Sermons

Third Sunday in Lent

Sunday 24th February at 10am

David Rhodes

Readings: Romans 5.1-11, John 4.5-42

A few weeks ago I was in South Africa. I was working with a child poverty charity helping them with their fundraising and and with their struggle to raise awareness of the catastrophic plight of millions of children in that country.

Children who are abandoned, abused, neglected, prostituted, and crushed by the multiple effects of extreme poverty and AIDS.

One reason I went is that I believe that's what God wants. I take the rather unfashionable view that, when Jesus said he had been sent by God to proclaim good news to the poor I think he really meant it. Especially as it cost him his life.

When he said that the whole of our relationship with God is summed up in the single word love: love of God and love of neighbour, I think he really meant it: even though it cost him his life.

When he said it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, I think he meant that too. Even though that sort of talk just about guaranteed his execution at the hands of the rich and powerful whose vested interests he threatened.

When he broke the law of God by unnecessarily touching a defiled leper, and thereby becoming defiled himself; by healing unnecessarily on the Sabbath; by eating with unclean hands; and consorting with unclean people; by asking for a drink of water from an unclean foreign woman whose people were bitter enemies of the Jews. When he did these things I do not believe for a moment he was sleepwalking. He was deliberately challenging a life-destroying system of military, economic and religious control.

A system which reduced a large section of the population to utter poverty and destitution.

What was good news for the poor? Justice, freedom, respect, love, acceptance. To remove those things which kept them oppressed and crushed.

But that sort of talk is a really effective way of losing votes among the better off.

So they killed him. Removed the problem. Silenced him. For two days they silenced him. But then something wonderful and inconvenient happened: the Resurrection.

And then something mysterious and much more convenient happened: the Ascension.

Convenient because the followers of Jesus: those in leadership positions. The men. realised that, whether or not Jesus was now at the right hand of God on high, he was definitely not with them in the flesh any more. And even more important: he was silenced. They could do the talking now.

What an opportunity. What a great chance to reshape the agenda. Rewrite the mission statement. Instead of good news for the poor it was to be good news for the Church.

And within a few short years what had been an open and inclusive fellowship becomes exclusive. What had been a movement bringing hope for the poor becomes a religious sect. Those who were called to be like yeast working invisibly through society spreading a new awareness of God's love with its demand for justice becomes instead a closed religious group. A body. The Body of Christ. The saved.

Saved? Saved from what? The Wrath says Paul sounding like Ian Paisley.

But what is this wrath?

Is it the wrath of the father when he ran to welcome the prodigal son home again?

Is it the wrath of a God who Jesus said we should address as Abba - dear and beloved father?

Funny, but Jesus doesn't seem to have gone for this wrath stuff very much. Wrath is useful if you want to frighten and control people: but perversely Jesus seems to have been more interesting in loving people and setting them free.

Strange how Paul seems to show little indication of having heard any of the parables - or the Lord's Prayer - or the idea of good news for the poor. Or a number of other things. Like what sort of a guy Jesus was.

While Jesus is always looking outwards, Paul and the others increasingly seem to be looking inwards: Paul repeatedly and characteristically uses words like us and ours. Those words and others like them appear no less than 26 times in today's quite short epistle.

I may be wrong but it feels to me like somewhere along the way the Jesus thing has been hijacked and Christianity turned into a membership group - a religion - something that Jesus showed no sign of ever wanting it to be.

It feels to me like the gospel is bring overwritten. The opposition of Jesus to the oppression inflicted by the rich and powerful is replaced by quiet acquiescence. Collusion. And so the rich continue to oppress the poor. Just look at the situation in South Africa if you doubt that

Sure, God raised Jesus from the dead: but the Church did its best to bury him again. Bury him in tradition; in liturgy; in great and ornate buildings; in ecclesiastical power and wealth; in page after page of words - the Old Testament the epistles and revelation at the side of which the small fragmentary gospels almost vanish.

And of course we bury Jesus in silence.

In the 17th century the East India Company banned the use of the Magnificat by its chaplains. The Magnificat with its inconvenient words "He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty. He has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek." Ten out of ten for political expediency. Zero points for integrity.

And what about the Church today? Have you noticed the bit that is missing from the Creed? "He was born of the Virgin Mary … suffered under Pontius Pilate."

Did nothing worth mentioning happen in between the two events? Was what Jesus said and did in his public ministry not worth a single line? We seem to focus a lot on the idea that Jesus died for our sins: is that what he believed was going on? Or do we know better?

Maybe he lived and struggled and fought and died to live out the love and justice of God.

Later in this service we will proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Fine, I'll go along with that. But does the mystery of faith really start with him dying?

Isn't part of the mystery of faith that God loved the world so much that he gave his own beloved son.

Jesus came not to start a chain of churches or sin rehabilitation centres, or even health clinics; but to proclaim the Good News of God's love to the poor, the outcast, the oppressed - those crushed by the greed of others. And to make things different.

The Church speaks on the Lord's behalf and, although it would never admit it, believes it has effectively silenced him. Or at least toned him down a bit. Smoothed over some of his rough edges.

But I am not sure it has completely succeeded.

When I worked alongside homeless people in Leeds and when I end up in squatter camps and townships in places like South Africa, I get the strange feeling that I am very close to the heart of the gospel. And other people say the same thing: among the poor and marginalised you come very close to the living Lord.

I think that we as the Church have a basic choice to make. We have to decide what our first priority is. Is it to be followers of Jesus Christ as we encounter him in the gospels and to put service of God above all else. Or is it to be members of a religious institution?

In an ideal world they might amount to the same thing. But the world is not ideal and neither is the Church. And they do not amount to the same thing.

For me that is the big question: do we respond to the call of Jesus to follow him in loving God and our neighbours as we encounter them in the poor and the oppressed? Or do we chose the seductively easy path of being members of a religious institution?

Is Jesus our saviour as today's gospel reading suggests? Yes, actually, he is. But perhaps not in the way the Church imagines.

He does not save us by threatening us with wrath and damnation: by bullying us and making us afraid. He saves us by showing us what it is to be truly human in all our diversity and calling us to be alive.

Truly alive within the laughter, and sometimes the pain, of the love of God.

That's the good news of the Kingdom of God.

Amen

Footnote:
After the service, in a very helpful conversation, it was pointed out that I had omitted "sin" from the sermon. This appears to be true and there is certainly no reference to the sort of personal sin exercising the Church of England and threatening its institutional unity at the moment.

In a short sermon there is neither the time nor the necessity to cover all the bases in Christian theology. However, I hope it was implicit in what I said [or intended to say] that the urgency which attaches to loving our neighbour, especially those suffering extreme poverty and needless death, arises out of an international situation directly caused by sin. In particular by the greed and selfishness of the rich and powerful.

This sin is both personal, in that individuals inside the church and outside it pursue power, status and wealth in a way which destroys other people; and systemic, in that we have created institutions which protect the wealth and power of the rich and ensure that the poor remain poor. I apologise for not making this clear.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay