Refusing Talent
A sermon preached on Sunday, November 19, 2023, at St. Thomas, Morden. Propers 392; Jg 4:1-7; Ps 123; 1 Th 5:1-11; Mt 25:14-30. The British philosopher, Mark Fisher , once wrote, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Fisher was fascinated by the fact that while our society routinely creates movies about the world ending, in the world these movies depict, the basic realities of our capitalistic economy remain resolutely unchallenged, even as this economic structure drives the world to its destruction. Our moral imaginations are trapped, Mark Fisher argues, in a structure he calls “Capitalist Realism” - a situation in which we deeply believe that something like a capitalistic economy is fundamental to human nature. Rather than correctly seeing capitalism as a contingent economic structure that arose relatively recently in Western society, we instead are led to believe that this economic system just is how the world works. Capitalist accumulation, on t