Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9a; 1Corinthians 2:1-12; Matthew 5:15-20
The festive season has been eventful for the Malcolm household. Sandy has taken on a new course of university study, and she’s already started pre-reading Hugh MacKay’s book What makes us tick?. I’ve been getting snippets as she shares it with me - and what a fascinating book it is. He identifies ten desires that drive us to do the things we do. Here’s the list:

• The desire to be taken seriously;
• The desire for ‘my place’;
• The desire for something to believe in;
• The desire to connect;
• The desire to be useful;
• The desire to belong;
• The desire for more;
• The desire for control;
• The desire for something to happen; and
• The desire for love.

Just hearing the list you can imagine how most of those might apply to you at some time or other. I guess Sandy, in taking up her study course might identify the desires to be taken seriously, to be useful and for something to happen.

I can relate to all that because on 29 December I was appointed to Chair the Waste Authority. It is a fairly high profile, controversial position so it is going to be challenging, but hopefully I can be useful, and I’m sure something will happen!

The Waste Authority’s job is to help us to become a waste-free society – no small task! And to do that people need to change. Change the way they think and change the way they act. It sounds a bit familiar.

Knowing that I was going to chair my first meeting of the Waste Authority last Wednesday and then take the service today I started thinking about the theology of waste.

The gospels aren’t strong on waste. I did a search and came up with the following:

In Matthew 26 Judas condemns the waste when the woman pours costly ointment on Jesus. In Luke 15 Jesus tells of the prodigal son who wasted his inheritance on wild living. In the next chapter he tells of the dishonest manager who wasted the rich man’s property – and that’s it. From that we can gather that being wasteful is not a good thing, but that’s about it.

But then I thought of the two stories of Jesus feeding vast crowd of people – the 5,000 and the 4,000. In both cases the heart of the miracle is over-catering to the point of wastefulness. But in both cases the excess food is not wasted. It is gathered up in baskets. We don’t know what happened to it, but my guess is it was given to the poor and hungry.

And that rings true when you look at nature. A flower produces far more pollen than is needed for reproduction, but it is not wasted, bees turn it into honey, pollinating flowers as they go.

A cow produces more milk than her calf needs, we benefit from that wasteful catering and so does the cow, because it gets looked after.

Nature appears wasteful, but in fact nothing is wasted. For every waste one species produces there are hundreds of other species for which it is lunch or dinner. Waste is transformed into a resource.

So the theology of waste is two pronged – don’t be wasteful, and turn waste into something useful.

But it is just a part of Jesus wider message of changing the way we think. It is all too easy for us to dismiss some people. They are different from us, have some disability or disadvantage and society tends to treat them like garbage, but Jesus says `No!` Look with the eyes of love and they, and we, are transformed into God’s creations, with God’s spirit inside, trying to get out and show itself in our actions.

So if we look with the eyes of love no-one is a `waste of space`, as they say. Looking with the eyes of love transforms us all into God’s agents – flawed, for sure, but filled with potential. Love turns what looked like waste into something valuable and special.

But what about not being wasteful? There are two problems with waste. One is that if we waste something there’s less of it left for next time – that may not be a problem for us but it could mean that our grandchildren, or their grandchildren miss out, because we were wasteful.

The other is that waste is often yucky stuff and when we produce waste it mucks up the environment and causes problems for our grandchildren’s grandchildren in the form of contaminated sites.

So there are two reasons why, for the sake of the generations to come, we should not be wasteful.

But there is one thing that will not run out if we are wasteful in handing it out, and it doesn’t make the world yucky – in fact it makes the world a better place, and that is love.

Bishop John Shelby Spong has proposed a three-part guide to living as Jesus preached. Live fully, Love wastefully and be all that you were meant to be. Love wastefully – and make the world a better place, that’s the theology of waste!