A sermon given in the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine

New York, NY

Sunday 21 January 2001

The Revd Canon Eric B Beresford
Consultant for Ethics: Anglican Consultative Council

Let me begin by saying a thank you to your Dean and your staff, and to you as a cathedral community for the privilege of being with you this morning. I have long admired the work of this cathedral, but only had the opportunity to worship with you once before, so it is a great joy to be with you today. I am also very thankful for the marvellous lections that happened to be set this morning because they make my life much easier. Of course, you might wonder what light if any they could hope to shed on recent developments in the area of biotechnology, the theme of the conference that took place here this weekend, and the theme I have been asked to address this morning.

To begin to answer that question let me point out one of the underlying themes that hovers around the each of the texts, the theme of Sabbath. Indeed, what I want to do this morning is to offer a reading of all of the texts from the perspective of that Sabbath of Sabbaths which we call Jubilee: the Sabbath rest which God proclaims for the earth, for all creation, and in that context for God's people; the Sabbath rest that God's people are called in turn to proclaim for the earth and for all its inhabitants.

In Nehemiah we have the story of the public recitation of the law. After Jerusalem has been rebuilt, Nehemiah tells how Ezra gathers the people together and reads the law to them. As they hear the law explained the people respond with profound penitence - they weep and prostrate themselves before God - but Nehemiah says no! The day on which God's word is heard is not a day for weeping, but a holy day - a Sabbath - a day for feasting and rejoicing. Nehemiah's text is about the relationship of God's word to the proclamation of Sabbath - to Jubilee. It is about the link between the renewal of God's people in their home and the principal of Sabbath.

This becomes clearer in the gospel reading that was set for today. There the theme of Jubilee is right on the surface. We read the story of the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. He returns from the desert and begins a spectacularly successful preaching tour, and at the heart of the passage he returns to his hometown of Nazareth, to the Synagogue there, and he reads from the book of the prophet Isaiah.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.

And when he closes the scroll, he tells his audience that he is the fulfilment of that passage: that in his own person Jubilee is proclaimed: that in him, and in his ministry, the Sabbath of Sabbaths begins. And what is that Sabbath about - it is about good news for the poor, release for prisoners, sight for the blind, and freedom for the broken in God's acceptable time. The Jubilee, announced in Jesus own person is an affirmation that God's concern for the poor and the vulnerable is not something to be set to some future time, it is something to be lived in the present by those who call themselves Christians, who are to be known as, "the body of Christ."

Following this, when we turn to the epistle reading we see something of the character of the Jubilee community. It is a place where no one is left outside; no one excluded or devalued, because all are gifted. Without each of us, without each part of the whole, the jubilee community is incomplete and cannot fulfil its purpose. We see a community characterized by the embrace of difference, but also the recognition that difference can so easily lead to exclusion. We have to be warned against that by the apostle. We have to learn not to devalue difference, but rather to treat it in the same way that God treats difference.

To make my point let me ask a question: something dear to my heart because I am a keen birdwatcher. Do you know how many species of sparrow there are in North America? Let me tell you, there are 34 different species, and many of them look very similar, very similar indeed. In practical terms this often means that they are almost indistinguishable on the basis of visual markings alone. You know I was once asked if I believe in UFO's. Believe in them, I said, I see them all the time! Bird watchers on this continent call them LBJ's - little brown jobbies. What do we need all these sparrows for? We don't need them, but God delights in them. God delights in difference far more than we ever will, but as Jubilee communities we are called to embrace God's delight in difference, and reflect it in our own communities and relationships.

But what has all of this got to do with biotechnology? Recent developments in the biological sciences have been dramatic. They include such areas as genomics, the science concerned with the mapping of genes in order to understand both their location and function within the genome: gene manipulation including the transfer of genes from one species to another, and cloning. Taken together, they offer some of the most powerful technologies human beings have ever developed. Indeed, these advances have the potential to change human life in ways that make the industrial revolution look like a Sunday School picnic. They offer enormous opportunities for benefit, yet they also bring considerable risk of harm. In saying these things we need to remember that there is no such thing as a technology in the abstract. Technologies reflect the social contexts in which they are developed and they further the interests of those who invest in their development. The question we must always keep before us therefore is, what sort of social vision is driving these developments, and being reinforced by them?

The biblical jubilee reflected in the texts before us today address itself directly to the questions of social vision. As we have been reminded repeatedly over recent years, the jubilee vision offers the promise of freedom from bondage, including the bondage of debt. In a context of social realities that are exclusive, it offers the call to inclusion, and it promises a Sabbath rest not only for the people of God, but also for the land. Indeed, if we turn back to that most central Jubilee text, Leviticus 25, it becomes clear that without the Sabbath rest for the land, without the seven cycles of fallow land, there can be no Sabbath for the people of the land. How do the promises offered in the new biotechnologies stand up to such a vision?

First, I want to ask what the social context, within which those technologies are promoted, has to say about our relationship to land - to the earth - to creation and all that is in it? "The earth is the Lord's," declares the psalmist, and the jubilee texts echo that in a social practice that concretely reminds God's people that the land belongs to God and not to them. In the provisions that demand that everyone can gather the produce from the land left fallow, the Jubilee provisions insist that what the land produces of itself belongs to everyone. This is a far cry from the bioprospecting that characterizes the practices of the major biotech companies. The practice of identifying the genetic resources of developing nations and indigenous societies and filing applications for patents on those resources based on the so called "discovery" of natural products that have been in use for centuries. Of course, biotech companies need some means of protecting the investment in research and development that they undertake, but the jubilee provisions set some limits to that: Limits that begin with the assumption that the natural world is a commons, available to all, and belonging to none. I'm reminded of a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon I saw recently. Hobbs says, "When I grow up I am going to be a scientist - I'll dedicate my career to the proposition that man can reshape the universe according to his own whims - I'll probably go into genetic engineering and create new life forms. Calvin asks, "You want to play God?" Hobbs responds, "Not exactly, God never bothered to patent his stuff."

The second observation that I would make is that if we think about the new technologies in the light of jubilee then we will need more social concreteness than most analyses offer. When we talk about risks and benefits we need to start to be specific. We need to ask ourselves, risks to whom, benefits for whom. When companies promise that biotechnology offers food for a hungry world this is a good thing. Nobody should underestimate the challenges of population growth and the demand for food. But at the present time the challenge is not food production, but food distribution, and we need to ask ourselves how the ownership of the genetic resources of the world, concentrated into the hands of a few biotech companies is going to improve food distribution. It is well to remember that increasing production alone will not solve our problems. The green revolution of the seventies and eighties vastly increased the capacity of India to produce food and turned that nation into a net exporter of grain. Yet it has not solved the chronic hunger and malnutrition in that country.

Finally, Jubilee is also about sight for the blind - it has something to say about the truth of our vision of the world around us, about integrity, and transparency. Yet how can we speak of giving sight to the blind when we cannot even see what we are eating because of the resistance to proper labelling?

The theme of jubilee that resonates through today's texts does not address itself directly to the problems posed by biotechnology. It does not offer us any easy and simple guidance about how we should respond. I have not this morning tried to say that these developments are good or bad, as if such simplistic judgements were ever open to us. But today's readings remind us that what we see, what the world looks like, depends on where we stand. There is no view from nowhere - we are called to choose. And jubilee invites us to choose a very particular point of view: a point of view that acknowledges our place in a creation, which is interdependent, an expression of the divine love, and in which each part has a place. Jubilee invites us to a perspective that privileges the hopes and fears of the most vulnerable, or the hungry and the landless, of the marginalized and excluded, and sensitive to those who may become further excluded as a result of changes to the structure of agriculture associated with biotechnological change. The jubilee invites us neither to be dazzled by our own technological virtuosity, nor to demonize what is new and different, but to see it from within the context of the new society that God is at work creating amongst us. The Jubilee calls on us to confront the challenges of biotechnology not with some studied neutrality, or detached objectivity - the so called view from nowhere - but with a passionate commitment to see and participate in the redemptive purposes of God in creation. To share in that vision and hope to which the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins points when he reminds us that despite our exploitation of nature and of each other "…the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and, ah! Bright wings."