St Lawrence, Deacon, Martyr, and Friend of the Poor...

 

Sermon. 6 August 2023.

Feast of St Lawrence (transferred from 10 August).

 

[On the day I preached without notes, and said less than this, so as to combine the theme of St Lawrence with the Feast of the Day – whose readings we had had – Transfiguration.]

 

Today is a day of great poignancy for me. I truly hope that it is not the last time we meet, nor that it is the last time I serve you by leading worship in some capacity. But what today is is the last time I will be rota-ed to serve you according to the pattern we have had. I will be moving much nearer to my place of work.

 

So today I do want to reflect on my time with you.

How lovely, then, that I do this on your Patronal Festival, when we keep the Feast of St Lawrence.

 

Let me first of all say that, while I do from time to time, like to bring in elements of my learning (such as it is) from my various courses over the years, and most especially concerning the Bible and its languages, when it comes to St Lawrence, I can only say that I know the basics. You may very easily know more about St Lawrence than me. So today will be back to basics!

 

St Lawrence, who lived in Rome in the 3^rd century, was a deacon. It is always good for a priest to have a deacon as a focus and hero. I do have one friend who says that a priest is not a deacon. He says that priests are ordained a deacon first, and then a priest, and the diaconal ministry is as it were dispersed into the priestly ministry. It evaporates. But this is very much a minority report. Everyone else says: once a deacon, always a deacon. A deacon is a servant, not in the sense of slave, but in the sense of one who waits on tables. One who waits on tables. What a lot is said in those words! The very language suggests a courtesy, an attentiveness, a wish to respond to the others’ needs and wishes. It is not for me to say if I have managed any of that courtesy with you. And we know if anyone has waited on tables, it has been you serving me, on those rare Sundays when the boss has let me stay with you!

 

But however bad I have been at it, on this Feast of St Lawrence, we – you and I – can recommit to sitting with the question of how we share in the deacon’s role, each in our own way. As Christians we are called to serve each other and others, to be attentive to them, to be… kind.

 

St Lawrence was also a martyr. It is easy to get things wrong, when Christians speak about martyrdom. In the early centuries, Christians not infrequently spoke about longing for martyrdom. Some say in this desire for a martyr’s death, the early Christians show how they hate life, hate life in the body. Others say that is reading too much into it, and it was rather just a psychological way of coping with the fact that it was quite likely that you would face death at the hands of the enemies of the Church, in those early centuries of persecution. In any event, longing for martyrdom is something we can surely leave behind.

 

We can also get it very wrong when we speak about martyrdom in our days. We might think it is something that we have left behind. Globally, we have not. We may think of the Coptic martyrs murdered by ISIS in Libya in 2015. And unquestionably there are others barely known, or not know to us. On the other hand, we may see martyrdom or at least persecution where it does not exist. In our context, here in the UK, the Church has lost and will continue to lose some of its privileges, and much of its sense of a right to be heard and respected by all. This – let’s be perfectly clear – is not persecution. The Church of England should not “play the martyr”, as it adjusts to a new place in our nation.

 

So how do we look to our saint and martyr, Lawrence? With admiration, with gratitude for his example, his fortitude. We might also ask ourselves: is there anything about my life as a Christian which disturbs anybody? Do I run away from even a hint of opposition? I have insisted we are called to be kind. But that doesn’t mean we are called to be nice. Kindness and niceness are very different.

 

So, on this Feast of St Lawrence, maybe we all – you and me – need to sit with the question of whether we have some prophetic edge in what we say and what we do. Are we ready to say that Christ stands for things which can be troubling for the complacent, for the powerful?

 

This brings me to the most famous story about Lawrence. When the Roman prefect demanded that Lawrence handed over the riches of the Church, he distributed as many of the items as he could, and instead gathered those who were poor and needy in his own community, and said to the secular authority: “Here are the treasures of the church. You see, the church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor!”

 

You can see how this would get him into trouble. Undoubtedly, in context, this was a prophetic statement. Laurence spoke truth to power. But it’s not a statement without difficulty. From another perspective, the poor persons themselves may well have thought themselves patronised. They may not want their own suffering, perhaps their cumulative agonies, to be dressed up as something good, because it shows the Church in a good light.

 

Bluntly, I don’t think the Church has ever quite settled the matter: Do we want to help the poor, or do we want to abolish the poor? Help, or abolish? Please do hear this right. I mean: Do we want to help those who are poor, those who are the mercy of others, in this way or that, bringing in comfort in some capacity? Or do we want to change society so that no one is poor, in the sense of being at the mercy of others? Do we want to play our part in building the very Kingdom of Gd?

 

I do feel that the Bible and the Christian tradition can be read in either way. And perhaps something would be lost, if we lost the tension between the two positions. Help, or abolish. On this Feast of St Lawrence, we – you and I - can commit to sitting with the question, whether we have the balance right.

 

I will leave you with a linguistic point. (How else was I going to finish?) Lawrence come from the Latin Laurentius, meaning “laurelled”, wearing laurels. You have never let me rest on mine, and you do not rest on yours, as you care as you do for this Church, congregation, village, and benefice. I thank you for it. I thank you for your consistent welcome to me. I rejoice in it. Indeed, on this Feast of St Lawrence, let us – you and I - rejoice. Amen.

Sermon. Read Amos - the Giant, Minor Prophet

Sermon. 18 September 2016, St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Trinity 16 (Year C)

Amos 8:4-7:

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

I was hoping today's would be short by my standards. Do you think I manage it? Of course, it's too late to take bets on it, but maybe you won't have to wait long to find out. What I can promise you is a very short summary. In fact, two words...

READ AMOS.

Or, more extensively, read the whole of the Book of the Prophet Amos, from which today's First Reading comes. What do you think?

Well, the good news is that to call it a 'Book' is just a convention; It is in fact just nine chapters. Here it is [shows], over six pages. It can be read in twenty minutes. So, will you do it? Or would you prefer a longer sermon...? Let's see...

Who was Amos? Amos was a prophet who was around, early-to-middle eighth century before Christ. Although he was from the South, Judah, he prophesied in the North, Israel. In his days, Judah and Israel are indeed divided, but they are rubbing along and doing pretty well. The Northern Kingdom has expanded northwards, and the two kingdoms together may even cover the same territory as at Israel's glory days – by which I mean, of course... back in Solomon's day. And with that expansion, there is much wealth; the rich are flourishing.

That's the context into which Amos (like most, well, all the prophets) spoke hard, negative things. To the rulers he threatened poverty, calamity, exile, and death. (Yes, it's as bad as that.) So he was 'advised' (by a cautious, bureaucratic priest; who else?) to leave the North and go home. That is presumably why he wrote down his prophecies. And, note: that is actually a new idea; Amos is the first prophet we know of to write down prophecies, the earliest of the written prophets. He's called a 'Minor Prophet', but that's only because his text is short; he's actually a revolutionary.

And Amos is revolutionary in other ways. It's actually evident in today's passage. You see, Amos is very critical, but one thing he does not criticise the people, or the rulers for... he does not condemn them for being religiously faithless. On the contrary, there's no doubt about it: the people of Israel are very, very religious. You have heard it in today's reading: they are good at observing both the Sabbath and the New Moons (and since new moons aren't all that important in the Israelite pattern of worship, presumably they kept all the festivals). Elsewhere, Amos insists they love and relish their religious practices [4.4-5].

What is more, at least in their own minds, subjectively, their religious activity is addressed to the true Gd. For Amos, the problem is not that the people are lost or trapped in idolatry (as for some prophets). There are two, or if you really stretch things maybe three references to so-called 'other gods' or alien religious practices in Amos – and that is it [2.4 ??; 5.26; 8.14]. When the People name Gd in worship, they do indeed use the nameless name given to Moses [e.g.5.18]. They are – in that formal sense – faithful to the One Gd.

What then is the problem - the devastating problem which means the prophet promises their devastation? It is that the powerful and rich among the people combine their worship of One Gd (which is on the face of it quite proper) with neglect of, and scorn for, and even violence against the poor and powerless people among them. We've already heard it: 'you that trample on the needy and bring to ruin the poor'. As you will see, when you read the whole book, that is something of a refrain for Amos. Earlier he says that the people 'trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way' [2.6].

This combination of piety and cruelty leads Amos to have Gd say:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps. [5.21-23; cf. 4.4-5]

Plenty of meetings for worship going on. All of it hated by Gd. Notice that it is not that Gd is against animal sacrifices as such; Gd is as much against hymn singing, even hymn singing that is addressed to him. Because when you sing hymns and wilfully neglect people, you harm rather than help your relationship with Gd. Bracing, we can even say scary stuff.

When you sing hymns and wilfully neglect people,

you harm rather than help your relationship with Gd.

I'd say this bluntness from Amos, the 'Minor Prophet', is what makes him a giant among biblical writers, calling out to each generation of worshippers throughout time every since.

When you sing hymns and wilfully neglect people,

you harm rather than help your relationship with Gd.

I do though need to add one thing: the problem for Amos is not that the people both worshipped Gd and still sinned. That's a position we are all in, always. We are all always glorious in our worship and sinning in some parts of our lives. That is why repentance and forgiveness are part of our worship – indeed, the beating heart of our worship. Far from having to be morally perfect to worship, our worship is a place of healing of the wounds our own sins have inflicted on us. It has to be so, and it is so.

So to be clear: the problem for Amos isn't that the people can be sinful, it is rather that the people were so trapped by their sins, and so lost in love and enjoyment of them, they could not even see them. Their problem was not imperfection; their problem was smugness. They were rich, safe, contented, stuffed, and cocooned and blinded to the needs of others. It's not that they went about being literally violent to the poor; it's that the way things were set up amounted to a form of violence against the poor, where they lacked what they needed just to get by. It's worship of the One Gd combined with smugness and a willingness to pretend other people don't even exist which pushes Gd out of our worship.

May it never happen to us! There may or may not be contemporary resonances. I'm inviting us to think about that, but leaving that open for our discernment. The main thing is: take heart; it does not have to happen to us. We can say: if we are at all troubled by our coldness of heart to others, then we are not in the position of those condemned by Amos.

I don't suppose for one minute that I am saying something you have not heard before. Still, I am insisting that when it is said as powerfully bluntly as Amos says it, then we should give thanks. Read Amos. Amen. 

Sermon. Leave the Dead to Bury the Dead? No, Jesus, No!

1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 26 June 2016

Trinity 5 (Year C)

Luke 9.51-61

The last time I preached I suggested we as a nation were celebrating the Queen's Birthday and a range of other things, which suggested harmony in all our diversity. What a difference a fortnight makes! Today it looks much more like we are a country divided. Indeed the divisions are themselves manifold:

• between young and old;
• between London and the provinces;
• between the four nations which make up our United Kingdom;
• and between those who have confidence in the political processes we've been used to, and those who have lost all confidence, perhaps.

Our lawmakers, negotiators and commentators will need cool heads, imaginative minds and generous hearts, if we are to make new national arrangements work. And, let's be honest, we as a Church (at whatever level) need to redouble our efforts to pray for our nation and its leaders.

One thing we won't need in the coming days is more sound-bites. You know - reducing

• complicated decisions,
• judgement calls,
• balances of arguments based on probabilities
• and genuine differences of conscience

to simple slogans.

Sound-bites, and simple slogans. The Church is not free of them of course. Indeed, some people use the Bible precisely to find sound-bites and simple slogans. They are typically meant to encourage us. If you go to a retreat house, there'll probably be a picture of a beautiful sunset on the wall and some Bible quotation about Gd being in charge and all being well. And there are some Christian traditions which have 'promise boxes'. Heard of them? A box with bits of paper in it, on which are written different positive Bible verses. Each member of the family can then pull out a Bible promise, before Sunday lunch.

I suspect you don't have a promise box. But, still, it's quite hard to fully shake off a sense that the Bible is a 'book of quotations'. That if we only had more time, learning or holiness, we could sit down and read the Bible, sentence by sentence, and find good things to build up our faith in every single sentence. But is that right?

You have realised I am hinting it is not right. It's not the case that the Bible just consists of encouraging sentences, to be consumed like a spiritual tube of Pringles, one after the other, on and on. No. The Bible is often hard to understand. It comes from an alien time and an alien place. And even people who have spent their lives studying the languages cannot always (cannot often) tell you what it actually means. There's no point hiding from this.

And... we have an example of one of those phrases which are hard to understand, and very hard to find encouraging, in today's gospel.

• Jesus says to a fellow Jew: 'follow me'.
• They reply: 'first let me go and bury my father'.
• Jesus, then: 'Let the dead bury their own dead'.

Or: 'leave [or even 'abandon'] the dead to bury their dead'.

What did Jesus mean?

Well, first let's be clear just how shocking this response from Jesus is. Throughout the world, dealing with the mortal remains of people who have died is important. No society simply leaves corpses to decay where they are (or rather, when they do, it is a measure of the horrific chaos they've descended to). All cultures have strong expectations and rituals about the right way of disposing of dead bodies - whether that means burial, cremation, or carrying off to a special place high in the mountains, and so on – and it's taboo/forbidden to go against them.

But no culture makes more of this than Judaism. There is a presumption, from Abraham and Sarah on, in favour of burial. And dealing properly with the dead is one of the most important of Gd's commandments. Failure to perform it brings shame. The rabbis stressed this. They pointed out how often Gd commands us to deal kindly and justly with the poor. And the poorest of the poor are the dead: not only do they not have money; they don't even have breath. What is more (continued the rabbis) the best kind of service is offered without any expectation of a return or thanks. And when we show proper respect to a dead person, we can be sure of this: they are not going to thank us or do us a favour back. So it's the ultimate good deed.

This means, both because every society has a horror of leaving dead bodies un-cared-for, and because in Jewish society, care for the dead is a solemn duty, and care for your own parents when they die is a family task that takes priority over anything else, today, Jesus shocks.

'Leave [or abandon] the dead to bury their dead.'

What did he mean?

We don't know. There are no details in the story to help us see the context and work out what was really going on. It is an encounter as stark and bare as it is shocking.

We don't know, but some suggestions are often made. One is that the first reference is - or both references are - not actually to the literally dead, but to the 'spiritually dead', meaning people who are not at all drawn to Jesus. There are those who feel compelled to follow Jesus, and there are those who are unmoved. And you have to decide which group you are in.

This is possible of course. But one problem with it is that it does seem to mean that Jesus is spectacularly insensitive. If anyone were to say to us: 'I've got to bury a relative', we would not say 'Ah, that gives me a good illustration on how to live properly, how to be Christian'. No. We'd find some words of consolation and offer help.

So indeed another interpretation is that nobody is really literally dead in this scenario. The person's father isn't dead. He may be seriously ill. But this means that what the person is asking for is not permission to perform a quick ritual but 'indefinite leave' from following Jesus, while they tend for his father. He is then asking to join-yet-not-join the disciples in their work. And it is that double-mindedness Jesus is objecting to. So he finds a colourful way to ask the person if they are serious. Or, even, on this reading, the father isn't ill, and the person called to follow is inventing an excuse which they think will work, will be unanswerable. They are fibbing, and Jesus is calling them on it.

Again, either of these is possible. But it is pure surmise. There's nothing in the text to require such a reading. And we might still ask: Why then if it is so, did Jesus not simply say: 'But your father isn't dead'? Why instead this phrase that rings out through the centuries? A phrase which, taking the words at their most literal and straightforward, every Christian community everywhere has always ignored:

'Leave [or abandon] the dead to bury their dead.'

Well, I offer one more interpretation. It says this. Jesus (or Luke, who wrote it down) knows how difficult the saying is. Indeed, it seems horrible, and calls us to the impossible. That is neither accidental, nor regrettable. It's actually the point. Humanly speaking, the Christian life is impossible. It calls for an abandonment of all comfort, security, custom and decorum. When the call from Christ comes, it is utterly urgent, and relativises everything, absolutely everything else. As Jesus in another place says: 'Greet no one on the way'. What we actually do to care for dead bodies is not the issue here. Not remotely. It is rather that we feel ourselves shocked to the core by Jesus's radical message. Not 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', but 'fierce Jesus, rude and upsetting'.

In other words, it is there to get us to face with all starkness the question:

Are we willing to find Jesus upsetting?

Given that Jesus is so prepared to shock,

that Jesus is not to be domesticated,

that he does not offer us simple rules to live decently

but calls us on an all-demanding adventure into the unknown,

do we (do we, the readers and hearers or this gospel) do we today...

leave Jesus, or do we remain with Jesus?

In another context, it's a question we are all very tired of, for sure.

But, given what Jesus says, it is today's question.

Amen.