World in a Week

Interesting to move overnight from springtime in South Africa to Autumn back home.  I’ve been writing a harvest sermon today – clergy joke about only needing one for your entire life in ministry.  And we used to ponder the fact that it is moments like Harvest and Mothering Sunday which tend to draw the crowds even though they seem rather theology-lite – while tougher moments like Good Friday can pass almost unnoticed by many.  Yet I am finding that Harvest actually has most of today’s issues there for the taking – wealth and poverty, the environment, justice ….  And most of all it seems to provide one of the moments at which one can see the difference between a secular society – which lives by values such as freedom, individual responsibility and self-sufficiency – and a society whose values are broader and deeper and where well-being and wealth are not the same things.  Interesting to hear Bill Clinton telling the Labour Conference that what mattered was that, when you gave up office, people were better off than when you began.  How inadequate a world vision is that?