You Make Your Own Luck

A sermon for

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

11^th July 2021

 

Psalm 1
John 9.1-41
 

Listen to this sermon here:
 
Ernest Hemingway, the great American author,
            apparently used to tell his children that,
            ‘You make your own luck’.
 
And I’ve always felt that this philosophy has a certain compelling logic to it;
            I mean, sure, to be lucky you have to be in the right place at the right time,
                        but if you never put yourself out there,
                        you’ll never be in that right place
                                    when luck comes knocking at your door.
 
It’s a bit like the similar quote attributed to Woody Allen,
            who suggested that 80% of success us just turning up.
 
If you hide in your room for ever,
            you’re unlikely to meet the person who transforms your world.
 
But is it true, that you make your own luck?
            Does life really work that way?
 
Is there some immutable law at work,
            which rewards people for their faithful efforts?
 
Professor Richard Wiseman,
            - and let’s just take a moment to appreciate how amazing his name is -
            Professor Richard Wiseman ran a study a few years ago on why some people
                        appear to be consistently either lucky or unlucky.
 
He concluded that for many people,
            the key to unlocking good luck
            lies in a person’s approach to life.
 
He identified four attitudes shared by those who experience luck:
            Firstly, he says, those who expect good fortune often experience it.
 
            Secondly, good luck comes to those who maximise their chances of experiencing it,
                        by creating, noticing, and acting on opportunities.
 
            Thirdly, people who listen to their ‘gut feelings’ and act on ‘hunches’
                        are often lucky in their outcomes.
 
            Fourthly, people who experience themselves as lucky
                        tend to cope with bad luck by turning it around
                        and imagining how things could have been far worse.
 
So there we are: science says that you can indeed make your own luck!
            Which is all fine, until that one day when it isn’t.
 
Because as we all know, even if someone stacks the odds in their favour,
            by keeping their weight down, exercising regularly,
            never smoking, eating their fruit and veg, or whatever,
none of this is any guarantee that the cancer cell won’t suddenly start multiplying;
            and no amount of putting yourself out there in the right place
            actually guarantees that you’ll be there at the right time.
 
You might be able to improve your chances of being lucky,
            but as any gambler at the roulette table will tell you:
                        winning streaks don’t last,
                        and the house always wins in the end.
 
Well, Hemingway, Allen, and Wiseman aren’t the first people
            to contemplate whether there is some relationship between what we do,
            and the way we experience the falling of the cards of life.
 
The ancient Hebrews also sought for meaning in life,
            and for them the question of theology was central to the answer.
 
The book of Deuteronomy suggests
            that there is a system for winning or losing in life,
            and that it is based on the immutable laws of God’s creation.
 
And this system is very simple:
            if you remain faithful and obedient to God, you will be blessed;
            but if you are faithless and disobedient, you will experience trouble and trauma.
 
This system is known by theologians as the Deuteronomic perspective,
            and once you’re alert to it, you can find it cropping up time and again in the Bible,
as the rising and falling fortunes of Israel
            are correlated against their faithfulness or disobedience
            to the demands of the covenant and the laws of the Lord
 
We can even find it in the New Testament,
            for example in the question asked of Jesus by his disciples
            when they encountered a man born blind.
 
The question, recorded in John 9, was classic Deuteronomic perspective:
            "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
 
The underlying assumption is clear:
            if someone has misfortune in their life or family,
            they must in some way have brought it on themselves.
 
They have failed, so to speak, to make their own luck,
            and instead have made their own bad luck.
 
We even get echoes of this Deuteronomic perspective
            in some strands of contemporary Christian theology.
 
There are plenty of preachers around
            who teach a doctrine of health and wealth,
            the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’,
where those who give faithfully to the church
            are promised that they will be rewarded with wealth in return;
while those who live faithfully according to the commands of the church
            are promised healing and health in their lives.
 
Again, it all works fine, right up until the moment when it doesn’t.
 
Another place where we get this Deuteronomic perspective
            is in some of the Psalms,
including our reading for this morning, Psalm 1.
 
We’re beginning a short summer series looking at a selection of Psalms,
            and as we shall discover,
            there are other perspectives in the Psalter on life’s fortune and misfortune;
but this week we’re beginning at the beginning,
            with a Psalm that is deeply rooted in the cause-and-effect logic
            that equates obedience with blessing, and disobedience with disaster.
 
And my first question, as we come to look in a bit more detail at Psalm 1,
            is, ‘who on earth writes this kind of stuff?’
 
It’s always a good idea to try and contextualise a passage from the Bible,
            before we start to try and apply it to today,
            and there are a few clues available to help us here.
 
Firstly, we can observe that this Psalm is written for people who are literate.
            If the expectation is that in order to be blessed, you will meditate on God’s law,
            this infers an ability to read the books of the Law in the first place.
 
So, we might conclude that it’s written for, and presumably by,
            the educated elite of ancient Israel.
 
Secondly, it’s written for those with time on their hands.
            Not only does the Psalm expect you to read the Law of the Lord,
            but you are expected to do it day and night.
 
This Psalm doesn’t target those who are out working in the fields all day,
            and then collapsing into bed exhausted as the sun goes down.
 
Rather, it’s written for those who have free time,
            and it wants them to use that time in a certain way.
 
Thirdly, it’s use of agrarian imagery is rather idealised,
            envisaging verdant trees planted by fresh flowing water,
            consistently yielding their fruit in season.
There’s no recognition here that most trees in Israel
            eked out their existence on bare hillsides
            with failed harvests an ever-present threat.
 
Rather, this Psalm presents the metronomic turning of the seasons
            as a somewhat romanticised metaphor for human existence,
with those who meditate on the Law of God day and night
            flourishing and bearing fruit,
whilst those who don’t do this are blown away like chaff.
 
Which brings me to my fourth observation on this Psalm:
            it has absolutely no middle ground at all.
There’s no room here for compromise:
            you’re either living the perfect life, or you’re not;
you’re either righteous or you’re wicked;
            you’re either innocent or you’re guilty;
you either live a life that conforms to God’s purpose,
            or you’re ignoring God and disrupting the good ordering of creation;
you’re either happy or you’re unhappy;
            you’re either well orientated or you’re disintegrating.
 
For this psalmist, the connection between devotion and destiny is non-negotiable:
            you will stand or fall, according to your faithfulness to the Law.
 
And taking these points together, we start to get a picture emerging
            of who this Psalm was written by, and who it was written for.
 
It’s a Psalm for the elite, for the well-off,
            for the economically secure, the potentially significant, and the self-assured.
 
It’s a Psalm for those who experience life’s breaks as falling their way,
            and who want to believe that they deserve their good fortune,
            that they have, in some way, made their own luck.
 
But there’s another aspect of this Psalm that I’d like us to notice,
            and this is the way it justifies its Deuteronomic perspective
            by appealing to the rhythms of nature.
 
Psalms such as this, sometimes known as the ‘Creation Psalms’,
            present their theology as an outworking of creation itself.
Their message is that
            ‘this is the way things are, because this is the way God made them to be’.
 
And a creation-orientated theological perspective such as this
            will typically be articulated by the more powerful people in society,
            because social conservatism find a natural partner in creation spirituality.
 
The truth is that the experience of a ‘well ordered’ life for some,
            is typically achieved at the expense of others,
and those on the winning end of this formula
            want to keep those on the losing end of it in their place.
 
So, claiming that it is this way, because God make it this way,
            becomes a powerful justification for social control.
 
A few weeks ago, I cited the example of a twentieth century creation hymn
            greatly loved by many of us, and often sung in Sunday School.
 
Listen to the words again:
 
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
 
Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.
 
It’s another idealised vision of creation,
            skating over the reality of the death and destruction
            that are also part of nature’s rhythm and cycle.
 
It’s a sanitised, child-friendly hymn,
            embedding in the psyche of those who sing it
                        a conviction that all is as it is
                        because that is how God made it;
            and the corresponding conviction to this
                        is that the way things are
                        is the way God wants them.
 
But as we noted a couple of weeks ago,
            there is a more sinister verse to this hymn,
            which thankfully we don’t sing any more.
 
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate;
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
 
In an article on this hymn, my friend Mark Woods notes the context
            in which Cecil Frances Alexander wrote these words.
 
He says:
 
The real tragedy behind that verse lies in when and where it was written. Mrs Alexander was rooted in Protestant Ireland, and a stalwart defender of the establishment.
 
The 'rich man in his castle' was an English Protestant; the 'poor man at his gate' was an Irish peasant.
 
The Irish potato famine killed a million people in Ireland between 1845 and 1852, and caused another million to emigrate, mainly to the United States.
 
There were terrible scenes as tenants were evicted from their cottages, unable to pay the rent.
 
Cannibalism was not unknown. The government's response was completely inadequate.
 
‘All things bright and beautiful’ was written while this was at its height.
 
There's no reason to suppose Mrs Alexander was anything other than horrified by the famine whose effects she must have seen.
 
But there's something chilling at the thought that she could live through such an experience and remain completely unchallenged by any thought that things ought to be different; that God did not "order the estate" of those who were dying of hunger and cold while others were well-fed and warm.[1]
 
And here we have the problem in a nutshell.
 
Creation hymns which celebrate the good order of creation
            are typically representative
            of the perspective of those for whom life is good.
 
And they can so easily become
            not only a self-justifying defence of the status quo,
            but also a mechanism for social control;
embedding in those who are required to sing them
            an attitude of obedience and acquiescence,
            and a resistance to rebellion and resistance.
 
And so Psalm 1 articulates a creation-theology of obedience,
            striking a note of Torah-observance
            as the basis for a good and Godly life.
 
But before we close our Bibles and give up on Psalm 1,
            I think there is another perspective here that might help us.
 
Because whenever God is at work,
            things are rarely quite as they appear to be.
 
We’ve been reading Psalm 1 from the perspective of its author,
            as a piece of theology to justify the powerful,
            and control the powerless.
 
But, as is so often the case,
            when you read it from a different perspective,
            it starts to sound rather different.
 
Psalm 1 condemns those it calls ‘the wicked’,
            those who it says fail to keep the commands of the Law.
 
It doesn’t, actually, condemn the poor, or the vulnerable,
            it doesn’t condemn the weak, or the defenceless.
 
In fact, it offers those whose experience of life is terrible
            a glimmer of hope that God’s good intention for creation
            transcends the present reality of human suffering.
 
Elsewhere in the Psalms, it becomes clear that ‘the wicked’
            are those who oppress the poor and the needy (Pss. 10; 37.14)
 
And Walter Brueggemann, the great Christian scholar of the Psalms,
            suggests that Psalms such as this,
 
provide a point of reference, even for those who share in none of the present “goodies,” but who cling in hope to the conviction that God’s good intention for creation will finally triumph and there will be an equity and a Sabbath for all God’s creatures.[2]
 
In other words,
            if Psalms such as Psalm 1 create a thought-world
            where God rewards the faithful,
then those who are currently experiencing life as catastrophe,
            can reasonably hope that they will get their reward in some other way,
                        at some other time.
 
For some, this becomes the hope of heaven,
            and you get emerging within Judaism in the centuries before Jesus
            a strand of belief that looks to the afterlife
                        for the righting of the wrongs of this world.
 
But this too is open to abuse by the powers-that-be,
            because they can keep people subservient in this life
            by promising them liberation in the next.
 
But another, more radical strand, also emerges,
            which says that whilst God’s ideal world
            may be one where the faithful are rewarded,
the reality of this present world is that sometimes the faithful suffer unjustly,
            as the wicked who oppress the poor go unpunished.
 
But rather than pushing the solution for this into the future,
            they rather adopt a principle of seeking to bring God’s future into the present.
 
This is the theology behind Jesus saying to his disciples
            that the Kingdom of God has come near (Matt. 3.2, 4:17; Mark 1:15),
            through his ministry of healing and reconciliation.
 
It is the theology behind the Lord’s prayer,
            when Christians pray that the God’s kingdom come on earth,
            as it already is in heaven.
 
It is the theology of social transformation,
            as God’s people are motivated to overthrow the powers of oppression,
            and bring into being a world of justice.
 
As Walter Brueggemann notes,
            a Psalm of social control can become a Psalm of social anticipation,
            which in turn can become a Psalm of social criticism,
            which in turn can become Psalm of revolution.
 
And so we discover here what Martin Luther King declared
            at the height of his struggle against racism:
That the arc of the moral universe is long,
            but it tends towards justice.
 
Those who seek to construct theologies of control,
            will discover that their liturgies of domination
            contain within themselves the seeds of their own deconstruction;
as stories of oppression
            always give way to narratives of liberation.
 
The Deuteronomic Perspective ultimately fails in the face of the Exodus and the Exile,
            as God’s nature is revealed,
            not as the God of the status quo,
            but the God of disruption.
 
And this trajectory continues into the life and ministry of Jesus,
            who declared of the man born blind
            that ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned’;
and then proceeded to heal him on the Sabbath,
            to the great consternation of the Pharisees.
 
And this trajectory continues
            into the life and ministry of the church of Christ’s followers,
as we too are called resist all attempts to enshrine power and justify privilege,
            and to declare that the kingdom of Heaven draws near
            to bring freedom and liberation to all.

---

[1] https://www.christiantoday.com/article/the-dark-secret-of-a-great-hymn-all-things-bright-and-beautiful/92034.htm
[2] Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, p.28 

Good, with money

 A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

20 June 2021

Mark 10:17-27   
Amos 5:6-7; 10-15   

Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/good-with-money

One of the recurring themes in British political discourse
            are discussions on the gap between the rich and the poor,
                        and on ways in which the rich might, or might not,
            be taxed in order to preserve the social care budget
                        that protects those at the bottom end of the social spectrum.
 
And I have long had an interest
            in how we might, as Christians,
            help our society to do ethical things with money.
 
I mentioned this briefly in last week’s sermon,
            when we were looking at how Christianity might bring healing
            to the sickness that so often affects the global financial markets.
 
And  our passage this morning from Mark’s gospel
            takes us right to the heart of Jesus’ thinking
            on issues of wealth, economics and justice.
 
In these verses from Mark chapter 10,
            we meet a very rich man
                        who is wrestling with some profound questions about eternal life.
 
And in this I suspect he is not alone:
 
There are numerous examples
            of good people who also have a lot of money.
 
Not everyone who has money is bad, or evil, or compromised.
            And there are many people who have money,
                        who also try to live good lives.
 
This rich man who comes to Jesus in Mark’s gospel, would, I think,
            have liked to think of himself as ‘good, with money’.
 
A bit like the old Co-Op bank slogan
            where they used to claim that they were
                        ‘good, with money’
with the clever double meaning emphasizing that not only do they intend to be
            ‘good with money’
                        in terms of being able to invest wisely
                        and get a good return on their investments
but also that they will use their money to do ‘good’:
            they are ‘good’, and they have money, they claim.
 
Well, we all know how that worked out for the Co-Op,
            with their infamous ‘crystal Methodist scandal’
but I wonder whether our rich man from Mark’s gospel will fare any better?
 
Yes, he has money,
            but he clearly also wants to be ‘good’.
 
And so he comes to Jesus,
            who has been travelling around
                        preaching a message of good news and newness of life,
            encouraging people to live lives of eternal value
                        and to consider their lives from heaven’s perspective
 
And the rich man says to Jesus,
            "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
 
In response, Jesus gives him a stock Jewish answer
            and lists six of the ten commandments.
 
Interestingly, Jesus misses out the first four ‘theological’ commandments
            citing only the final six ‘ethical’ ones.
 
This man’s issue is not, it seems, to do with his belief in God,
            it is to do with his behavior.
How his belief works itself out in practice.
 
And in fact, Jesus actually changes one of these:
            In the list of the ten commandments in Exodus 20
                        the final one is :
                        ‘You shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbor.’
            But Jesus changes this in the list he gives to the rich man
                        to ‘You shall not defraud’,
            which is actually not a command from the ten commandments at all,
                        but from Leviticus 19.13 – which says
‘You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.’
 
With this deft bit of editing,
            Jesus reveals that he is more interested
                        in how this man became so affluent,
            than he is in any pious theological inquiry about eternal life.
 
The temptation facing this rich man,
            is not about coveting the wealth of others:
                        after all, he already has great wealth.
            Other people covet his possessions,
                        not the other way around.
 
Rather, his particular problem is the acquisition of wealth,
            at the expense of those less fortunate then himself.
 
So let’s return to the man’s original question:
            It seems that this rich man assumes he can inherit eternal life.
 
It seems that he is of the opinion that eternal life, like property,
            can be inherited! – passed on from one’s ancestors.
 
Like many who find themselves the beneficiaries of a socioeconomic system,
            he sees the benefits of religion  - eternal life, in this case -
                        as a mere reproduction
                        of his own class entitlement.
 
He has inherited wealth,
            and now he wants to inherit the eternal life,
            to which he also believes he is entitled by virtue of his privileged birth.
 
In first century Palestine, the basis of wealth was land,
            and the primary mechanism for the growth of such wealth
                        was the acquisition of land through the debt-default
                        of small agricultural land holders.
 
The socioeconomic system of Jesus’ time
            was one of haves, and have-nots.
With rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer,
            and the gap between the two getting wider with each generation.
 
The landed class took great care, of course,
            to protect its entitlement from generation to generation,
and to ensure that their inheritance was protected.
 
And so the rich man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life,
            and Jesus tells him:
                        that he should not participate in the defrauding
                                    of others out of what is theirs,
                        in his ongoing possession and acquisition of wealth.
 
Jesus doesn’t directly dispute the man’s improbable contention
            that he has ‘kept the whole law’ since his youth,
                        even though it flies in the face of Jesus’ own assertion
                        that ‘there is no-one good but God alone’.
 
Instead, Jesus ‘looked at the man and loved him’,
            whilst then delivering the hardest truth of all:
 
‘You lack one thing’ – he says to the man who has everything.
            What the man lacks is forgiveness…
 
This rich man has a debt to pay:
            he remains indebted to the poor,
                        who have been defrauded down the generations,
            in order that he may inherit his great wealth.
 
‘Go’ pleads Jesus,
            ‘sell what you own and give the money to the poor’
 
This is radical stuff:
            Jesus is asking the man to do nothing less
            than dismantle the very system from which he derives his privilege.
 
If he gives his money away,
            there will be nothing for his children,
and the system of inherited wealth and privilege,
            will be challenged as money is redistributed to the benefit of the poor,
            rather than hoarded for future generations of the wealthy elite.
 
According to the logic of Jubilee,
            by redistributing his ill-gotten surplus,
            the man stands to receive true ‘treasure in heaven’.
 
But it doesn’t end there, ‘Come, follow me’, says Jesus.
 
This isn’t just about asking the man to change
                        his personal attitude towards his wealth,
            or to treat his servants better,
            or to reform his personal life.
Rather, it is asking him to participate
            in the overturning of the system that generated
            his elite status in the first place.
 
The man gives up and leaves dejected,
            because, says Mark, ‘he had many possessions’.
 
We can imagine his distress:
            if he does as Jesus asks,
            where does that leave his children and the rest of his family?
 
In the context of class inequality,
            Jesus’ message of repentance means redistributive justice.
 
The economic model Jesus is proposing here
            is one where wealth does not simply perpetuate and accumulate
                        in the hands of the few,
            as they pass it from generation to generation
                        whilst the poor get poorer.
 
Rather, it is one where the structures are in place,
            to ensure that the flow of money goes down through the social strata
                        as well as up.
 
I think there are echoes of Jesus’ challenge to the rich man
            in the Philanthropic Pledge,
            initiated by multi-billionaire Warren Buffet.
 
This directly challenges the rich elite of our time
            to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity,
and Buffet himself has pledged to give
            99% of his wealth to philanthropy.
 
However, he states that even this level of giving
            will leave his personal lifestyle and that of his children untouched.
 
And with insight, he says that a vast collection of possessions
            ends up possessing its owner.
 
So, back to gospel…
 
Mark wants his readers to know
            that this story means exactly what it says,
and so he has Jesus drive the point home
            with some absurdist humour:
 
"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!  ²⁵ It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
 
The joke here about the camel and the needle
            has been twisted by commentators anxious to avoid its sting.
 
In an interview for the Independent newspaper,
            the born-again Christian rock star Alice Cooper
            trotted out the old chestnut about the eye being a gate in the city wall,
            as he sought to justify his own great wealth.
 
But the reality is that Jesus named the largest known animal,
            and the smallest known aperture,
precisely to denote the impossibility of the rich
            entering the kingdom of God with their wealth intact.
 
You cannot, as they say, take it with you!
            But you can, of course, leave it all to your kids…
 
Anyway, the disciples protest ‘Who then can be saved?’
            and we might well join them in this question.
Because we, like them, all to often interpret wealth
            as a sign of God’s favour
 
Those of us who have inherited western wealth and privilege,
            have done so in a context
                        where church and state have colluded down the centuries ,
            to create a version of Christianity
                        that is predominantly educated, privileged, and elitist.
 
And those who have shaped our thinking,
            have been so anxious that Jesus here might be saying
                        something exclusive or critical about the rich,
that they have often missed the fact that this terrifying passage
            is not primarily about the rich at all.
 
It is about the nature of the kingdom of God.
 
The kingdom of God, says Jesus, is that place and time
            when there are no rich and poor.
 
It is the place and time when Jubilee is enacted
            when the equality of all humans in the eyes of God
            becomes reality in the lives of all.
 
And this vision of the kingdom of God
            - the place where eternal life is to be encountered,
is a place which the rich, by definition,
            cannot enter with their wealth intact.
 
This is a vision of a genuinely new social order
            based on economic equality,
and Jesus acknowledges that it seems truly impossible.
 
Certainly in the culture and religion of capitalism,
            any economic model that has been predicated
                        upon re-distributive justice
            has been considered high heresy.
 
And the nightmares associated with totalitarian communism
            still haunt any such discussions.
 
And yet churches
            have been quick to embrace movements
            such as the Jubilee debt campaign
                        which has called for the cancellation
                                    of the debts owed to the west
                        by heavily indebted poor countries around the globe.
 
The biblical vision of Jubilee
            was neither a utopian prescription,
                        with no earthly hope of ever working,
            nor an eschatological hope,
                        to be realized only in the hereafter.
 
Rather, it was intended as a practical hedge,
            against the inevitable concentration of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few
                        to the detriment of the whole society of ancient Israel.
 
The vision of Jubilee restitution and redistribution,
            originates not from social idealism,
            but from the revealed character of God.
 
The dependent poor were to be released from their debt,
            because the God of Israel
            was the God who brought Israel out from slavery in Egypt (Lev 25.35-38).
 
Land was to be shared amongst the people rather than retained by the few
            because the land ultimately belonged to God
            with those living there doing so as his tenants (Lev 25.23-28).
 
This Old Testament Jubilee vision represents the antithesis
            of those systems that promote wealth concentration,
and Jesus not only insists that redistributive justice is possible
            but he implies that without it we cannot speak of the kingdom of God.
 
Mark’s portrait of the rich man seems to suggest
            that he is ‘possessed by his possessions’,
and today we might call this the addiction of affluence.
 
Perhaps it is because economic greed
            is the most difficult and pervasive of human addictions
            that Mark emphasizes Jesus’ love for the rich man.
 
But love speaks the truth:
            ‘Recovery’ from this addiction will, for the rich man,
            take the form of ‘reparation’
 
Few subjects in the gospel are as difficult for us to address as this one,
            and the trouble with wealth is that it is so insidious:
                        We hardly even know how to define it!
 
And yet its pursuit can so easily become one of the primary goals of our lives,
            unless we take Jesus’ counsel seriously.
 
The truth is that if we mean it when we pray the Lord’s prayer,
            if we mean it when we say
                        ‘your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’
            then we are committing ourselves to the task
                        of seeing a new social and economic order
                        come to birth in our midst.
 
And one of the ways we can do this
            is to ask ourselves about the ways
                        in which wealth exhibits itself in our society.
 
One distinguishing characteristic of wealth,
            is the opportunity to make decisions and choices
            about the direction of our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.
 
Where and when and into what circumstances we were born,
            often determines whether we can make choices in life,
                        and if so, which ones.
 
Often it is difficult to differentiate
            between necessities and luxuries.
In fact, the very definition of ‘necessity’
            varies widely according to the context of our lives.
 
Food, clothing, shelter, recreation, and security,
            for example, are basic human needs.
But how we interpret the satisfaction of these needs in our own lives,
            may provide our contemporary context
            for the application of this gospel story to our own lives.
 
Food, for example, is just one example:
            In a world where the diets of pets in wealthy households
                        are significantly better than the diets
                                    of many children in poor households
            something is terribly wrong.
 
Or what about clothing and shelter?
            We live in a world where designer goods fill the shops,
            whilst the streets remain home to those who freeze at night.
 
Affordable housing is a growing political issue,
            as the need to build more dwellings
            becomes ever more apparent.
 
We are often encouraged to believe that wealth and privilege ‘just happen’
            - by good luck, or hard work, or the will of God.
 
And I’m reminded of the verse we don’t sing any more
            from ‘all things bright and beautiful’
 
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And fashioned their estate.
 
The reason this is an unacceptable theology,
            is that great wealth and great injustice
            all too often go hand in hand.
 
Now, I don’t want to reduce this to a personal issue,
            and I don’t want to target those of us who are personally wealthy
                        into feeling guilty and inadequate.
 
That is not the point of Jesus challenge to the rich man
            and we shouldn’t make it such either.
 
But we do need to recognize
            that we live in a world where the vast majority of people barely survive,
            and the small minority live extremely well.
 
Mark’s story about the rich man
            needs to be interpreted in our own times,
            as an invitation to transform the systems and structures
                        that create wealth inequality,
                        that perpetuate poverty,
                        and that maintain privilege within our own society,
                        and within our world.
 
It is an invitation to enter the world of politics,
            to make our voices heard on issues such as international debt relief,
            on the housing crisis,
            on the policies relating to the fair and just taxation of the rich,
            on the provision of benefits for the poorest of the poor,
            on the welcoming of refugees…
 
If we ignore these, and confine ourselves to a privileged vision of faith,
            where we look after me and mine, or us and ours,
then we too, like the rich man,
            may find that we have turned away from Jesus
            and his dawning kingdom.
 
And forgive me, but I remain doubtful
            that a political rhetoric of ‘spreading privilege’, and ‘trickle down economics’,
                        which does not also address those systems
                        that further benefit the already super-privileged,
            has anything more than very limited  practical application.
 
But, if we can learn to hold lightly to our possessions,
            and if we can learn to be generous
                        with our wealth and privilege and power,
            and if we can learn to follow Jesus wherever he calls us…
 
Then maybe we can learn what it is to be good with money,
            and maybe we can, by the grace of God,
            find our place in the dawning kingdom of God.
 
Where the poor find value
            and where first are last and the last are first.

Healing in the Marketplace

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

13 June 2021

 

Listen to this sermon here: 

Mark 6.30-34, 53-56
 
Roll up, roll up, roll up,
            two for a penny or three for a pound,
            cheap at half the price,
            get ‘em while they’re hot
            eat ‘em while they’re fresh
            here today, gone tomorrow
            guaranteed to last for the lifetime of the product
 
The traditional cries of the market trader
            have echoed through the streets of London for centuries
And the great markets of Petticoat Lane, Camden Lock,
            Borough, Covent Garden, and so many more
remain as much a ‘must see’ part of a tourist’s visit to London
            as any of the great museums or art galleries
 
Some of you will know that when I was in my late teens,
            I spent a year running a market stall
                        on Camden Market
and for a young man from the pleasant leafy town of Sevenoaks,
            this was, I can tell you, something of an eye-opener
 
It was at Camden Market that I first encountered
            the huge ethnic and social diversity
            that is such a feature of this great city
 
and it was at Camden Market that I worked alongside
            and became friends with
            people from so many different cultural backgrounds
 
It was also at Camden Market that I first encountered
                        the shadier side of London life,
            with the ‘under the counter’ trade in drugs
                        a regular feature of some of the stalls around mine
 
It was at Camden Market that I was,
            for the first time in my life, physically threatened,
                        as a man with a broken off bottle
                        waved it in my face and demanded my takings.
 
It was at Camden Market that I experienced
            the strong bond between stallholders
            as those from neighbouring stalls came to my rescue
 
In many ways, it was on Camden market that I first experienced
            the breadth and depths, the highs and lows of life
 
There were days spent freezing in the snow,
            and others sweating in the heat
there were days when I earned good money
            and others when I sold nothing
 
It was, as they say, one of life’s ‘formative experiences’!
            but it left me with a sense that in some strange way
            the whole of life could be found represented in the market:
riches and poverty, friendship and violence,
            suffering and rejoicing
All present in the market:
            a microcosm of life
 
For those of you who are wondering,
            I sold Indonesian clothing
which my aunt imported
            in what was, I now realise with hindsight,
            a forerunner of the fair trade movement.
 
She had been to Indonesia, and had discovered these wonderful fabrics
            such as Batik and Ikat,
and in a micro-enterprise she employed local tradespeople
            to create western style clothes from Indonesian materials
which she then sold through a few market stalls.
 
Everyone she dealt with was paid a fair price for their work,
            everyone was known to her personally,
and hand on heart I can say
            that her particular engagement with the marketplace
            sought to bring life and justice to those involved
 
Of course, the same could not be said for all the other traders,
            and from drugs to knocked-off CDs
            from immigrant workers to pickpockets and thieves
there were those who found the market a place of oppression
            or cut-throat opportunity
 
As I said, the whole of life,
            experienced through the microcosm of the market
 
And, to bring us back to the present,
            we seem to be hearing quite a lot
            about ‘the market’ these days as well, don’t we…
 
If we read the newspapers, or watch the TV,
            it’s never very long until we hear someone talking about ‘the market’
 
And what they mean by this, of course, is the global marketplace:
            the financial markets of London, Tokyo, and New York
where what is bought and sold is not fairly traded Indonesian clothes
            or fake Rolexes, or stolen goods, or…
 
But hang on a minute…
 
Perhaps the global markets around the world
            are not so different from my experience of Camden all those years ago
 
We find good people and criminals,
            side by side in the market,
with the whole of human life reflected there
            as a part of the financial and economic systems
                        which drive our world
 
There can be little doubt
            that a sickness of great seriousness
            has affected the health of our global financial institutions:
 
And whether we are talking about
            the European Debt Crisis, that continues to affect European economics;
or the global debt cycles of boom and bust,
            which allow banks, hedge funds and the super rich
                        to lending money irresponsibly,
            exploiting those in developing countries;
or the extortionate rates paid to farmers by UK supermarkets;
 
The market places of the world are sick,
            and those affected by this sickness
are laid out for all to see
            as the poor get poorer
            as health programmes fail
            as countries slide deeper into recession
            as jobs get more scarce
            as benefits are reduced,
            as the environment is exploited,
            and international aid payments are threatened.
 
The sickness of the market takes its very real toll
            on the very real lives, of very real people.
 
And here, I’m going to say it,
            when the market becomes infected in this way
                        it becomes a satanic entity
            which acquires a life of its own
                        and rampages its way in the world
            demanding that all must worship it
                        and leaving a trail of devastation in its wake
 
It becomes the strong man we spoke about last week,
            who fills his house with good things
            at the expense of those who have less.
 
And the thing is, this is nothing new.
 
We might be experiencing it in this way for the first time in human history,
            but the tendency of financial markets
                        to enter into alliances with those who hold military strength
            to extract wealth from the world
                        for the benefit of the few
            is not a new thing.
 
Something very similar was happening in the first century
            with the Roman empire
which bestrode the world as a financial and military colossus
            dominating the markets and extracting its tribute at every turn.
 
If you went to a market place in Israel in the first century
            you would find a sickness in the market every bit as real and devastating
                        as that which we are experiencing today
The Roman empire imposed punitive taxes
            which made the poor poorer and the rich richer
and whether you were in a city, a village or a farmyard,
            there was no escaping the infection
            that the empire had placed in the financial and trading markets
                        of those countries which Rome had occupied
 
The Pharisees knew all about the sickness of the market place
            and these religious leaders of the Jews went to great lengths
            to ensure that they didn’t become infected themselves
 
In chapter 7, just a few verses on
            from this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel,
we’re told that
 
Mark 7:3-4   the Pharisees, … do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it;
 
For the Pharisees, and for those Jews who followed their teaching,
            there was no separation between physical and spiritual uncleanness
They didn’t simply wash the goods from the market to get the germs off,
            in the way that we might wash an apple before eating it.
For them, the ritual washing of goods purchased in the market
            was about the ritual cleansing of tainted goods
                        that had been bought with tainted money
            in a market place where all the wrong kinds of people were at large
 
They wanted as little contact as possible with gentiles,
            and with those whose spiritual lives
                        might not measure up to their own exacting standards
 
And where they needed produce from the market
            that might have been grown by farmers
                        more interested in the next harvest
                        than in regular synagogue attendance,
or which might have been traded by merchants
            who dealt with Romans and Greeks as well as Jews,
            or who made the required offerings of worship to the emperor
                        so that they could trade in the markets of the empire,
the Pharisees needed some way of distancing themselves
            from this ritual uncleanliness;
and so the washing of the food was part of this ritual of cleansing,
            making real their belief that they were more holy before God
            than those they contacted in the uncleanness of the market
 
And so we come to Jesus, in our gospel reading for this morning.
            Let’s hear Mark chapter 6, verse 56 again:
 
And wherever he went-- into villages, towns or countryside-- they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.
 
Do you notice what’s different here about Jesus,
            compared to the Pharisees?
 
Jesus goes into the marketplaces,
            and rather than becoming himself infected
                                    with the sickness of the market,
                        by touching the wrong person, or handling the wrong thing,
            rather than becoming himself unclean,
                        he brings healing and wholeness to those whom he meets there.
 
And it is healing offered without condition,
            across every social sphere of society.
 
He goes to the market places of the cities,
            of the villages, and of the rural areas,
and in each market he enters,
            he encounters those who are sick, those who are unclean,
                        those who are lacking wholeness,
                        and dislocated from their society,
and he restores them,
            healing them and making them whole.
 
Again, here we find the same blurring of the boundary,
            between physical and spiritual sickness,
                        and physical and spiritual healing.
 
For the ancient Jews,
            body and soul could not so easily be separated,
            as we who are the heirs of Platonic dualism seem to manage.
 
The healing Jesus brought to the markets of Israel
            involved the whole person: body, mind and spirit,
as those who had been infected by the market
            were restored to physical health,
                        to spiritual wellbeing,
            and also to their right place within society.
 
And, I would venture to suggest,
            the same is, or at least should be, true today.
 
Too often certain strands of Christianity
            have become fixated on the notion of healing in the name of Jesus
                        as a miraculous restoration of health,
            and seek this whenever a human body starts to show the inevitable signs
                        of it’s eventual degeneration and mortality.
 
But the difficulty with this,
            is that it sets in place a whole host of false expectations,
because the reality is that not everyone who is sick gets better,
            even if they pray a lot, and have a lot of faith,
and eventually all of us will shuffle off this mortal coil,
            in one way or another.
 
Then there are other strands of Christianity
            that have become fixated on the healing of the soul,
where what matters most is whether your heart is right with God,
            and the present evil age is something to be endured
            whilst waiting to depart to be with the Lord.
 
And the difficulty with this
            is that it creates an environment where all that matters
                        is the saving of the person’s eternal soul,
            while the meeting of their physical needs either becomes neglected,
                        or, only marginally better, met as long as the person
                        takes some steps towards spiritual conversion.
 
But then there are other strands of Christianity,
            that have become fixated on meeting
                        the physical needs of the vulnerable and disadvantaged,
            and have poured all their efforts into programmes
                        designed to alleviate poverty, address homelessness
                                    and caring for the alien in the land.
 
And the problem with this
            is that it can be too easy to meet the presenting problem,
without also shining the light of the gospel of Christ
            into the troubled hearts and souls of those being cared for,
and so, whilst the immediate need is met,
            the person’s long-term spiritual woundedness remains unhealed.
 
And then there are other strands of Christianity
            that take the same approach as that adopted by the Pharisees,
and they have minimal contact with those
            who are spiritually unclean or physically sick,
            lest they themselves might become infected with unholiness
                        in the process.
 
None of these approaches, it seems to me,
            captures the healing that Jesus brought to the markets
            of Israel in the first century.
 
And none of these approaches
            captures the healing that Jesus seeks to bring
            to the markets of our own troubled world.
 
The Pharisee option,
            tempting though it may be on occasions
                        to remain cloistered in some holy Christian clique,
            is not ultimately an option for us
                        because the needs of our sick and damaged world
                        are too pressing for us to ignore.
 
As we, the people of Jesus who claim to be his disciples,
            seek to live out the approach of Jesus in our own lives,
we need to be willing to enter the market in his name,
            to bring his healing and wholeness to those we meet there.
 
And the healing of Jesus that we proclaim
            will not be simply a healing of the soul,
                        which ignores the plight of the body;
 
            and neither will it be a tending of the body
                        which ignores the plight of the soul,
 
            and neither will it be a promise that death can be cheated,
                        while health and wealth are maintained through prayer.
 
Rather, it will be a healing that embraces sickness and death,
            and in so doing robs them of their power
                        to render human souls unclean.
 
It will be a healing that restores the soul,
            as it brings wholeness to the physical situations we encounter.
 
It will be a healing that subverts the sickness of the market,
            and sets in place life-giving alternatives,
which value the individual at each stage of the economic cycle.
 
Here’s a thing:
            Imagine I need a new item of clothing, say a T-shirt.
 
I could, if I wanted, take a gun and point it at a man who makes T-shirts,
            and order him to make me one at a pittance.
 
But I’m a civilised person, and I don’t want to do that;
            I wouldn’t even like the idea of someone doing it on my behalf.
 
But I’m also a consumer, and I’ll buy my T-shirt from the market,
            choosing the one that is the best value for money.
 
In this instance, the market becomes the man with the gun,
            acting on my behalf.
 
This is the sickness of the market,
            it domesticates violence,
            and makes us all complicit in the process.
 
Healing in this situation starts to look like some kind of system,
            similar to the micro-business run by my aunt thirty years ago,
And so we come to the importance of the fair trade movement,
            and the various systems that it has spawned.
 
But here’s another thing:
            There is a trade in human beings taking place around the world,
                        predicated on the sex-industry,
            as people are trafficked to service the market,
                        in sexual exploitation.
 
Now, I’m not about to get all prudish,
            about the fact that Fifty Shades of Gray and its sequels and imitators
            have consistently topped the best seller charts for the last decades;
But I cannot help but notice that sex sells,
            and one of the things that sex sells is human beings.
And I wonder what it would mean to enter that market,
            and bring healing in the name of Christ?
 
We’ll close with an example of what this looks like in real life.
 
Many of you will remember Ella’s Home,
            the London-based organisation working with women
            who have survived trafficking and sexual exploitation.
            https://www.ellas.org.uk/
 
We’ve had their founder Emily Chalke visit us before
            to speak about their work,
            and the difference they are making to women
            who have been traded in the global marketplace.
 
https://www.ellas.org.uk/donate
 
Short video ‘Running to the light’ which tells the story about Lucia
https://youtu.be/z5xxIwwt71g