Bishop Richard’s Weekly video Message – Transcript 20.06.2024

Play Video

Bishop of Hereford's Weekly Message #205 – 20.06.2024

Video for June 20th, 2024

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.

I was hoping to have a free entry to the King’s uncle’s camel farm in Bahrain this week, but unfortunately its closed. The King’s uncle sadly died and the camels are now involved in a bitter custody dispute. Everyone wants a share apparently, but no-one wants to look after them. So, not to have a camel metaphor elude me while here, I’m making do with a commercial farm in the south of the desert.

Jesus once said, “it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle that it was for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”  It appears in all three synoptic Gospels so it must be important.  In fact, Jesus talked more about money than he did about anything else. 25% of the Sermon in the Mount is about it. Mammon was the only god Jesus mentioned by name.

We need to hear Jesus words as prophetic more than ever today. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard said that materialism has become the new dominant system of meaning in our culture.  Atheism hasn’t replaced cultural Christianity, shopping has. It has even become a new cultural unifier. Over the road from our hotel is one of the largest shopping malls in the middle east.  It is indistinguishable in architectural style and the shops inside from a mall you could find anywhere in the world.

Because it’s the sea that we swim in, we don’t see it as particularly unusual. But, even in western culture consumerism – that sense of defining our identity from what we own, arose relatively recently. The American economy was fuelled by WWI and WWII but in 1927 one journalist observed, “a change has come over our democracy.  It is called consumption”. Paul Mazour of Lehman Brothers (remember them – that didn’t end well) said, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. We must shape a new mentality.  Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” And after 9/11, President Bush warned against terrorists, “frightening our nation to the point where people don’t shop!”

Advertising as we know it started in Berlin under the Nazis. Ironically, they picked up on the Jewish Psychiatrist Freud’s ideas of unconscious drivers of fear and want and used it for nefarious political purposes. Previously advertising was simple information.  Most ads today say very little about what the product actually does, they exist to create a desire for it. I would be aware of that when you watch campaign ads over the next few weeks.

Now, I don’t think the people of Hereford diocese are especially materialistic in fact. However, we need to be aware of our culture and the way it drives us, even unconsciously. Consumerism fuels insecurity and unhappiness.  Paul’s assertion in Philippians that he had learned to be content in all circumstances is profoundly counter-cultural. Although much research shows that once you get to a certain level of income that covers the basics, further increases in income and goods don’t increase happiness one bit. I think Jesus’ advice to us the next time we are tempted to indulge in a little retail therapy – a clue to what’s really going on if ever there was one, is generosity. Don’t spend more; give more away. Paul, in his advice on giving to the church in Corinth, uses the Greek word ‘hilarion’ from where we get our word hilarious. Most versions of the Bible translate the word as cheerful.  I prefer the idea that God loves a ‘hilarious’ giver.  The Bible consistently encourages such generosity.  I have been the beneficiary of such at times in our life when finances were stretched. I wouldn’t go as far as some of the dangerous prosperity Gospel preachers on the TV, but there is a sense that God provides even, and perhaps especially, if we go beyond what we think is our capacity to share. It is ironic that some of the poorest dioceses in the Church of England have the highest per capita giving figures.  There is a real challenge to us in this.  Up until this year, Hereford Diocese had the lowest per capita giving in the Church of England.  We’re now second lowest! I’m still not entirely sure why this should be.  Our Father is a generous God. May he help us to be the same.

+Richard