The Campfire Church ministry of the word for today: Farewell to Bitterness (Tony Collins)

Last week Grace read a passage from Hebrews 12, which includes the sentence, ‘See to it that no one misses the grace of God, and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble.’

It’s so easy to be bitter. Bitterness arises in your soul when something grieves you and you have no chance to set it straight. I am sure you are familiar with the flavour.

My heart was filled with bitterness last Sunday as I watched David Attenborough’s programme on the extinction crisis. For as far back as I can remember I have loved the earth, and have grieved over its destruction, most of which has taken place during my lifetime. How can we not be bitter to see thoughtless clearing of precious forest just to plant soya beans for cattle feed? How can we not react with bitterness when we learn, as the United Nations warned this week, that a million species are threatened with extinction?

It is tempting to look for someone to blame. Bitterness engulfs me when I think of national and world leaders who do so little to care for the earth, and who are so cavalier in their disregard for those who are hurt by their policies.

Bitterness arises when you look for acknowledgment and find none; when you have made a contribution, and it is disregarded; when your viewpoint is ignored and the issues you want to raise are dismissed as of no account.

The problem about bitterness is that it turns back on itself. Those who cause the bitterness sail blithely on, quite unaware, while your spirit curdles within you.

Bitterness eats you from within. It can render you angry and destructive, or depress you. It can also make you ineffective, the victim of your own passions.

Bitterness can destroy a fellowship, or a family, or a marriage. It can colour all your decisions and taint your responses to other people.

Bitterness leads to scapegoating – to thinking, ‘If only I could get rid of Donald Trump, or Boris Johnson, things would start to get better.’

Bitterness can also be a temptation, a refuge, a place of bleak comfort where we are absolved of responsibility, because the situation is out of our hands.

Bitterness provokes us to focus on the personal, and to miss the wider picture.

If bitterness is not addressed, it leads to despair. One of the qualities I most admire about David Attenborough is that he has not given in to despair, though he is better placed than most of us to see the scale of the devastation our species has committed in the last 50 years.

If bitterness fills your soul, what should you do?

How, for example, can you pray? Specifically, how is it possible to pray for those who are the source of your bitterness? Such prayer can feel like ashes in the mouth: how do I pray for the trawlermen who drag nets across the ocean floor, destroying what they do not catch? How do I pray for the politicians who turn aside refugees and prevent shelter and food from reaching them? How do I pray, even, for the man who saw fit to empty his trash out of his car into the gutter immediately outside my house?

Even to pray can be too much to ask, so we need to start further back.

Start, I suggest, not with the crimes or misconduct of those who have provoked your bitterness, but with your common status as creatures of the Most High. One of the points that is now being raised regularly by Extinction Rebellion and many others within the ecological community is that we are all in this together. ‘Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,’ wrote the poet John Donne. ‘Therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Donne was right, of course, but he didn’t go far enough. We and the planet are one: the wildfires of California and Oregon affect us. As Grace pointed out the other day, dust from the Sahara provides nutrients for the Amazon. Or, as the author Deepak Chopra puts it, ‘The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath and the earth our body.’

How, though, does the Almighty view us, part of one creation that we are? Working on the general principle that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, as Paul says in Romans, I am constrained to the unpalatable conclusion that I need the forgiveness of the Lord just as acutely as any illegal logger: more so, because I am condemning his actions whereas the logger may be simply seeking to feed his family.

Thankfully God’s grace extends even to me. As it says in Lamentations chapter 3:

The Lord’s loving-kindnesses indeed never cease,

For His compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

Great is Your faithfulness.

God’s grace is the theme of the 23rd Psalm. It is easy to overlook, because it is so familiar, but I find it a solace to my spirit to read lines such as:

Surely your goodness and love will follow me

all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord

for ever.

The writer Murray Watts, a distinguished screenwriter and dramatist who co-founded the Riding Lights Theatre Company, has made a practice, over years, of meditating on the 23rd Psalm each day. Of the Psalm he has this to say:

If your heart is open to love, then this song is for you. It is not about romantic love but it will bring far deeper love into all your relationships.

If you have no interest in religion but consider yourself spiritual, then this song is for you.

If your life is in deep trouble, then this song is for you. More than any song or poem it has been read in desperate times and brought comfort to the broken-hearted and the dying.

If your life is successful, happy and fulfilled, then this song is for you. For why wouldn’t you want to go deeper and further into a peace and happiness that is beyond your wildest dreams?

If I start at this point, rejoicing in the Lord who is my shepherd, then I have begun the day well. I am on the road away from bitterness. Perhaps there is room in my soul to start praying. But how?

At this point I need an illustration, and this morning I am pleased to inform you that we have a couple of celebrity guests. However, they are a little camera shy, so they won’t appear on screen. Let me first invite President Trump to join us. Step forward, Mr Trump, and take a seat. Tell me, have you ever read the 23rd Psalm? Ah. Well, give it a try. Now, tell me how I can pray for you. Help me to see past the manner to the man. I know, for instance, that you long to be liked. I long for that too. You are vulnerable to the hungers and passions of the body. So am I. You seem insecure. I know about insecurity. When I think about what you are dealing with, I owe you an apology, Mr Trump, because it is unfair of me to expect more from you than I expect from myself.

Once you go through an exercise of this kind Donald Trump seems more of a man and less than a monster. You may not want to have a drink with him, but it becomes possible to pray for him. Your sense of bitterness and outrage start to recede.

But what should we pray? To pray properly requires understanding.

Let me recruit, in turn, Boris Johnson to help our reflections this morning. Greetings, Mr Johnson. Do sit down. Take the weight off your feet. As the father of a young child I imagine you’re not getting as much sleep as you might. Tell me something about yourself which will help me understand you. Talk to me about your journalism, and your interest in classics, and your admiration for Winston Churchill. Tell me about your turbulent upbringing, and the smart set at Eton and Oxford among whom you moved. Perhaps you would share something about your liking for headlines. Yes, it was a good joke you told in the House of Commons last week. In return, let me admit to you that I too find it tempting to make people laugh, and to reach for the quick effect, and to skimp on the research, and to let my eyes linger on pretty girls. Once again, I have to say that when I get to know you, Mr Johnson, I cannot be disappointed in you without also being disappointed in myself. As I understand myself, I am the more able to understand you.

Both Mr Trump and Mr Johnson are prone to bluster, when their shortcomings are exposed. They have a tendency to employ volume to win their point. This is true of many men: my family know perfectly well that I will override others, if permitted, in order to carry the argument.

Once we have gone through such an exercise, and acknowledged that none of us is an emperor, but that all of us are wearing transparent suits, then the Trump-monster and the Johnson-monster are reduced to scale: they are bumbling humans like the rest of us, vulnerable and defensive, overbearing and cunning, easily manipulated by special interests. Their abiding weakness is that they are desperate for respect, but are members of a profession in which respect is often lacking.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that bitterness often arises when we look around for someone to blame. The solution is to refuse to play the blame game, to work intelligently to make things better, and to pray.

There is a further step to take, as you travel away from bitterness, and that is to love, which requires you to extend both candour and compassion to yourself. As Jesus put it, you cannot love your neighbour without loving yourself. As anyone who has maintained a close relationship for any length of time will know, you cannot love a cardboard cutout; nor can a cardboard cutout offer love. If you try to prop up a false self, in order to win love and respect, it will demand all your strength, and it won’t work, because people are not stupid, and will quickly discern if the image you present is fundamentally dishonest. It’s especially hard to love politicians, because they frequently trade in falsity. To love, or to receive love, you have to be honest.

To love requires us to perceive what is real, and to see past the sin to the sinner. This is not easy. To love the industrialist but not his pollution, the logger but not his destructive conduct: this may require more bandwidth than we can manage. This kind of discernment is costly in terms of time and effort.

Which is where God comes in. The task is beyond us. All we can do is to keep in mind that we wish, ourselves, to be understood, loved and prayed for – and to extend the same courtesy to the Trumps and Johnsons and Putins and Bolsonaros and Xi Jinpings of the world. As we understand, love and pray, the bitterness starts to recede.

And, just to bear in mind, the news is often more complicated than it first appears. Trump is certainly no environmentalist, and his dreadful rollbacks of environmental legislation will have long term impact, but four weeks ago he did sign into law the Great American Outdoors Act, a huge programme of investment and one of the most significant pieces of conservation legislation enacted in the States in half a century. Part of me wants to perceive him as the climate-gobbling oligarch presented by the media, but it isn’t entirely true. We can’t afford the luxury of believing in superheroes or supervillains. Trump is just a man.

In the name of Christ, Amen.