last week, on a sunny afternoon, around 3p.m. in Central Croydon which I’ve actually walked through, two policemen asked a young woman who has dropped litter to pick it up and dispose of it properly. She picks it up and then drops it again. The police insist, onlookers become involved, and in the time it takes to spit out chewing gum around 30 “teenagers” are laying into the two police officers. Some papers call it yob mob rule.
How does a dropped piece of litter escalate into a mob attack on two police officers which leaves them injured, off work, and has a bystander comment the violence and aggression were so extreme they thought the officers might have been killed. The disproportion between dropped litter and life threatening violence, makes this incident a parable of a culture that is losing it. Losing its temper, losing its way, losing respect and its self-respect, losing its sense of laughter, losing its conscience, losing its capacity for community – losing it.
Like anyone else who cares about the environment we all have to live in, and I mean the urban environment as well as the natural environment, litter isn’t only an eyesore. It’s a statement about how little we value the place we live and the others who share it with us. Chewing gum spat out on our streets by the gobful, fast food packaging with some of the dredges left in it, drink cans and bottles kicking around your feet, plastic bags blowing around or stuck on fences and plants, the crisp bag that flies out of the car in front; the scattering of fag-ends outside buildings where smoking is banned but litter isn’t, and woe betide any policeman who tries to say different, – when it comes to mess we can be very creative in our destructiveness.
So what should a follower of Jesus do? What does a dissident disciple do in a country where litter is so bad Bill Bryson once described one of our towns as hosting an all year litter-fest? When did you hear a sermon on the theological arguments for not throwing litter? I know about the radical and risky call to forgive, be a peacemaker, to love as generously as we are loved by God – the heroic stuff is hard to do but at least we know that the demand is serious. But in a world as messy as ours has become, and I mean messy economics, messy war, messy violent crime, messy media mind-shaping, – how far up the priority scale should litter throwing be?
Well, the same Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, the importance of seed and bread and good soil and cared for vineyards. But no, he didn’t prohibit the dropping of litter – mind you, after the biggest mass takeaway ever, they took up 12 baskets full of the leftovers. I suppose the reasons why I shouldn’t throw away litter are a mixture of good citizenship, long instilled habits of caring about our world and other people, a desire to live in a society that at least cares for the basics of urban housekeeping. But I think there is something deeper, more symbolic, more transformative about walking to the litter bin with my can, chewing gum, banana skin, coffee takeaway cup or whatever. And it’s this.
What we do to our streets images what we are doing to our world. If I don’t care about mess, the accumulated detritus of not giving a toss where I dump my garbage, it raises the question of how I’ll ever learn to care about global pollution. It takes the same human action to throw away a carrier bag in Glasgow as on the Moray Firth, or on the Pacific coast. In Glasgow each plastic bag becomes a personal statement that lingers when the culprit has gone, mobile consumer graffitti, a durable advert for our carelessness – that is we don’t care enough and couldn’t care less. On the Moray and Pacific coasts, carelessly thrown away carrier bags choke dolphins. Actions have global consequences.
Which is why I admire the initiative of the members of Mosaic Glasgow, ‘a wayfaring group of Christ followers’. They’ve joined FORK, Friends of the River Kelvin, and as followers of Jesus take responsibility for cleaning up the river and protecting the environment around it. They do this as Christians loving the world God loves; and every act of litter retrieval is an act of witness to a Gospel that is about human mess, and what God in Christ calls us to do about it.
Leave a Reply