John 14.8-17, 25-27; Isaiah 40.1-9.
Have you ever found yourself lost for words? Simply unable
to find the appropriate syllables to put around the thoughts that exist in your
head? A kind of verbal equivalent to ‘writer’s block’ where the words just stop
flowing and sentences refuse to take shape? It has occasionally been remarked
about me that this is something that I
rarely experience, and I’m not sure that that’s a compliment!
I suspect that, in reality, it is a universal experience,
the temporary inability to speak the momentary loss of voice the unexpected
silencing. And, for most of us, it passes, our thoughts re-order themselves,
and the words return. A friend of ours tells the story of the day she had a
stroke, triggered by preeclampsia during her second pregnancy. She suddenly
found that she couldn’t reliably speak even simple sentences, and she would
look at people, know who they were, but be unable to speak their name.
Thankfully, she has now made a complete recovery, but for a few days she was
dis-voiced, disempowered, verbally paralysed.
This image of being unable to speak is one which speaks
powerfully to the situations faced by many people in our city. Not in terms of
momentary confusion, or medical crisis, but in terms of their everyday
experience of the world. Think of the asylum seeker, refugee, or migrant
worker, recently arrived and as yet unable to speak English. The proliferation
of language schools within shouting distance of where we are today speaks of
the scale of non-native English speakers in our city. Just as a matter of
interest, I wonder how many of us here today would not class English as our
first language?
According to the 2011 census, whilst 78% of those living in
London would say that they speak English as their main language, 1.7 million
people, that is, the 22%, have a different first language. And of these nearly
320,000 say that they cannot speak English well or at all. Modern London is
massively multi-lingual, and whilst this is, in my opinion, a great thing,
there is a genuine concern that those who cannot speak English, are not only
dis-voiced, but disempowered and disadvantaged.
Someone who cannot speak the dominant language, will
struggle to access medical or legal help, and will most likely struggle to find
employment, or to access training, or further education. Yesterday, Bloomsbury
hosted the annual conference of the Churches Refugee Network, and we heard from
Sarah Teather, MP for Brent Central. She spoke of her frustration at
inaccessibility of the benefits system for asylum seekers and refugees, and of
the intransigence of the Home Office in processing requests for leave to remain
in the UK, something which many of us in this congregation can I’m sure echo
from our own experience of these bureaucratic systems.
And then there are those who are dis-voiced in other ways;
those who might speak the dominant language but who, because of other factors,
such as ethnicity, gender, disability, or socio-economic status, still struggle
to have their voices heard above the dominant narratives of power which give
voice to the interests of the powerful whilst effectively silencing the
concerns of the disempowered. Some people are simply unable to speak for
themselves and are at greater risk of injustice because no-one will speak for
them and they cannot speak for themselves.
What they need, of course, is an advocate. An advocate gives
voice to the voiceless, an advocate empowers the powerless by allowing their
cause to be heard. Which brings me to the plight of the ancient Israelites at
the time of their exile in Babylon. The history is well-known; it was the sixth
century before Christ, and the Babylonian empire were conquering all before
them. The city of Jerusalem lay in ruins, with its temple burned, and the
ruling class of the Israelites had been deported to Babylon where they were
living in exile in a foreign land.
Those who had once had status and a voice in their own land
were now exiles in Babylon. They were separated from their friends and
families, their homes were destroyed, their possessions confiscated, and they
were trying to survive in a strange land and a foreign city. In many ways, the
situation of the Israelites in exile in Babylon was not dissimilar to the situation
faced by many of those who find themselves exiled within our own great city.
And it was to this group of dispossessed, dis-voiced, and disempowered
Israelites, that the prophet spoke what may be the most radical and unexpected
message of hope in the Old Testament.
Isaiah 40:1 Comfort,
O comfort my people, says your God.
What’s interesting here is that the word translated as
‘comfort’ in our Bibles is the same word in the Greek version of the Old
Testament as that which we meet in John’s gospel to describe the Spirit of God.
It’s the word paraclete, and it carries a range of meanings. Yes, it can mean
‘comforter’, but it can also mean ‘counsellor’, or ‘helper’, or, as our Bibles
put it, ‘advocate’
The message of comfort to the people of God in Babylon
wasn’t a message of, ‘there, there, it’s all right’, or even, ‘there, there,
it’ll be alright’. Rather it was promise of comfort that derived from the
assurance that God had not forgotten his people, that God had not abandoned
them to their fate, that God would not leave them disempowered and voiceless
forever, that God would advocate for them, that God would speak up for them,
would speak out for them, that God would ensure that their cries for justice
did not go unheard that their shouts for mercy did not fall on deaf ears. The
message of comfort was a message of advocacy, it was a message of re-voicing,
re-empowerment, of the lifting up of the fallen and the binding up of the
broken hearted.
If we read on through the opening verses of Isaiah 40, we
find a recurring theme of speaking, of giving voice: verse 2 ‘Speak tenderly to
Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is
paid’. Here we encounter more words of comfort, spoken to people who are
suffering; and offering assurance that their time of trial is coming to an end.
verse 3 ‘A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD”’.
Here we hear a voice proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Lord who comes to
those who thought God had abandoned them to their fate. verse 6 ‘A voice says,
"Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?"’. Those who have
been silenced are now given a voice but to start with they don’t know what to
say, they don’t know where to begin. And it is often the case that those who
have been dis-voiced for so long may need someone to speak for them, they may
need the advocate, who can take their cause and clothe it with words to ensure
that it is heard. But then we hear the message, the shout that cuts through the
narratives of power, the cry that offers hope to the hopeless: verse 9 ‘Get you
up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with
strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to
the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!"’ The message of hope is the
message of the arrival of God, the coming of the one who hears the cry of the
marginalized, the one who gives voice to the cause of the silenced.
The arrival of the Spirit of God is nothing short of social
revolution, as the Advocate speaks out and those who mourn are comforted and
those who have been brought low are raised up and those who have been silenced
brought to speech. The revolution of the coming of the Spirit of God is the
equalising of humanity: as the proud are humbled and the humble are heard. The
scale of the radical nature of the coming of the comforter is found in the
metaphor used to describe it: verse 4 ‘Every valley shall be lifted up, and
every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and
the rough places a plain.’ This is the ultimate level playing field, it is the
levelling of humanity as God intervenes to deconstruct the oppressive
narratives of power and replace them with a divinely spoken story of equality.
The coming of the Spirit on Mary, the lowly maiden from
Nazareth, had much the same effect. In Luke’s gospel, we are told Luke 1:35
‘The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power
of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be
holy; he will be called Son of God.’ And in response, Mary raised up her voice:
the insignificant teenage girl sang aloud, and what a song! It has become known
as the Magnificat, and in it, Mary echoed the words of radical equality from
the prophet’s message to the exiles in Babylon as the appropriate response to
the coming of the Spirit of God. She sang, Luke 1:46-48, 51-54 ‘My soul
magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked
with favour on the lowliness of his servant. He has shown strength with his
arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought
down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled
the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his
servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy.’
When the Advocate comes, the world is changed. When God
intervenes by his Spirit, to speak words of truth and justice and righteousness
the narratives of the powerful are challenged as the voice of the powerless,
the martyred and the dispossessed cries out from the ground. As Jesus himself
said, when instructed by the Pharisees to silence his followers: Luke
19:40 "I tell you, if these were
silent, the stones would shout out." The cries of the oppressed cannot be
silenced forever, and whether it is the comfort of the Advocate to the Exiles
in Babylon, or coming of the Spirit of equality to an insignificant young woman
or the outpouring of praise from those who have seen liberation coming. The
Spirit lifts up the fallen, and gives voice to the oppressed, the Spirit brings
a revolution of equality to humanity.
And we see this in the events of Pentecost as the Spirit
came in power on the disciples empowering and enabling them to speak fearlessly
the message of radical equality whereby the Spirit is poured out upon all
flesh; upon slaves and free alike, upon men and women equally, with sons and
daughters prophesying, with old and young receiving visions from God, and it is
a message that knows no ethnic boundaries, accessible not to just those who
spoke the dominant language but to those who were gathered there from every
nation under heaven. This is the effect of the coming of the Advocate, this is
the comfort brought of the Spirit of God: All the divisions in humanity are
broken apart, the prevailing narratives of power and domination are challenged,
and the dis-voiced are given a new language that transcends the boundaries of
human speech and brings those with no voice to new voice before God.
The paraclete, the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, that Jesus
speaks of in John’s gospel is the Spirit of the Lord who anoints those who
receive it to ‘bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind, to
let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’ Luke
4:18-19. And we, as the Spirit filled community of Christ, are called to speak
out and not be silenced we are called to have courage and not to be afraid we
are called to be advocates for others to speak out for those who cannot speak
for themselves to bring to realization in our lives and in our city the radical
equality of the kingdom of God. And we might usefully ask ourselves who the
disempowered & the dis-voiced are in our city who are those whom no-one
will speak up for? Those who volunteer here on the Open Doors project, which
keeps the doors of the church open every day with a warm welcome for all will
tell of some of those who come in through the doors, and of some of the ways in
which we are able to advocate for those who have no-one to speak for them
One of the things which we value very much here as a church,
is that as the Spirit filled people of God we are not called to be
inward-looking, and we’re not called to speak only our own Christianese
language to one another. But rather we are called to be outward-looking, and we
are called to speak many languages. And I don’t just mean in terms of relating
to the many different ethnic languages of our city, important though that is,
with our Filipino group and our association with the Japanese church forming
important aspects of our life together. But we are also called to learn the
other languages of power that dominate our city: Who among us can speak the
language of politics? Who among us can speak the language of economics, the
language of the civil service, the healthcare system, the education system, the
legal system, the voluntary sector, the asylum and immigration system? All
those languages of all those institutions which promise so much but within
which people can so easily become disempowered and dis-voiced.
Between us, we speak so many languages, and the Spirit of
Truth, the Paraclete, the Advocate calls, and gifts, and anoints us to speak
words of truth, and justice, and righteousness. Sometimes, the greatest comfort
we can offer to the dis-voiced is someone to advocate for them, to hear them
and then speak on their behalf. Sometimes, what is needed is for those of us
who bring to the world that radical combination of a Spirit-given commitment to
human equality, and the ability to speak the languages of power, to become the
advocates for those who are unable to speak for themselves.
And part of this, and this is something we can all do, is to
persistently challenge the prevailing narrative of ethnic protectionism. We can
tell stories of truth about those whom society stigmatises. We can speak a
Godly alternative to the insidious propaganda of
racist ideology born of fear, self-interest and ignorance. Just because a nice
man with a pint and cigarette says it confidently and with a smile, doesn’t
mean it’s true! And who is to say differently? Who is to speak up for those
cannot speak for themselves?
As Christians, we have a deep tradition which speaks to us
the profound language of human equality. And as public opinion continues to
shift towards language which affirms me and my clan, whilst denying the other
and their reality; whilst public opinion makers continue to vilify the
vulnerable and scapegoat the susceptible; there is an urgent need, as Sarah
Teather told the conference here yesterday, for prophetic Christian witness,
for those who will stand up and be counted, for those who have a deeper,
richer, fuller vision of human flourishing, to
tell the stories of truth in the face of ideologies of deception.
The Spirit-sent message of comfort to the dispossessed and disempowered of our
city is one of advocacy, it is one of empowerment, it is a message of
re-humanising those who
have been dehumanised by their inability to speak the languages of power. And
the Spirit that is come upon us, calls us to action as we join our voice with
the prophet of old, and say to the people of the city:
Isaiah 40.1-9
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received
from the LORD's hand double for all her sins.
3 A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the
LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every
mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the
rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory
of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the
mouth of the LORD has spoken." 6 A
voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All
people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7 The grass withers, the flower fades, when
the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8 The grass withers, the flower fades; but
the word of our God will stand forever.
9 Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up
your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do
not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!"
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