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Good morning. Last September Thames Water found a 250-metre long fatberg blocking an East London sewer. Fatbergs form when household items (flushed down loos) congeal with grease and fat (washed down sinks). The Museum of London said yesterday a slice of the fatberg it had placed on display had become a popular exhibit. Alternative energy companies are talking about its potential as a biofuel. On average we each create 64 tons of landfill per lifetime. That’s a lot of footprint. It’s not surprising we resort to euphemisms. One local dump I know describes itself as a ‘community amenity facility.’ Somehow waste isn’t just a practical issue – it represents everything in our lives we haven’t got a place for, don’t know what to do with. Most people have parts of their personal histories they regard as waste – that year at college doing the wrong course, that relationship with someone who turned out to be a complete liar, that apprenticeship working for a bullying swindler. A lot of people have parts of their own personality they’ve never understood what to do with – useless skills, uncontrollable desires, destructive habits. Such kinds of waste clog up our memories and our self-respect more thoroughly than a fatberg blocks a sewer. When we grieve the loss of a loved one or see a deeply yearned-for project turn to dust, one word haunts us more than any other – the terrible, overwhelming, crushing waste. When a person of faith seeks to grow in wisdom and grace, it’s amongst these memories, habits, and disordered relationships that they’re looking for change, healing, peace. All four of the gospels tell the story of Jesus feeding 5000 people in a deserted place. It seems the crowd was so captivated by his teaching that almost no one brought any food with them. The disciples distribute enough and more to everyone. At the end there are twelve baskets left over. Why collect up the surplus, in a hot country where food was hard to store or transport? The story portrays the way, in God’s future, nothing is finally wasted. We can make mistakes, like the crowd not bringing anything to eat, or us pouring oil down the sink. We can be selfish, like the crowd not sharing what they had, or us unwisely disposing of our rubbish. We can be foolish, like the disciples being slow to trust in Jesus when they’d seen him do amazing things before. For most people, the real griefs and losses and failures can’t be flushed down the loo. They linger and fester. For me, the promise of faith is all about turning metaphorical fatbergs into fuel. The challenge of my faith is to believe that nothing – nothing whatsoever – is finally wasted.