Choose Life

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

13 August 2017

Romans 10.5-15  

Deuteronomy 30.11-20 

Earlier this year, Danny Boyle celebrated twenty years

            since the release of his wonderfully surreal film Trainspotting,

by releasing T2, the Trainspotting sequel.

Both films begin with a poems,

            known as the ‘choose life’ monologues

which echo our reading this morning from Deuteronomy

Here’s the poem from the second film:

Choose life

Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares

            Choose looking up old flames, wishing you’d done it all differently

            And choose watching history repeat itself

Choose your future

            Choose reality TV

Choose a zero hour contract, a two hour journey to work

            And choose the same for your kids, only worse,

                        and smother the pain with an unknown dose

                        of an unknown drug made in somebody’s kitchen

And then… take a deep breath

            You’re an addict, so be addicted

            Just be addicted to something else

Choose the ones you love

Choose your future

Choose life

And this question of what it means to ‘choose life’

            runs through so much of our wrestling with what it means to be human.

We come up with our answers,

            and we normalise them,

and then we condemn those who choose differently,

            writing off those who don’t fit our, or our society’s definition,

            of what an acceptable life must be.

But who are we to choose,

            and who are we to decide?

And on what basis do we write ourselves as normative,

            and those who differ from us as aberrant.

As Dawn said last week, one of the questions

            on which Christians have expended vast amounts

                        of energy, time, and effort

                        over the last two millennia,

            is this question of ‘who’s in, and who’s out?’

And so we have drawn our theological lines in the sand,

            beyond which we will not cross;

and we have erected our doctrinal boundaries,

            to fence off those who don’t see things as we do;

and we have condemned to the outer darkness

            anyone. not. quite. like. us.

But underlying this question, of who’s in and who’s out,

            is I suspect an insecurity, a fear perhaps,

that if we fail to successfully define ourselves, over and against the other,

            we may ourselves find that we are on the wrong side of the line;

fenced off from God’s eternal truth,

            and left languishing ourselves in the outer darkness.

What if we find that we haven’t ‘chosen life’ after all?

Which is probably why this question has mattered so much,

            to so many, and for so long.

There’s a lot riding on it.

I wonder, can you think of a time when someone has told you

            that, by their understanding of salvation, you were ‘out’?

I know I can.

For me, the feeling that I was being excluded began in my teens,

            when I was spending time with some Christians

            who had had very definite ‘conversion’ experiences.

You know the kind of thing, where someone can name

            the day, hour, and even minute that they were ‘saved’,

                        whatever that means…

Well, for me it was never so straightforward

            – I have no moment of salvation,

                        no time or place on which I can pin my journey from darkness to light.

I have always felt somewhat left out when we sing that verse of my favourite hymn

            which has the words ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free,

                        I rose, went forth, and followed thee’.

In my experience I no more needed converting to the love of God

            than I needed converting to the love of my mother.

I might need reminding of both from time to time,

            but I’ve always known them to be true.

And so one of my friends, who I respected at that time,

            told me that if I had no moment of conversion, I was not yet saved.

I was, by his counting, out.

Similarly with those who told me that unless I spoke in tongues,

            I did not have the Holy Spirit.

Actually, at that point I was using the practice of speaking in tongues

            as part of my devotions, but I wasn’t telling them that!

More recently, I (and others here) have been told

            that we are outside God’s will and kingdom

                        because of our positive views on same sex marriage,

            and that I will be judged harshly by God for leading his people into error.

Mostly, these days, I don’t bother arguing

            – but that doesn’t stop the barbs hitting home sometimes…

I mean, I know I think I’m right, but what if I’m not?

            I’ve been wrong before!

What if God is a God of judgment, and I am displeasing him?

So in my lesser moments I comfort myself

            by reiterating my certainty that God is a God of love,

                        who draws all his dear children to himself,

            and there is nothing I nor anyone else can do

                        to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And then I tell myself that those who are seeking to put me out are wrong,

            and that it is not I but they who have missed the truth,

and before I know it, and without realising it, I start to put them out

            – out of my mind, out of my life, out of my church, out of my faith…

and all too quickly I have become the person I didn’t want to be.

Can you relate to this?

            Does this, or something analogous to it, ring true for you?

Where would you draw the line?

            Who do you think is out, if you’re ‘in’?

Well, all this talk of in, and out,

            takes us right into the heart of our reading this morning

            from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

In today’s passage, we encounter Paul

            grappling with a deep and profound problem;

which is this

            – why is it that most of his fellow Jews

            have failed to turn towards Jesus as their long-awaited messiah?

From Paul’s point of view, this is a great conundrum.

Since his own mystical encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road,

            Paul the Jewish Pharisee had been convinced

                        that in the person of Jesus Christ, God had drawn near to humanity

                        to rescue people from the twin powers of sin and death.

            Through forgiveness and resurrection,

                        people had been granted new life in all its fullness,

                        offered as a free gift of grace without cost or condition.

And Paul had devoted himself to the proclamation of this good news,

            not just to his own people the Jews,

but to those from other ethnic groups throughout the Roman empire,

            known collectively as the Gentiles – or the ‘non-Jews’.

The mystery, for Paul, writing to the mostly Gentile church in Rome,

            is why it should be that his fellow Jews

                        were proving harder to convince about Christ

                        than their Gentile neighbours.

Surely, thinks Paul, it should be the other way around

            – after all, the leap from ‘faithful Jew’

                        to ‘faithful Jew who believes Jesus is the messiah’

            is not so great as the leap from ‘Emperor-worshipping Gentile’

                        to ‘faithful Christian’.

‘Can it really be’, wonders Paul,

            ‘that Gentiles are “in”, whilst Jews are now “out”?’

This is the conundrum that lies behind his train of thought here in Romans.

            And so he begins by drawing a distinction

                        between two different kinds of righteousness.

On the one hand, he says,

            there is the righteousness that comes ‘through the Torah’,

            through the Jewish Law.

On the other hand,

            there is righteousness that comes ‘through faithfulness’.

Even as I say this, I can almost feel Martin Luther tapping me on the shoulder,

            and reminding me that 2017 is the 500^th anniversary

                        of his decisive actions that led to the European reformation,

            in which he accused the church of his day

                        of having adopted a gospel of righteousness by works,

                        in which people were expected to earn their salvation

                                    by paying priests for indulgences for their sins.

Luther’s point was that forgiveness for sins comes by faith alone,

            not by any action on the part of individuals or the church.

And certainly, in the context of the corruption of the medieval church,

            Luther was on the money, so to speak.

And of course, the most influential text on Luther was,

            you guessed it, Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Luther equated Paul’s language of the righteousness that comes through the Law,

            with the Roman Catholic practice of selling salvation.

Against this, the righteousness that comes through faith

            was understood as being the faithfulness of the reformation churches

            in their teaching of faith alone as the basis of salvation.

In other words, Luther used this passage, and others like it,

            to argue that the Roman Catholic church was excluded from God’s covenant

                        because in their works they were denying the grace of God.

Historically speaking, this is all well and good,

            at least it is if you’re Protestant like we are.

But of course, none of this was what Paul was actually saying.

Paul was writing in the first century, not the sixteenth;

            and he was addressing Judaism and the law of Moses,

            not Roman Catholicism and the infallibility of the Pope.

We are on dangerous ground here,

            if we start to equate Luther’s denunciation of the faith of Rome,

            with Paul’s exploration of the lack of Christian faith of the Jews.

That way lies Europe’s horrific history of anti-Semitism.

Here is the crucial point:

            Paul was not seeking to write the Jews out of the covenant

                        because of their unwillingness to embrace Christ as the messiah,

            and he was not seeking to write them out of God’s grace

                        because of their ongoing adherence to the Torah laws of their ancestor Moses.

If anything, Paul was arguing the exact opposite to this:

            he cannot, and will not, accept

                        that the inclusion of other nations, the Gentiles,

                        into the covenant of God through Christ,

            has resulted in the automatic and wholesale write-off

                        of God’s chosen nation of Israel.

For Paul, the inclusion of the Gentiles expands Israel,

            it does not annihilate it.

Those who live by the Torah, who keep the commands of the covenant,

            can still find life in the doing of it.

The keeping of the Law is not a curse from which release is needed;

            but, it is incomplete.

For Paul, the Law finds its fulfilment in Christ,

            as the doing of faith finds its perfect partner

            in belief in the new life that comes into being in Christ.

All through the passage, there is a kind of dance

            between these two concepts of ‘doing’ and ‘believing’,

            as they move in and out, and round and round each other;

so, ‘confessing with the lips’ is paired with ‘believing in the heart’,

            as the actions of the mouth in proclamation

            find fulfilment in heartfelt faith in Christ.

Doing and believing are not, in Paul’s thought,

            mutually exclusive polar opposites

– they are partners, each pointing to the other.

So, the faithful behaviour of Paul’s fellow Jews,

            originating in obedience to the covenant laws of Moses,

points to faith in the new life

            that comes through resurrection in Christ.

And similarly, faith in Christ points to faithful action

            in the proclamation of the good news that has been received.

This is not, therefore, about the exclusion of the Jews in favour of the Gentiles

            – not at all –

it is rather about Paul’s hope and expectation

            that the faithful response of the Gentiles to the gospel of Christ

            will circle back through their faithful proclamation

                        of the gospel to all people, including the Jews.

As Paul is at pains to say:

            ‘There is no distinction between Jew and Greek;

                        the same Lord is Lord of all.’

The truly faithful response to the gospel

            is to become the one who walks on Mount Zion

                        bringing good news to those who have not yet seen and grasped

                        the universal gospel, of God drawing near to humanity in the person of Jesus.

But Paul has a further problem that he’s addressing here in Romans.

As with most of his letters,

            he’s writing to address a particular problem in a congregation.

I have always taken great comfort from the fact

            that the people Paul’s writing to

            seem to be constantly on the edge of making a total hash of things!

                        It gives me hope!

Anyway, the problem in Rome seems to have been

            that there is someone in the congregation there

trying to persuade the Gentile converts

            that in order to be properly saved, properly ‘in’,

            they needed to adopt the practices and requirements of the Jewish Law.

This person was almost certainly a Jewish convert to following Christ,

            but unlike Paul they thought that Gentiles needed to become,

                        in effect, God-fearing Jews

            if they were to follow Jesus the Jewish messiah.

We know from Paul’s other writings, and from the book of Acts,

            that if ever there was an issue which put Paul’s back up,

                        it was this one.

His conviction that the Spirit of Christ has been poured out on all flesh equally,

            whether Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free,

led him to a profound conviction

            that whilst there was nothing wrong

            with a Jewish Christian keeping the Torah Law,

it was certainly contrary to God’s gracious reaching-out to humanity in Christ

            for Gentiles to be made to keep it.

Whilst the law may be a blessing to the Jews,

            it is a huge diversion for Gentiles.

In fact, Paul goes further than this.

            The Torah Law becomes a diversion for the Jews too,

                        if they hang their righteousness on it,

                        rather than on faith in Christ.

Good works, whether they be works of the law

            or other faithful responses to God’s calling,

            must follow and spring from a person’s faith;

they do not precede it,

            and are not a condition of faith.

And so Paul is very clear:

            There is no action necessary on the part of humans

                        that can summon up the presence of Christ.

            We do not need to indulge in mystical visions or esoteric practices

                        to ascend to the heavens to bring Christ down to earth

                        – he is already here;

            and we do not need to deny ourselves or mortify our bodies

                        to descend to the depths to raise Christ from the underworld

                        – he is already raised and present with us by his Spirit,

                                    on our lips and in our hearts,

                        stirring us to works of faithful obedience to the calling of his Spirit.

So, where does this leave us?

Where are we in our quest to know who’s in, and who’s out?

            Are we any clearer about where we draw the line

                        and erect the boundary fence around the faithful?

            Do we have a clearer picture of who God would have us exclude?

            Are we any more certain of our own righteousness?

Well, taking the last one first: I hope the answer is yes.

            If you ever have cause to doubt your own place within the love of God,

                        I hope you can hear clearly from Paul’s letter to the Romans

            that your value to God

                        does not depend on your own appreciation

                        or understanding of your eternal worth.

You are loved by God who has come near to us all in Christ

            – as close as the words on our lips

            and the secret stirrings of our hearts.

And with regard to who’s in, and who’s out?

            I think that Paul’s point is clear:

            whoever we might think is out, is actually in.

Wherever we would draw the boundary,

            God re-draws it wider.

And when we seek to impose our favoured, carefully selected,

            beliefs and doctrines on people,

            in order to ensure their acceptability to God,

we fall into the trap of the false teacher in Rome,

            seeking to impose the Jewish law on Gentile converts.

‘But Simon’, I hear you cry,

            ‘surely there must be some limit to the love of God?

                        What about… other faiths?

                        What about… the worst of sinners?

                        What about…?’

                                    Well, you can fill in the next blank.

I think that for Paul, it was of first importance

            that God’s faithfulness to his people did not fail

            – and if God is faithful to even those who have rejected the messiah,

                        then God is faithful to all that he has made.

This, I dare to suggest, is at the heart of the gospel of Christ:

            Jesus died for all, and is raised for all,

                        that all may have new life.

Over the next few days and weeks,

            some very big choices will be made

                        by president Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and others.

Choices of life and death.

They, like each one of us,

            will have to decide where they will draw the line,

                        who they will condemn, and on what basis.

But their choice on the international stage

            is of course merely an extension

                        of the individual and communal choices

                                    that confront each one of us

                        in our own more parochial circumstances.

In a democracy, we take pride in the fact that we get the leaders we choose,

            but of course that also means that we get the leaders we deserve;

and whether the subject is membership of a union of countries,

            or how we will define and defend our borders,

            or who is welcome in our cities, homes, and churches,

the choice remains the same: who's in, and who's out.

How we respond to that choice,

            in our living, praying, and voting,

            has a direct effect on the world.

The residents of Charlottesville are facing that choice today,

            as they take centre stage in the all-too-literal battle

            between who’s in, and who’s out.

Clashes of ideology can quickly become murderous

            as people choose death as the path to victory.

And as the people of God,

            we have a calling to live into being in our world

            the startling reality that in Christ, there are no outsiders.

So the question before us, then, today,

            is what are we going to do about it?

How will we respond?

And here we need to hear the call of Moses:

            ‘Choose life, so that you may live’ (Deut 11.19)

Restorative Reciprocity

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Restorative Reciprocity

23 July 2017

Daniel 7.13-14 

Matthew 25.31-46 

Do you ever look at the world, and think,

            ‘where, in the midst of all this, is there any good news at all?’

So much of the world that we live in,

            from the local and parochial, to the national and the international,

            is dominated by darkness, despair, and desolation.

I could, but won’t, spend the rest of this sermon

            cataloguing just a tiny percentage

            of all the things that are wrong with the world.

I admit, that might be a bit depressing,

            but then sometimes the world is a depressing place.

In fact, there are some days when I just want to scream at the heavens,

            and call down divine judgment on this so-called developed country of ours,

where the poor are getting poorer

            and the services designed to lift up the unfortunate and the disadvantaged

            are being systematically pared away until there is little left of any use.

In fact, it’s probably a good job God wouldn’t respond

            to my cry for sudden and catastrophic intervention,

            or we’d all be in even more trouble than we already are.

I take some comfort from the fact that my desire for judgment is nothing new,

            and that people have been crying out for millennia

                        against the injustices of the world.

In fact, one of the key theological debates in the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament,

            revolves around the question of why bad things happen to good people,

                        while the bad people so often seem to get away scot free.

You can even make an argument that it is this very question

            which drives the development of theology,

            as people sought answers to this most problematic of pastoral problems.

The writer of the book of Deuteronomy proposed a solution

            which, in a nutshell, asserted that if something bad happened to you,

            you definitely did deserve it, whether you knew why or not.

The Deuteronomic idea was that health, wealth, and blessings

            were given by God to those who kept the covenantal laws,

while sickness, poverty, and misfortune

            were sent in response to disobedience.

This sort of mechanistic approach still has echoes today

            in the kind of Christianity where God is believed to reward the faithful

                        with happiness, money, and good health.

It is also found in religious traditions like Christian Science

            where sickness is believed to be a manifestation of a person’s sin;

            and so the path to healing is to be found in confession and repentance.

My grandfather was brought up as a Christian Scientist,

            and it was his teen age experience of being denied treatment for a tooth abscess,

                        and simply being told to confess his sin to make the pain go away,

            that turned him into the lifelong atheist that I knew and loved.

And the interesting question for me in the story of my grandfather,

            is whether the judgment of God falls against him personally

                        for his life of faith-less-ness,

            or against the community that abused him away from a life of faith?

Sometimes, I think, we over-emphasise the individual response,

            without giving sufficient weight

            to the corporate responsibility of a person’s wider context.

And so we meet in the Hebrew Scriptures another strand of thought

            which suggests that maybe we shouldn’t individualise this so much

                        and what if we took a broader, more communal view,

                        where nations and peoples rise and fall together.

We can see this perhaps most clearly in the personification of Israel

                        as a suffering servant in the book of Isaiah,

                        bearing the pain of exile for the sins of other nations done against her;

            while those nations are judged

                        for the way they, in turn, have treated God’s chosen people of Israel.

A further perspective can be found in traditions like that of the book of Job,

            who is depicted as a righteous man

                        whose sufferings are sent as a test of his faith,

                        to see if he will curse God when his blessings are withdrawn.

Throw into this the development of a theology of the afterlife,

            and the possibility that rights may be wronged

                        and punishments handed out

            in some future world rather than in the present one,

and the stage is pretty much set for our parable this morning,

            the story of the sheep and the goats.

It’s a fascinating little story,

            told by Jesus towards the end of Matthew’s gospel,

and it combines some key ideas:

            There’s the idea of a future judgment;

            there’s the question of human suffering,

                        of why some people are hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, and imprisoned;

            there’s the concept of corporate guilt borne at a national level

                        that take us beyond individual culpability;

            and there’s the conundrum of where God and his people fit into all this.

It’s also nowhere near as straightforward to interpret

            as it may at first appear.

I’ve chosen this parable for our reading for today

            because I think it provides an interesting perspective

                        on the question of how we, as the followers of Jesus,

                        might respond to the needs of our world,

            and particularly the problems caused by poverty and homelessness.

As we all know, the needs of the needy aren’t going away;

            if anything, they are getting more severe,

with the rise of food banks, clothing exchanges,

            night shelters, day centres, soup kitchens, and other crisis services

                        all testifying to the growing problem of people in our city

                        without enough resources or support to function within normal society.

The roll-back of state benefits has created a vacuum

            into which many charities and churches, ourselves included, have stepped

                        as we try to provide help to those at greatest need and risk.

It’s what David Cameron called ‘the Big Society’,

            where we take responsibility for one another through charitable enterprise,

                        rather than expecting the state to do it collectively on our behalf

                        through the welfare system.

So, what do we think we’re doing when we feed the hungry,

            clothe the naked, and visit the sick or imprisoned?

Well, one reading of the parable of the sheep and goats

            might lead us to believe that we’re earning our place in heaven!

Have you ever seen an advert for a Christian charity,

            asking for money to support the good work they’re doing

                        with the poor, or refugees, or children, or whatever,

            and the poster has a picture of a representative of their client group,

                        overlaid by the text,

                        ‘whatever you did for the least of these …dot … dot … dot …’?

 Just stop and think this through with me for a moment,

            to its logical conclusion.

In the parable, the nations are separated into sheep and goats;

            the sheep inherit the eternal kingdom,

                        while the goats are cursed and sent away to the eternal fire

                        prepared for the devil and his angels.

And what is it that separates the sheep from the goats?

            It is the feeding of the hungry and the thirsty, the welcoming of the stranger,

                        the clothing of the naked, and the visiting of the sick and imprisoned.

The Son of Man says,

            ‘Just as you did it, or did not do it, to one of the least of these

                        who are members of my family, you did it, or did not do it, to me.’

So here’s the deal:

            If ‘the least of these’ refers to the generic poor of the world,

                        to the homeless, the refugees, the imprisoned,

                        the homeless, and the starving,

            then the only thing you need to do in this life,

                        to ensure that you go the heaven and don’t go to hell,

                        is to feed, clothe, welcome and visit.

Doctrine doesn’t matter, nor does confession or repentance,

            nor reading the Bible, nor worship,

            nor any of the other things we often think are so important:

                        just devote yourself to good works and your salvation is assured.

Five hundred years after the dawn of the Reformation,

            I think I can just about hear Martin Luther turning in his grave!

But actually, the implications of our fundraising poster are even more sinister,

            because the inference is that if you don’t give them your money,

                        you’re a goat, and are going to the place of fire!

So my question is:

            are we satisfied with this dominant interpretation

                        of the parable of the sheep and goats,

            or is there another perspective

                        which may open it up for us in a different way?

The key question here is,

            who exactly are intended by the phrase,

            ‘the least of these who are members of my family’?

Is it the poor of the world, or is some other group in view here?

Many scholars are of the opinion that Matthew actually intends

            this to refer to the family of Jesus,

            to Christians rather than the generic poor.

This would certainly be consistent with elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel,

            where the disciples of Jesus are referred to as the ‘little ones’.

In chapter 23, Jesus says that ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’ (23. 11-18);

            and in chapter 18, the disciples are told

                        that they must become like little children (18.3, 4);

            while the warning is given that anyone who causes a ‘little one’

                        to stumble in their faith will be subjected to judgment (18.6, 10, 14).

And if this is right, that in Matthew the term ‘little ones’

            is used to refer to the family of Jesus, to his disciples and followers,

it opens up a whole different perspective

            on our understanding of the sheep and goats parable.

For a start, it moves us away from the idea

            that salvation directly correlates with good deeds towards the poor.

The reason I think this is significant,

            is because the more popular reading

                        assumes that Christians are wealthy and privileged enough

                        to offer help to those less fortunate than themselves.

If the ‘little ones’ are the poor of the world,

            the idealized division in humanity is between privileged Christianity

                        and a needy underclass.

I think that the reason the ‘generic poor’ interpretation has proved so persistent,

            at least in Western Christianity,

            is because all too often Christianity is a privileged religion.

This is the legacy of Christendom,

            where the faithful did a deal with powerful to mutual benefit,

            and the established church was born.

And a wealthy and powerful church will always be drawn

            to an interpretation that allows them to justify their privilege in the eyes of God

            by giving out of their wealth to help the least and the lost.

The traditional reading is therefore a manifesto

            for patriarchal top-down charitable giving,

            which has suited traditional western Christianity very well.

However, if the ‘little ones’ are not the poor of the world,

            but are the disciples and followers of Jesus,

            a more challenging and far less comfortable interpretation begins to emerge.

In the parable, the nations of the world are held to account

            for how they treat the ‘little ones’

            who are hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, estranged, and imprisoned.

This is not middle class Christianity,

            this is the suffering church following in the footsteps of its savior

                        who had no place to lay his head,

                        and who died a criminal’s death.

In terms of Matthew’s original readers,

            the persecuted minority of Christians in the latter part of the first century,

            struggling to keep faith in the face of overwhelming opposition,

it makes perfect sense for them to see themselves as the ‘little ones’,

            suffering for the cause of the gospel;

and in many places around the world today,

            a long way from our privileged Western Christendom heritage,

            Christians are similarly on the receiving end

                        of being the least and the last in society’s structures.

Interestingly, all the characteristics of the suffering church in this parable:

            being hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, and imprisoned,

are also listed by Paul in his second letter to the Corinthian church,

            where he speaks in these terms of his own sufferings

            for the sake of the gospel of Christ (2 Cor. 11.16-33).

It begins to look as though Christians have no right to expect privileged treatment

            at either the hands of the almighty or the state,

                        no matter how faithful they might have been.

We are not rewarded with wealth and health

            for our devotion, piety, or loyalty,

and any privilege we may have is not ours by right;

            which means it is not really ours at all.

At best it is ours on trust;

            but we have no claim to status or honour.

In fact, discipleship after the example of Christ

            may well involve us learning that the first shall be last,

                        and the last shall be first (Matt. 20.16),

            and that the greatest among us will be the servant,

                        while all those who exalt themselves will be humbled

                        and all who humble themselves will be exalted (Matt. 23.11-12).

Can you see what has happened in our reading of this parable?

As we have reframed ‘the least of these who are members of my family’

            away from referring to the poor of the world,

            and towards being a characteristic of authentic discipleship,

we have distanced ourselves from an approach to Christian charity

            whereby we earn our salvation through deeds of mercy

                        performed by wealthy believers;

and we have distanced ourselves from a theology

            of privilege as a God-given reward for faithful obedience.

Instead of these, we have arrived at a place

            where authentic Christianity is found in the suffering church,

                        and in our identification with the poor and the powerless.

And this has the capacity to radically transform our engagement

            with those who currently hungry, naked, unwelcome, and unwell in our world.

No longer do we throw them a gift from on high,

            to secure our salvation and assuage our consciences.

Rather, we are called to draw alongside them,

            in full knowledge that in other places, and other times,

            the body of Christ is to be found in the gutters and prisons of the world.

We are called to lay aside our superiority

            and to meet the other as an equal;

            as much a dearly loved child of God s we are ourselves.

And this equality of encounter opens

            the possibility for a genuinely transformatory relationship to develop.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking

            at how we can and should develop

            our church’s ministry to, and engagement with, the vulnerable of our city.

In the first sermon, on Toxic Charity, we saw how

            a patriarchal, trickle-down approach to charity

                        can end up making things worse

            by perpetuating the inequalities and dependencies

                        that lead to homelessness and disengagement from society.

In the second sermon, last week,

            we explored together what it might mean

                        for us to bear one another’s burdens,

            and to discover the strength that comes through mutual support.

Well, this week, in our final sermon in this short series on charity,

            I want us to realise that there is simply no New Testament mandate

                        for one-way, top-down charitable giving.

Through our reconsideration of the parable of the sheep and goats,

            we have seen how the key text used to justify one-way giving

                        can actually call us to something far more transformatory;

                                    to an equalizing of relationship

                                    and a laying aside of power and status,

                        so that a new basis for engaging the poor can begin to emerge.

And what comes into being from this is not charity,

            it is reciprocity.

We have to give up our isolation from the poor we are trying to help,

            and instead to discover that what it is to make ourselves vulnerable,

                        and to find ways of integrating with the poor.

If we perpetuate an ideology of offering service from on high,

            we lose the truth of the gospel

            and are in danger of making things worse rather than better.

Our goal is not to feed the hungry, or to clothe the naked,

            it is to see people restored as independent members of society,

            integrated into the networks of reciprocity that we ourselves benefit from.

Therefore the goal of our attempts to help

            must be to create networks of mutual dependence,

            rather than one-way giving which perpetuates unequal dependencies.

Dawn and I have been thinking long and hard about how,

            in our different projects here at Bloomsbury,

                        we can build in reciprocity,

                        where people give as well as receive;

            and where any vestiges of a culture of one-way giving

                        are transformed into mutual, reciprocal relationships.

This may not change the world, but it can begin to,

            because all revolutions start small and grow.

And what is at stake here is very big indeed.

Our nation is in a time of great transition.

            From the privatisation of social services and housing,

                        to the big and as yet unanswered questions about immigration and Brexit,

            we are going to need people who will stand up

                        and offer a way of engaging the poor and the vulnerable

                                    that is transformatory rather than punitive;

                        which raises people up,

                                    rather than keeping them in their place;

                        and which offers a way out of the seemingly ever-widening gap

                                    between the haves and the have-nots.

This is a societal problem, it’s a national issue,

            and it goes far beyond the individual.

So how will our nation be judged, I wonder,

            when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all his angels with him?

The answer to that may well depend, at least I part, on what we do next,

            both individually and corporately.

A nation that distances itself from its collective responsibility

            towards the poor and the vulnerable,

and which rolls back on commitments to, for example, universal healthcare,

            sounds to me like a nation stoking the fires of judgment.

And in such contexts our wider community will need communities of faith,

            where people keep faith in a generous, loving, care-full God,

            who cares for each person without distinction.

So, are we ready to be that gospel people,

            will we be those who take the good news

            of the radical equality of the gospel of Christ

                        and start living it into being here, in the heart of our capital city?

Will we be those who, in the name of Christ,

            discover and share the joy that comes

            from participating in the renewal of society,

                        one life at a time?

If so, then all hope may not yet be lost,

            and maybe God’s judgment,

                        that I am sometimes so ready call down on,

            can be justifiably deferred in the interest of mercy and forgiveness.