Bloomsbury Central Baptist
Church
2nd November 2014
11.00
Living Wage Sunday
Matthew
23:1-12 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his
disciples, 2 "The
scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat;
3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do
not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard
to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are
unwilling to lift a finger to move them.
5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make
their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 6 They love to have the place of
honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7 and to be greeted with respect
in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8 But you are not to be called
rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9 And call no one your father on
earth, for you have one Father-- the one in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called
instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11 The greatest among you will be
your servant. 12 All who
exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be
exalted.
Micah
3:5-12 Thus says the LORD concerning the prophets who
lead my people astray, who cry "Peace" when they have something to
eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths. 6 Therefore it shall be night to
you, without vision, and darkness to you, without revelation. The sun shall go
down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; 7 the seers shall be disgraced,
and the diviners put to shame; they shall all cover their lips, for there is no
answer from God. 8 But as for
me, I am filled with power, with the spirit of the LORD, and with justice and
might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. 9 Hear this, you rulers of the
house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert
all equity, 10 who build Zion
with blood and Jerusalem with wrong! 11
Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its
prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say,
"Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us." 12 Therefore because of you Zion
shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the
mountain of the house a wooded height.
The
people once described by Napoleon
as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ are
now, it seems,
divided
into ‘scroungers’ and ‘hard working families’.
You’re
either contributing to society,
or taking from it.
If
you’ve got a job, and you pay your taxes,
then you have earned your right to
be part of our society,
and to access the benefits of our
common wealth.
If,
however, you’ve not got a job,
and especially if you’re in receipt
of some support from the state,
you are a ‘scrounger’, and you have
no moral right
to access the benefits that are
sustaining you.
I
think that this is an invidious narrative,
but it is one with huge popular
appeal;
particularly
among those who work hard, pay their taxes,
and resent funding the lifestyle
choices of the ‘scroungers’.
Earlier
this year, the Chancellor George Osborne said:
“Where I have had the opportunity I have focussed
the effort on those on low and middle incomes… That's my priority, that's where
my tax-cutting priorities lie because I want to help those hard-working
families."[1]
And
the Prime Minister David Cameron said:
“welfare is there to help people who work hard and
should not be there as a sort of life choice… That is why we need to make work
pay and cut the welfare bill - cutting this bill will enable us to cut taxes
for hard-pressed households.”[2]
But
it’s not just from the Conservative side of the house
that such rhetoric comes…
In
his conference speech this year, Labour leader Ed Milliband asked:
“Can anyone build a better future for the working
people of Britain?”.
before
offering the following answer:
“I am not talking about a better future for the
powerful and the privileged. Those who do well whatever the weather. I’m
talking about families like yours treading water, working harder and harder
just to stay afloat. For Labour, this election is about you.”[3]
Both
sides of the political fence have bought into the narrative
that we’re all either scroungers, or
workers.
And
both sides recognize the political capital that is to be gained
from reducing the national burden of
the benefit system,
in order to correspondingly reduce
the taxation burden
borne
by hard-working floating voters.
As
Jesus might have put it, in one of his more cynical moments,
“They tie up heavy burdens, hard to
bear,
and lay them on the
shoulders of others;
but they themselves are unwilling to
lift a finger to move them.”
And
so we find ourselves at our Gospel reading for this morning.
Come
back with me, for a few minutes, to the world of first century Judea,
as we start to unpick Jesus’ damning
indictment
of the religious and
political leaders of his own day,
before coming back to our own world,
to consider how his
critique might speak
to our contemporary
situation.
The
first thing to say, is that our passage from Matthew 23,
which we had read to us earlier in
the service,
cannot
be read in isolation from something that Jesus says
a few chapters earlier in Matthew’s
gospel.
Matthew 11:28-30 "Come to me, all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am
gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
We
often encounter this saying as a comfort for troubled souls;
I’m sure you know the kind of thing,
you’ve heard it in sermons before:
Are
you weary? Weighed down by the trials of life?
Are you finding the burden of your troubles too hard to
bear?
Then come
to Jesus, like Pilgrim in Bunyan’s famous novel,
and
lay down your heavy burden at the cross;
because Jesus is gentle, humble, meek and
mild;
rest in him and your soul will be
restored.
His yoke is easy, and his burden is light…
Except,
this was not really the point
of what Jesus was talking about in
Matthew 11,
and
it certainly wasn’t what he was talking about
when he spoke of burdens too heavy
to bear
in our reading for this morning from
chapter 23.
The
burden that Jesus had in mind,
was not the sense of soul-weariness
that
afflicts us all from time to time.
Nor was it the burden of persistent
sin,
damaging and destructive
though that can be.
Rather,
Jesus was talking about burdensome systems of oppression,
that had kept people enslaved and
ensnared,
to
the service of the unjust regime
that
held political and religious power.
The
Judea of the first century
was an occupied country.
The
Romans held ultimate political power,
but it was exercised locally through
a permitted network
of puppet kings and religious
leaders.
This
devolved system of governance had local responsibility
for administering taxation,
legislation, and social care.
And
as long as the Roman Empire received what it required,
the details of how the rest played
out at a local level
was something for the indigenous
rulers to sort out.
For
the average person, in an average Jerusalem street,
the “hardworking first century family
man”,
just “trying to make
ends meet”,
the system was a burden from dawn
till dusk.
Taxes
were exorbitant,
and the system for their collection
was rife with corruption.
The
political leaders were out-of-touch,
and motivated primarily by
self-interest and self-aggrandizement.
And
the religious leaders were utterly compromised,
and thoroughly enmeshed in the preservation
and legitimation of the status
quo.
The
Judean equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus
was over taxed, under paid, and put-upon
at every turn.
By
the same token,
those in need society’s help,
the widows, the orphans, the extreme
poor, and the disabled,
were
having their legally enshrined right to support
cut back at every opportunity.
Isaiah
may have told the people of Israel that they should
“learn to do good; seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, [and] plead for
the widow.” Isaiah 1:17
But
the reality of Israel at the time of Jesus
was a long way from this ideal.
Beggars
lined the streets,
women were vulnerable and defenceless,
and the sick were pushed to the
margins of society and beyond.
So,
when Jesus says,
‘Come to me, all you that are weary
and are carrying heavy burdens’
he
is speaking to those who are put-upon and done-unto
by an economically oppressive and
destructive system,
borne out of a combination of Roman
Imperialism
and unethical localised
administration.
The
yoke that Jesus invites people to throw off
is the yoke of the oppressor,
it is the yoke of tyranny.
And
his invitation to take up an alternative yoke,
is an invitation to start living by
a different set of rules,
it
is a call to start living
as citizens of a different empire,
as those who belong to different
kingdom.
Once
again, Jesus sounds like a dangerous revolutionary,
and his words of challenge no longer
sound so warm and comforting.
This
is no gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
comforting the tired and weary with
platitudes and clichés.
Rather,
this is Jesus the radical,
calling the oppressed to a new world
order,
and
challenging the self-interested powers-that-be
by unmasking their hypocrisy
and exposing their indifference to
the plight of the poor.
The
empire to which Jesus calls people
is a kingdom of mercy, justice, and compassion.
It
is a new world-order where those who wearily toil
are liberated from the burdens that tyrannize
them.
It
is a vision of the world where justice is fairly administered
for both the rich and the poor alike
(Lev. 19.15; Deut 1.17),
and
where each member of society is of equal value
in the eyes of the law, as well as
in the eyes of the Lord.
This
is the empire of God,
and Jesus invites people to start to
experience it in the here-and-now.
Not
as some longed for future,
or as some vision for the afterlife,
but
as a reality that transforms human society
as the values of eternity break into
the present.
It
is in the light of this vision, first spelled out in chapter 11,
that Jesus turns his attention in
chapter 23
to one of the main stumbling blocks
to the realisation of the new world.
And
so the religious leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees,
become his particular target.
The
thing that seems to particularly offend Jesus
about the scribes and the Pharisees
is that they ought to know better.
They,
after all, are the custodians of the laws of Moses.
They are those who have read Leviticus
and Deuteronomy,
and have taken upon
themselves the task
of applying the ancient
laws to the first century world.
The
scribes and the Pharisees know the commands
to exercise fair and impartial
judgment,
they
know the commands to care for the weak and the vulnerable,
they know the commands to exercise
taxation with probity.
They
know this stuff, and they teach it easily enough;
but, says Jesus, they don’t live it
out.
It
is not real in their lives, and so they are hypocrites.
They
should be at the forefront
of challenging the oppressive
practices of the Roman Imperial system.
But
instead they have become complicit in its abuses,
and are profiteering from its corruption.
Instead
of lifting the yoke of oppression from the shoulders of the poor,
they are tying up heavy burdens,
hard to bear,
and laying them on the shoulders of
others,
while
they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.
They
have betrayed the vision of the prophets
and have sold their birthright for a
mess of pottage.[4]
They
have accepted the bribe
that the empire offers to all who
might challenge it,
and
have exchanged their call to transform the world
for the more immediate lure of power,
status, and wealth.
And, I have to ask,
are we any different?
The
followers of Christ down the centuries
have demonstrated a ready capacity
to align themselves
with promises of power, wealth, and
status.
We
have silenced ourselves, and shut ourselves up,
all in the cause of
self-preservation and self-interest.
Time
and again we have lost the vision of the prophets
for a world transformed and a world
renewed,
because
we have set our sights on the things of this world,
and not on the revelation of the new
world that is breaking in upon us.
But
the call and critique of Jesus echoes down the centuries to us, today,
challenging us to consider our
relationship to power, wealth, and status,
and
asking us to look long and hard at the complicities we bear
in the treatment of the poor, the
vulnerable, and the disabled.
The
people of our country cannot simply be split
into “hard working families” and “scroungers”,
to “givers” and “takers”,
and
to do so is to imbibe a narrative of domination
where the poor are squeezed,
the vulnerable are oppressed,
and
the weak are heavy-laden.
The
gospel of Jesus Christ calls us all to engage society
in ways that are transformative, and
not entrenched.
It
calls us to see Christ in the face of the stranger,
and to see God-given humanity of
each created person.
There
may be no such thing as the undeserving poor,
but any of us who look at our own
wealth
and tell ourselves that
we deserve it,
may well find that we are closer to
the Pharisees and the scribes
than we are comfortable
admitting.
This
coming week is Living Wage week,
and there will be a lot of publicity
about the importance of
paying people an hourly rate
that
is sufficient, not only for subsistence living,
(which is the premise of the minimum wage(,
but
a rate that is capable of lifting people out of poverty.
The
Living Wage foundation believe
that work should be the surest way
out of poverty.
Work
should not be a burden on the shoulders of the poor,
but a means of grace and dignity.[5]
As
a church, we are part of the Citizens UK movement,
which aligns us with other community
groups,
ranging from churches, to schools,
to synagogues, to
hospitals, to mosques.[6]
And
in this way, we are directly involved
in the process of community-organising
to effect change
in some key and vital areas in both London
and the wider UK.
So,
through the London Citizens group,
we are aligned with campaigns
relating to, amongst other things,
the governance of the UK,
improved social care,
child health,
affordable housing,
treatment of asylum seekers,
employment and training
opportunities,
credit unions,
and the living wage.
If
this kind of direct involvement in the transformation of society,
at a non-party-political level
is
something that you are interested in,
please do speak to me, or Dawn, or
Ruth,
and
we will talk with you about how you can get more involved
on behalf of Bloomsbury.
This,
it seems to me,
is where the rubber starts to hit
the road
in
terms of our faith taking shape in our society,
to transform the world in the name
of our saviour Christ Jesus.
[1]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/georgeosborne/10602842/George-Osborne-Low-paid-first-in-line-for-tax-cuts.html
[2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9975274/Benefits-are-not-a-life-choice-says-David-Cameron.html
[3]
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/09/ed-miliband-s-speech-labour-conference-full-text
[4]
Genesis 25.29-34
[5]
http://www.livingwage.org.uk/
[6]
http://www.citizensuk.org/
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