(EXPLANATORY NOTE: The following sermon was something of an
experiment in style – preaching from the form of a text rather than the
specific content of the text with the aim of achieving the same impact
that the text would have had for its first audience. The Jeremiah
passage, like a number of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, is in the
form of an ancient legal argument in which God’s case against the people
is stated to the court. My sermon is an attempt to use the form of a
modern barrister’s summing up speech to do the same thing. I presented
it as a one-person play dressed in the full barrister’s wig, gown and
collar.)

May it please the court: Your honour, learned friends, ladies and
gentlemen of the jury; over these past few days you have heard the
testimony of many witnesses, and now as we approach the end of this
trying affair, it falls to me to sum up the case for the prosecution.

As you have heard, the victim of these crimes, Lord God of Heaven
and Earth, attempted on numerous occasions to seek reconciliation before
eventually, in exasperation, agreeing to press charges. And so, having
refused every olive branch offered, the accused, known to the court as
the human race, sits here before us accused of the following:

defilement of the land,
corrupt misappropriation of
resources,
desecration of sacred heritage,
and culpable living.

May it please the court: It is difficult for any right thinking
person to comprehend not only the magnitude of these crimes, but that
they could have been contemplated in the first place. As has been made
clear to this court, the victim, Lord God, has been, by a very great
margin, the major benefactor of the human race throughout their life.
Right at the very beginning God was the midwife of their lives, pulling
them kicking into life, and in that moment of crisis when it was thought
they would fail to live, breathing spirit into them.

As they grew to adulthood, God was always there for them, protecting
and nurturing, offering guidance and direction, and frequently rescuing
them from the disastrous circumstances they seemed so often drawn to.
Ladies and gentlemen, you saw the tears and the pain on the face as God
testified to having personally rescued them from slavery in a foreign
land, leading them safely through a drought stricken wilderness and
relocating them in a new land where God offered them permanent tenancy,
rent free, in return for no more than carrying out basic care and
maintenance of the land and its people. This was a plentiful land full
of rich fruits and good things, easily capable of sheltering and feeding
them all with abundance.

Indeed it is difficult to comprehend that that such an extravagantly
generous benefactor could have been treated with such callous disregard
and malicious treachery, the particulars of which it has been our sorry
duty to sift through these last days. May it please the court: You will
excuse me, I hope, for having to rehearse some of them again before you
now before you consider your verdict.

You have heard a string of expert witnesses testify as to the
horrendous extent of the defilement of the land that has occurred at the
hands of the accused. Waterways have been poisoned, land stripped of
forests and exposed to salination, countless species of birds, animals
and fish exploited often to extinction, rivers damned, wetlands covered
in concrete, fragile habitats destroyed, and even the air pumped full of
offensive fumes and dangerous gases. May it please the court: as you
consider these facts, I would ask you to take account of the images
presented to the court of the extraordinary beauty and diversity of the
land when it was created by God and given so generously to those now
accused. I would remind you of the complex interconnections within it
and its inbuilt self-balancing systems. And most of all I would ask you,
the jury, to look again into the eyes of the one who created all this
and sense the depth of pain of one whose life’s work has been so
savagely vandalized and defiled.

May it please the court: You have heard evidence too of the corrupt
misappropriation of resources by the accused. Overwhelming evidence has
been presented of the ample sufficiency of the resources bequeathed to
the accused by Lord God, resources intended to ensure that all people
were provided with the means of abundant living. And before you has been
put the sorry litany of corruption, dispossession and embezzlement
wilfully carried out by the accused, motivated, one can only assume, by
naked greed and the most cold-blooded disregard for the rights of
others.

Testimony has been given as to how less than one third of the
population has consumed more than 75% of the earth’s resources while two
thirds of the population have been denied access to adequate housing,
essential nutrition, safe drinking water and basic freedoms. All this in
flagrant contravention of the expressed will of Lord God who provided
all things. May it please the court: the prosecution accepts that, as
the defence has been at pains to establish, not all the accused were
equally culpable for the actual perpetration of these atrocities, but we
rightly have laws against aiding and abetting and against living off the
earnings of crime. Thus they stand accused as a group and I would call
upon you to find them guilty as a group.

The charge of desecration of sacred heritage is clearly a charge of
quite different order. Though we have not called witnesses to refute the
argument of my learned friend that the injuries are not so widespread,
we certainly take issue with his spurious conclusion that this renders
the offence trivial. May it please the court: I ask you, the jury, to
recall to memory the anguished testimony of the victim, Lord God, and to
take careful note of the betrayal, humiliation and contempt suffered.

Lord God established covenants from early times with the accused,
covenants that provided for mutually beneficial relationships between
creator and created. God left a perpetual inheritance of sacred stories,
rituals, disciplines and relationships that evoke meaning, purpose,
wisdom and integrity and transmit them from one generation to the next.
No more precious gift could be imagined and yet, as has been graphically
illustrated before the court, this sacred heritage has been repeatedly
and viciously desecrated.

This sacred heritage has been shamefully used as the basis for
intolerance and oppression. Its mysteries have been calculatingly
misconstrued as accessible to only a privileged few. It has been
exploited as the means for extorting both money and personal services
from vulnerable seekers. And perhaps most widespread of all, what was
intended as an all-encompassing and life giving sacred union has been
marketed and partaken as a mere weekend hobby.

May it please the court: as I’m sure you in the jury can now plainly
see, all this has laid the ground work for the destructive, negligent
and grossly delinquent pattern of behaviour that resulted in the final
charge, that of culpable living. Culpable living, as has been clearly
explained by his honour, is a particularly serious offence consisting of
living in ways which recklessly expose others to significant danger of
hardening of the heart, pollution of the mind, dulling of the
perception, disintegration of the conscience, quenching of hope and a
consequent slow strangling death of the spirit.

After the many explicit and horrifying accounts we have had to
endure these last few days there seems little need to rehearse any of
the particulars again. Suffice it to say, may it please the court, that
in addition to the needless and tragic demise of so many potentially
creative and joyous lives, this has caused agony beyond belief to Lord
God who created all people with infinite dignity and worth.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as you retire to consider your
verdict, I ask you to keep before you the pictures of that tormented and
agonized face. The contorted features as the poison hits God’s veins of
living water. The sunken cheeks and listless body as God queues up in a
Sudanese food aid station. The terrified eyes as God’s children are
stolen away under genocidal government policies. The look of cowered
subservience from God after relentless beatings and rapes by a so called
caregiver. The angry and hopeless scowl of the adolescent God starved of
any example of authentic loving and compassionate spirituality. Remember
the extraordinary history of generous self-giving by the victim of these
crimes and take those images with you as you deliberate, and then bring
back to us what is surely the only verdict possible in this case. . .

Excuse me, I’m in your honour’s hands, the clerk of the court has
just asked to communicate with me.

I’m in your honour’s hands, something has arisen, and with your
permission, your honour, I need to have a brief word with the victim
before I can explain this to the court.

May it please the court: Your honour, it has been brought to my
attention that a man has already been tried, convicted and executed for
these charges – one Jesus of Nazareth, some years ago. The opinion that
he was in fact innocent has been widely circulated and accepted in most
quarters but the conviction has never been overturned. Lord God was
aware of this previous trial, in fact the erroneously convicted man was
Lord God’s own son. May it please the court: I have brought it to the
attention of Lord God that res juditica, the court is bound by the
previous decision in the matter and thus it is not possible to try a new
accused if the previous conviction has not been quashed. Lord God has
accepted this ruling and wishes to convey to the accused once again a
desire to drop all charges in return for the accused’s willingness to
enter mediation with a view to full reconciliation.