[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation via Zoom on Sunday 3rd of January 2021]
(Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 and Matthew 25:31-46)
About a week ago, my Dad forwarded me an article that he found highly amusing. It was published on the website of the Daily Mirror with the headline ‘Nostradamus terrifying predictions for 2021’.
Now I’m know that the tabloid press is commonly perceived as having no aversion to kicking people while they are down, however to do such to the hopes of an entire population first struck me as being in bad taste and highly frivolous. It still strikes me as very frivolous, but we might be able to use it to our advantage. It is, after all, a very useful and, depending on one’s sense of humour, fun, way to think about the future.
Michel de Nostredame lived in the 1500s and was physician to many members of the French royal family who rose to prominence after writing almanacs and beginning to work as an astrologer to wealthy clients. In 1555 his book The Prophecies was published to, at the time, a very mixed reception. However the prophecies in the book have been hailed by his supports has having predicted, the Great Fire of London, Hitler’s rise to power, the French Revolution, the Second World War, and the atomic bomb. The academic consensus on these “predictions” is that they are the result of “retroactive clairvoyance”. None of Nostredamus’s writings have ever been used to predict a specific event before it happened. Instead many are vague enough to seemingly describe, with the benefit of hindsight, many historic events.
Trying to use Nostredamus’s witing to predict future events oftern ends in startling and hilarious results. The article in the Mirror predicts that, in 2021, soldiers will have microchips implanted into their brains, solar storms, and Earth being hit by an asteroid! However it was the article’s first prediction genuinely made my skin crawl…
For those who don’t know, I have a phobia of zombies. If I watch an entire zombie film I will be guaranteed to have nightmares for a month. My fiancée Zosh really wants to show me Shawn of the Dead but, despite it being a comedy film with two of my fraviout comic actors in it, I have been completely unable to sit through it all.
Sure enough the Mirror’s leading prediction for 2021 was a Zombie apocalypse caused by a Russian biological weapon. Now, even though they provided the quote from Nostradamus that they claim supports this prediction, I honestly can not see how they derived this. Yet, I will say this, a zombie apocalypse can be a tool for hope!
No don’t worry, 2020 has not left me so defeatist that, for me, even being eaten by a zombie would be an improvement! No, it is more in what zombie literature can communicate to us.
The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson is among those who have observed that for some people in sometimes, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” The 1978 genre defining zombie film Dawn of the Dead seems to confirm this. In a scene early on in the film, the main characters, having survived the early phases of a zombie epidemic, observe that the zombies appear to be heading towards a huge shopping centre or mall, landing their helicopter out of harms way on the roof of the mall the characters observe the zombies bellow them, wondering seemingly aimlessly around the mall. One of the suvirious eventually askes another why they think the zombies have come to the mall. In reply her fellow suviror hypothesises that could be “some kind of instinct, a memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” In short, the ideology of capitalism is so strong that, even when our brains our turned to mush by a virus, we will still be mindlessly treading around shopping centres in one last final effort to consume. If Dawn of the Dead were remade today it could easily show zombies at home on their computers mindless clicking on Amazon product listings or sitting at home in front of the telly desperately trying to key the number for the QVC hotline into a long out of power phone. A boring but relatable dystopia, that even without zombies, seems to be here already!
This is one of the ways that tails of apocalypse can hold a mirror up to our society and our own behaviours.
What Nostradamus and the Daily Mirror have got wrong is that history is not a straight line of one thing after another but a sea of possibilities. This does not give us grounds for idle optimism but gives us meaningful hope that our analysis of the present, perspectives for the future, and our actions today and tomorrow matter in shaping our future.
Humanity today has the technical infostructure capable to feed the hungry and starving of the world, to provide clean and pure water to those who thirst for it, to truly welcome strangers with plentiful resources, to cloth all the people in the world with suitable clothing, to provide the sick with free and decent health care the world over, to meet prisoners in prison and give them the resources to help reform themselves and contribute to society once more.
Yet we do not have the resources to do these things while our leaders continue to spend billions of pounds on nuclear weapons, while we continue to use the resources of the earth to make weapons for countries with far from perfect human rights records such as Saudi Arabia, and maintaining an economic system that, during a crisis that has seen urgent need for investment in public health services, priorities growing the wealth of the world’s billionaires to a record high of £7.8 trillion.
This week, in a editorial, the Financial Times compared the lives of those who find themselves in the “underclass” of rich societies today, with the precariousness that the holy family experienced during the Advent story. The editorial citied the infamous incident of a woman who was forced to give birth to her child in the toilet of a Sports Direct warehouse, owned by the billionaire Mike Ashley, as she could not afford to miss her shift. To quote the editorial, “it is just a matter of time before the pitchforks come out for capitalism itself, and for the wealth of those who benefit from it.”
As we begin this new year of 2021, what we need are perspectives, not predictions. Perspectives that allow us to see the trends in our global society and discern how we can best work to help the poor and liberate the oppressed.
If we do not do this the only sure prediction that we can make through Matthew’s gospel is that our future will not look to bright. Instead let 2021 be the year we work together to win a better future for all.
Amen
