetting of the many on the fringes of life. And Amos thunders at this….
The sheer self-interest, hypocrisy, corruption and greed of then is to be found, almost seamlessly in Britain now, 2021. And not least in this Season of Remembrance.
For several weeks our media has delivered ever-more touching stories of poppy preparations, of ever-more creative and artistic displays on hillsides, in town centres and church gardens; carefully directed You-Tube Remembrance Rituals….
….cathedral choristers and primary school choirs offering different but always moving anthems; guild grannies knitting and stitching pulpit falls and wall hangings; some of the ever-fewer survivors from those wars that tore the world apart wheeled out with their medals, their stories and the ever-present Poppy Appeal. Because how would anyone not want to support those who fought in such times (and other less well-known times) for their country? I’ll support them – I think it’s a moral crime not to.
Meanwhile, church walls dangle and weep with ingenious displays of hanging poppies; I passed the most beautiful display of weeping poppies in a church near Dollar a couple of days ago. A net of poppies flowing like tears from the church window onto the graveyard – picturesque, poetic, melancholic.
In schools, youngsters surpass themselves to prepare imaginative and heart-breaking poppy displays for wars they cannot possibly – thankfully – imagine.
And secular installations, which bishops call “memorials” and the media call “column inches”, invite people to come and ponder. And some folk can’t wait to join the queue and other folk can’t wait to walk on by. But the question remains…what on earth is the purpose of our ever more intricate, choreographed poppy celebrations?
Nowadays you can wear a poppy on your lapel, stick it on your car bonnet, turn it into a floral display, wear it as an ever-so tasteful broach, decorate your garden, quietly applaud the kirk that most folk never enter but nevertheless pause and admire their tasteful poppy parade in the church garden…all these ways that we remember the terrible sacrifice of those lost in wars….some global, some territorial….but all fought under a flag. And somehow that flag made it seem righteous.
Hear this:
Money raised by the British Legion Poppy Appeal in 2020 – £4.45 million.
Revenue generated by Britain’s largest and immensely profitable arms company in 2020 – £20 billion.
My arithmetic is a bit dodgy but I think that works out that for every pound raised buying a poppy, our leading British arms company generated £4,444 – on bombs, missiles, machine guns and fighter jets. All, of course, top quality British workmanship.
It doesn’t stop there: British weapon-making and weapon-selling companies are increasingly involved in sponsoring British Legion Poppy events – which is a bit like having a Mexican drug cartel provide the coffee and biscuits at a Fraserburgh drug rehab programme.
Every Remembrance season we beat our chests, retell the horrors, declare that we must never let this terrible madness happen again….meanwhile the shiny pound coin we pop into the can for the weeping poppy has just been trampled into the dust by the £4444 other pound coins made by manufacturing and selling weaponry; guaranteeing many jobs – and many more deaths – and excellent dividends for shareholders.
London hosts one of the world’s largest weapon fairs, every two years – with tacit, nuanced support from Her Majesty’s Government. I imagine it’s like a church bazaar but without the tea and scones; and there’s no millionaire shortbread but there are millionaires aplenty.
We are the leaders in Europe when it comes to exporting what is euphemistically called “defence” commodities. Our Government even has a department dedicated to promoting weapon sales. PAUSE
There’s a Canadian Episcopal priest by the name of Morton Kelsey who wrote about this disconnect – that tragic human ability we all share not to see the end-result of our labours; not to see the chain we choose to be part of; not to see the chain reaction. Kelsey roots this disconnect in the manner of Jesus’ death. He sees with frightening clarity that Jesus wasn’t crucified by sadistic monsters but by an assortment of rather ordinary folk who simply had different agendas.
This is what he says, “The Cross is crucial…..because it shows what possibilities of evil lie hidden in human beings. The cross is the symbol, alive and vivid, of the evil that is in us, of evil itself. To recognise this is not to wallow in self-loathing but to be honestly awareness of the darkness within.
“Who ran the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, kept the ovens fed, made lamp shades out of human skin, performed the mass murders and executions? Remember, Germany was the most literate and educated nation in the world!
“We think that people who did these things must have been perverted monsters. Actually, until they stepped into those rolls, they had mostly been peaceful German burghers who had never hurt another; living quietly and peacefully in their homes…..and then the devils in them were let loose.
“And so we learn, scratch the surface of a human being and the demons of hate and revenge, avarice and bestiality and sheer destructiveness break forth.
“It was not wild viciousness or sadistic brutality or naked hatred which crucified Jesus in AD29. It was the civilised vices of cowardice, bigotry, impatience, timidity, falsehood, indifference – vices all of us share; the very vices which crucify human beings today.”
Kelsey is warning us, if anyone is listening, that the darkest evil is carried out not by diabolical creatures with cloven hoofs but by ordinary folk who refuse to see the greater thing, the monstrous thing, they are choosing to be part of; the terrible end result of their labours. But the pay is good, the job secure, the shareholders dividend very satisfying.
Will we ever be prepared – our society, our country – to look within and acknowledge our demons? Or will we be charmed and distracted by poppies, which weep because we have forgotten how to?
And then, suddenly – when least expected – ‘cos that’s what he’s really good at – Jesus walks into the room, with that pithy little saying of his that’s all the nicer for being conveniently ambiguous, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be.”
Where is this country’s treasure? And what is it? Is it to be found in the well-being of our ever-growing marginalised masses whose existence has normalised food banks? Or is it in the workers and share-holders who do not so badly, thank you very much, from the immense profits of a British industry which supplies arms to, amongst others, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, India and Turkey?
But it’s poppy season and who are we to spoil the reverential and dignified party by asking awkward questions? Thus it was that Amos eventually, I imagine, sidled back home to his sheep and olives, fed up with spitting against the wind.
But Jesus remains, awkward and awkwardly, in the corner, saying ever so quietly – “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be.” And suddenly those words aren’t so ambiguous any more.
But our leaders – and many others – remain incapable of answering what is, ultimately, one of Jesus’ trickier questions.
GLORY BE TO GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT; AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW AND EVER SHALL BE. AMEN.