All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

Every little helps – is the slogan of the Tesco Supermarket chain, designed to make us believe that they have our best interests at heart -helping us to have a better quality of life.  The truth is that, during the past year, Tesco has been involved in:

• supplying customers with ’contaminated’ petrol, which caused extreme damage to some car engines
• refusing to pay dairy and other farmers a decent and fair amount for their produce, forcing some out of business 
• forced the closure of smaller shops through building more stores and monopolising the local economy – King’s Lynn has two large stores and a petrol station store
• used Radio Frequency Identification Technology to spy on customers shopping traits, as part of a plan to ‘track’ every product they sell 

Yet, inspite of all the protests, boycotts and lobbying against such practices, the company still managed to declare an excess of £2.5 billion pounds in profits and a 30% share of the retail market.

Some might say, what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, is a true enough saying, but unfortunately for Tesco at Gaywood in King’s Lynn, some people did see.  On Christmas Eve, staff were seen throwing food into black plastic bin bags.  Personally, I think that it is sad that the management didn’t contact the local churches, Hospice or Homes, either directly or through the local press, and enquire as to whether their ‘waste’ might have benefitted someone for whom every little might indeed have helped. 

The truth is, I suppose, that the produce that they buy and the manufactured products don’t cost them a lot.  Yet, was it better to throw it away, than to give it away to someone who might have truly benefitted from such a benevolent gesture?  The problem is that those who offer and sell an economy range of products simply tend to forget that there are still those who struggle on low incomes, for whom cheap is still expensive and, for whom, Christmas is as expensive a time as for those who are rich.

Every little helps - but who does it help? To my mind it is no more than a ‘cheap slogan’ for a company with a cheap moral and ethical policy – or could I be terribly wrong?  Oh, and make no mistake, Tesco’s computors for schools and free sports equipment – who do you think pays for that?  In truth, the one who is not even deserving of a free hand-out on Christmas Eve – the consumer, who saves the tokens given free (?) by a company which never stops thinking about the ways it can help us ….. because every little helps … them!

‘I would rather have a thief than a liar, because at least you know where you stand with a thief’.  My brother and I grew up with this phrase ringing in our ears – it was one that our mother used.  As small children, it was difficult to grasp the truth of it, particularly when the occupation of thieving, which was so prevalant at the time, seemed to have been ‘elevated’ in mother’s mind above that of someone who just ‘stretched the truth’, which some children were wont to do!  In later years I realised that what mother was trying to instill in us was, that neither was acceptable – although the liar was the more unpredictable and dangerous of the two and, according to mother, required a good memory! 

Strangely, the ability to lie, or should I say ‘be economical with the truth, seems to have become fashionable amongst some politicians.   It is an interesting point that they cannot accuse each other of lying or name one another as liars, in the House of Commons, because it is considered to be ‘un-parliamentary language’.  British politician Winston Churchill actually found a route around the rule by referring to an ‘outright lie’ as ‘terminological inexactitude’!  For the current British prime-minister, commonly referred to as ‘a child of the Manse’, (implying ‘Christian’ and honest), any suggestion that he has lied or has ‘mis-led’ the Commons, over the latest ‘Labour Party funding crisis’, could prove to be very damaging.

Lying itself, in a strange way, is ‘stealing the truth’; also, it robs us of our dignity and self-respect and robs others of their trust in us.  People who lose these things, particularly those in public office, whose reputation often is the one thing which ensures their personal success, have a long way to fall and. those who are ‘truthful’, perhaps motivated by envy, will engineer their destruction.

In the Gospels, those who spoke or ‘revealed’ the truth of their lives to Jesus received healing -Zachaeus the tax collector; the Roman Centurion pleading for the life of his servant … ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof’ ….. . Mary of Magdala and the thief on the cross.

Sadly, lies and deceit paralyze and destroy  us as people.  I have lost count of those who have spoken to me formally, in Confession, or casually about the lies they have told or the deception in which they have been involved.  These are not creative, nor beautiful acts, they are the things that steal and destroy something of ourselves and something of others.  Lies rip the smiles from our faces and mar the beauty which is within us.

The Church has just entered the season of Advent.  A time to prepare for the birth of Jesus  – and to face our relatives across the dinner table!  For many it is a time to forget the wrongs of the past, the lies and deceit, the mis-understandings, the animosity, and to try and manage some kind of reconciliation.  Let us hope and pray that the great and the good, the rich and the poor may all know true reconciliation, as they begin to move towards the solemnity of Christmas, when we shall all ‘touch the truth’, brought to us by a God who did not grasp at greatness or popularity, at power or status.