Planet City - A Sermon

Planet City, film still. Directed by Liam Young. Source: https://www.sciarc.edu/news/2021/liam-young-planet-city

Jesus said:

There is no need for them to go elsewhere: you give them something to eat.

In the film Planet City, a carnival parade of people dressed in different ethnic garb, visit each other’s communities and witness each other’s dance, music, and drama, feasting drumming and piping as they go.

Their homes, schools, places of work, of healing and of leisure are piled up above them miles into the sky, constructed entirely of the recycled infrastructure of past life inside and outside the city. Everyone is well fed from sprawling algae farms that filter pollution and provide sustainable food sources. Everything here is clean, since the city is designed to produce zero waste. It operates on massive, renewable energy arrays and pumped-hydro storage. Agriculture in integrated into the urban

landscape.

What’s important to realise watching this film is that this city takes up far less than half the surface of the landmass of the earth, yet the earth’s whole population is housed here. Everyone on earth lives here and lives well here. The rest of the earth is left to Nature’s own rewilding. The city’s self-sustained existence allows the earth to recuperate and recover from our current tragic misuse of its bounty.

Liam Young’s Film “Planet City” is only 15 minutes long – do catch it if you can. Because this is no sci-fi thriller dreamt up to create a lucrative blockbuster. Its director is a speculative artist and architect trying to provoke discussion and change in the current prevailing narrative of despair about the future of our planet. His method is to tell stories which disturb the current politically accepted attitudes towards wealth creation and power possession in our world. Nor are his thought processes naïve. To make this film he gathered a mighty conference of ecologists, scientists, architects, artists and economists to talk about realities which already exist as resources to reshape the future, if only our mindsets, personal and political, could refocus themselves to creating hopeful change instead of accepting the terrifyingly unjust and self-destructive ways things are at the moment.

I heard Liam Young speak in This Cultural Life and was captivated by this one phrase: “There is a need to make the future a project again”

Jesus says to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel story – “Don’t send these hungry people away to forage for themselves! You give them something to eat.”

And we are hungry, aren’t we? Jesus here creates a disturbance in the narrative of how things were meant to be in the social and religious norms of the day. This is an act of provocation which feeds the hungry hoards around him with hope for the fulfilment of their wildest dreams and prophecies. Here God’s messenger comes among them to provide them with abundance.

And as with so many of Jesus miracles this is an act likely to provoke mutterings – mutterings of hope among ordinary people desperate for change, and mutterings of rage among those in power dedicated to preserving their own ways of life.

John the Baptist, a second Elijah come to prepare the way for the Lord’s messiah, is dead, murdered in a despotic cowardly act by Herod. Jesus then comes like a second and greater Moses, beside his hungry poor in a desert place, and feeding them with Manna.

But unlike the Manna of old there is an abundance of this food left over for the next day. What’s more this food does not fall from the sky! Human intervention is needed by the followers of Jesus in the creation and sharing of this food – You give them something to eat, Jesus says.

Soon the Pharisees will demand of Jesus why his disciples don’t follow the traditions of the elders, and Jesus knowing the status quo is threatened, begins to predict his own likely punishment at the hands of those in power.

And there it might have ended, only it didn’t. Jesus’ life death and resurrection left his disciples with hope for the future of the loving kingdom dawning which he had shown them. The young church sprang up preaching hope, releasing prisoners, healing the sick, protecting orphans and widows, sharing food and inspiration and company along ways of change and the defiance of oppressive social norms. Not always of course and not everywhere. The adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome did little to protect our prophetic stance and way of life.

But it wasn’t lost – hospitals, education, shelter, the creation of just laws, enlightened minds, the arts, the spread of values inculcating hope came in some places and at some times in the wake of the movement which spread abroad from Jerusalem, because of Jesus’ life and witness to the kingdom.

Now it is our turn - our turn-to-turn despair to hope. though heaven knows we may feel hopelessness at times. It is our turn to create acts of provocation which disturb current narratives of success, power and possession. It’s our turn to create hopeful living visions of God’s kingdom among us and to celebrate that kingdom - whether we attend Open Table, or commit to acts of protest against ecological destruction, or create a Co-operative Credit Union, or we do quieter things like changing our purchasing habits or inviting folk who don’t have a garden into ours or listening to people who aren’t usually listened to.

There were five small loaves and two fish, that’s all. Each small thing we do, which action which speaks of the Kingdom matters in the creation of hope.

Only let not overtly “getting somewhere” matter too much to us. The movements in the towns visited by Jesus and his disciples, then by Peter and Paul and James coalesced eventually to become the whole of Christendom East and West. Liam Young’s hope is to provoke discussion which one day will cause tremors and movements towards a cultural shift in our attitudes towards world building. We might not see or know the end of what we do when we try to create hope, when we trust God’s power hidden in our weakness.

What we do know is that in a moment when we stand around this altar and share this Eucharistic feast, a whole crowd of Christian witnesses joins us: among them Thomas Merton who wrote these words about activism and prayer:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all... As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

There is a need to make the future a project again.

Jesus said: “Don’t make the people go away: you give them something to eat”.

Amen.

To watch the short film ‘Planet City’ that inspired this sermon, click here.