Thursday 27 January 2022

The Water of Life Eternal

 A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
30th January 2022


John 4.1-42

Last week, for the week of prayer for Christian unity,
            I went on a pilgrimage.
 
Not to Lourdes, or even to Canterbury,
            but to the Temple Church not far from here,
            with a group from King’s College London.
 
We had actually hoped to get as far as Westminster Abbey,
            but as is often the way with journeys,
            things took a bit longer than we had anticipated!
 
We began in the chapel of Sir Thomas Guy:
            the Baptist founder of Guy’s Hospital,
who made his money through the unusual combination
            of selling Bibles and investing in the slave trade.
 
Then, via Southwark Cathedral, we made our way over London Bridge,
            and stopped to pray and reflect in a variety of city churches,
before making our way to St Paul’s Cathedral,
            and then finishing in the astonishing Temple Church.
 
Many of the churches we visited I’d been to before,
            but one discovery that has stayed with me
was the ruined church of St Dunstan in the East.
 
Originally established by the Saxons,
            it was rebuilt in 950 by St Dunstan,
            who became Archbishop of Canterbury;
but then Dunstan’s church was destroyed by the great fire of London,
            only to be rebuilt 30 years later by none other than Christopher Wren.
Tragically, Wren’s church was destroyed in the blitz, in 1941,
            and after several decades as a derelict ruin
            the church was transformed into a picturesque public space in 1967.
 
I tell you this story of our truncated pilgrimage,
            and the history of St Dunstan in the East,
because in many ways, they a metaphor for the point of my sermon this morning:
            Which is that things don’t always work out as you intend them to.
 
Sometimes, you don’t make your intended destination on the pilgrimage of life;
            sometimes you build things, only for them to come crashing down around you;
            sometimes things don’t work out as you intend them to.
 
But, and here’s the good news,
            within the love of God, such things are not the end of the story.
 
Let me share a photo with you
            that I took when we were at St Dunstan in the East.
 
This is a fountain in the ruined church,
            placed where the altar would have been.
 
And as we stood around it, on our pilgrimage,
            one of the women in the group quoted from John’s gospel.
 
            Those who drink of the water that I will give them
                        will never be thirsty.
            The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water
                        gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
 
There was a moment of silence,
            and then she said,
‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
 
And as I thought back over the history of that site,
            with its history of rebuilding, ruination, and restoration,
and as I looked at the beauty of its current state,
            with the fountain bubbling gently,
            with seats for office workers and tourists to rest,
I thought of the woman of Samaria,
            to whom Jesus said those words of blessing,
            promising the gift of the water of eternal life.
 
She was certainly someone who knew what it was
            for things not to turn out as she had hoped and planned.
 
The story of her encounter with Jesus beside the well of Jacob,
            includes a conversation about her marriages.
 
It seems that she has been, as they say, ‘unlucky in love’,
            having had five marriages,
            and now living with someone who is not her husband.
 
We need to pause here, just for a moment,
            and reflect on the way in which preachers have often handled this story.
 
In the earlier traditions of the church,
            the Samaritan woman was celebrated as a witness to Christ;
but in the years following the post-reformation rise of evangelicalism,
            with its emphasis on sin and forgiveness,
preachers have tended to cast her as a scarlet woman:
            a sexual sinner in need of repentance.
 
As such she becomes an example
            of Jesus associating with prostitutes,
showing that no-one is too sinful, too depraved,
            too ‘other’ for Jesus.
 
And whilst I applaud the sentiment
            of Jesus going to the margins and the marginalised,
            there is a problem here,
which is that the text offers us no indication at all
            that this woman is a sinner.
There is no act of repentance on her part,
            and no offering of forgiveness from Jesus.
 
It seems she has been demonised where no demons reside,
            scapegoated for a sin she hasn’t committed,
all in the interest of the proclamation
            of a gospel based on sin and repentance.
 
And I wonder if there are some of us here today
            who have been similarly demonised and scapegoated.
Told that we’re sinful, shameful, and marginalised,
            because aspects of our personal story or identity
                        don’t match the dominant conception
                        of who or what a good Christian looks like.
 
From ethnicity, to gender, to sexuality;
            from economic status, to mental health, to disability;
many people today find themselves cast into the same space
            as the Samaritan woman in some interpretations of this story
 
Those who would perpetuate a gospel of sin and repentance
            all too often require others to deny who they are, to change who they are,
            in order to fit a narrative that without repentance there is no salvation.
 
But I don’t think this matches the story
            as we encounter it in the gospel of John.
 
This woman is not sinful, she has no need of repentance,
            and those who have made her so
            have asked her to carry a shame that is not hers to bear.
 
In fact, in John’s gospel, sin has nothing to do
            with past actions or present indiscretions;
rather, sin is always an indicator of a broken relationship with God,
            which the presence of Christ is always seeking to restore.
 
But there is another side to this too,
            which is the desire of some preachers to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman,
            to cast her as a hapless but virtuous victim.
 
And the problem with this, as my friend Meredith Warren puts it,
            is that ‘attempting to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman
            reinforces normative feminine sexuality’[1]
 
Just as it is unacceptable to demonise the Samaritan woman,
            so it is also unacceptable to try and rescue her
            to some imposed definition of ‘normality’.
 
The truth is, we don’t know why she has been married five times,
            although a plausible scenario
            is a combination of divorce and widowhood.
 
It may be that she was unable to have children,
            and so was divorced by a series of men, each seeking to secure an heir;
and it may be that her living arrangement with the man who is not her husband,
            is the result of the complex arrangements
                        demanded by Levirate marriage law
                        following the death of her final husband.
 
But the truth is that we just don’t know,
            and we cannot impose upon her a normality
            that her abnormal and unusual situation resists.
 
Because it wasn’t normal for a woman to find herself in this situation;
            which means this is a situation that resists normalising,
            every bit as much as it resists condemnation.
 
And again, there will be those here, and those known to us,
            who have been subjected to normalising pressure,
to cast themselves in roles that alleviate the shame
            that society would otherwise heap upon them.
 
There will be those whose personal story defies convention,
            who find themselves being ‘rescued’ or ‘rehabilitated’
            by the imposition of normalisation narratives that are not theirs to own.
 
And this can be every bit as damaging
            as the tendency to demonization.
 
What if some people need neither rescuing nor demonising,
            neither rehabilitation nor repentance?
 
What if the Samaritan woman is one of them?
 
So what’s going on with her?
            And why does Jesus raise the subject of her marital status in the first place?
 
I think the clue is in how she responds.
 
When she goes out at the end of the story,
            into the Samaritan city, to tell what has happened to her,
she simply says to her countrymen,
            ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’
 
What convinces her, and her fellow Samaritans, that Jesus is a prophet,
            is not that he forgives her, or rescues her:
            she doesn’t need forgiving or rescuing.
 
Rather, he sees her, he knows her.
 
What she meets in Jesus is someone who meets her as a fellow human, as an equal,
            in full knowledge of all the complexity of her story,.
 
Jesus neither judges nor normalises,
            he places no expectations upon her in terms of change or status.
Rather, he offers her a gift,
            a new experience of being human,
            which he says will well up in her like a stream of living water.
 
This isn’t Jesus exercising some creepy telepathy, to read her darkest secrets,
            a prospect that many today find deeply terrifying;
rather it’s Jesus knowing her fully, seeing her completely - with all that that involves -
            and welcoming her, as she is, to be part of his new family of followers.
 
And this, surely, is the message of good news,
            that is symbolised by the metaphor of the water
            bubbling up to eternal life.
 
We’ve already seen water transformed into wine at the wedding of Cana,
            and we’ve already heard Nicodemus challenged at night
            to be born of both water and the Spirit.
 
So we already know that water is symbolic in John’s gospel,
            that it points to something beyond itself.
 
And this is what we meet here,
            not in the darkness of night,
            but in the brightness of the noonday sun.
 
Water from Jacob’s well might quench a person’s thirst for a while,
            but the water of life that Jesus offers,
                        the gift that fills a person to overflowing,
            is a new relationship with God
                        which fulfils our deepest needs,
            not once, not just today, but in an ongoing, life-supplying way.
 
Samaritans and Jews had been arguing for centuries
            about which mountain God dwelt on,
            about which high place you should go to, to encounter God.
 
But the proclamation that Jesus, the Jew, gave to the Samaritan woman,
            was that God is no longer to be found on either mountain.
 
The prologue to John’s gospel
            has already proclaimed that the Word has become flesh.
 
The creative and wise word of God,
            is no longer found through words of wisdom, or edicts of the law,
            but in the person of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.
 
God in Jesus is the one who can tell us everything we have ever done,
            because in the noonday light of his presence,
                        all shadows and secrets, all shame insecurity,
            are vanished and banished,
                        to be replaced with the light of life,
                        the water of eternal life.
 
And this means that wherever Jesus is, God is.
            God is at large in the world, beyond boundaries and borders,
                        outside of temples and sanctuaries;
            taking residence in the hearts and lives
                        of those who follow the invitation of Jesus,
            drawing all humanity into a new relationship with God,
                        where people are fully known, fully seen, and fully loved.
 
And so the Samaritan woman tells her friends,
            and they too recognise the good news of a new relationship with God.
 
They come to believe in Jesus
            not because they have concurred with statements about him,
            but because they have experienced relationship with him.
 
The point of God becoming human,
            the good news of the incarnation,
            is that it reveals the deep relationship
                        that God desires to have with each of us.
 
Salvation is never about abstract assertion, nor dogmatic declaration,
            and it isn’t about some future hope for a better life to come.
Rather, it is about entering into life eternal in the present,
            it is about drinking deeply from the water of life today,
            it is about experiencing the abundance of life in the here and now.
 
And so as we conclude our thoughts on this story,
            and there is much more that could have been said,
I want to leave us with the words of the unnamed Samaritan woman,
            and I want us to hear her challenge to us,
            as it was heard by those in the city in Samaria.
 
Her witness to Jesus is framed as an invitation and a question.
 
            ‘Come and see…’, she says.
 
            ‘Surely, this cannot be the Christ, can it?’, she asks.
 
God is not encountered in the certainty of faith,
            but in the mystery of a question.
 
Witnessing is not about offering people statements of certainty,
            it is an invitation to a relationship.
 
Life is complex, life does not always work out as we planned,
            but in the complexity and uncertainty of life,
the offer of a new relationship with God,
            and the summons to a new way of being,
these are the gifts of the living Christ,
            that well up in our lives like a spring of water
            gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
 
And as my friend put it in the church of St Dunstan in the East,
            ‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
 


[1] Meredith J. C. Warren, Five Husbands: Slut-Shaming the Samaritan Woman, THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY, 2022. https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol-17-no-2-fall-winter-2021/vol-17-no-2-2021-five-husbands-slut-shaming-the-samaritan-woman-meredith-j-c-warren/


Saturday 15 January 2022

Flipping Tables

 A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
16th January 2022

John 2.13-25

A popular internet meme, in Christian circles at least,
            involves an artistic depiction of the cleansing of the Temple.
 



The text that accompanies it reads:
 
“The next time someone asks you ‘What Would Jesus Do?’
            Remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip
            is within the realm of possibilities.”
 
It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it nicely punctures the façade
            of Charles Wesley’s ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild’.
 
The subtext is clear:
            Christians might be all, ‘turn the other cheek’…
                        but don’t count on it!
            Sometimes they can get shouty and punchy too.
 
But I have to say that I find this rather disturbing,
            and the reason it disturbs me,
            is to do with a podcast I’ve been listening to, which I’ve mentioned before,
about the rise and fall of Mars Hill church in Seattle,
            whose pastor Mark Driscoll notoriously promoted
                        what he described as a more aggressive form of Christianity.
 
His critique of mainstream churches was that they promoted a weak, passive faith,
            and that if people who lived in the ‘real world’ were to find Christ,
            they needed to meet a Christ who could hold his own under any circumstances.
 
In other words, they needed a Christ
            who could flip tables and chase people with a whip.
 
In support of this macho, cage-fighter Jesus,
            Driscoll turned to the book of Revelation,
            a text almost certainly known to the author of John’s gospel.
 
Driscoll says:
            ‘In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament),
                        Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg,
                        a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed.
            That is the guy I can worship.
                        I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ
                        because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.’
 
Similarly, in his sermon on the cleansing of the temple,
            delivered against a backdrop image of a large whip,
Driscoll says the following:
 
            “Here comes Jesus and he is furious, he is angry…
            Now some of you will be very surprised to hear that Jesus got angry
                        because you have wrongly perceived
                        that Christianity just means that you be nice.”
 
What may not surprise you, hearing this,
            is that his 15,000 strong church closed down in 2014,
over accusations that its pastor engaged in persistent bullying
            both of staff members and of people from the congregation.
 
Now, I need to be careful here,
            because I am very aware that only one who is without sin
            should cast a stone at another for their sin,
and so I don’t want to get too drawn into a direct critique of Mark Driscoll,
            who I’m sure has many redeeming qualities.
 
My critique, rather, is of the attempt to shape Christianity,
            as a religion of hyper-masculine aggression;
this is a project which I think fundamentally undermines the witness of Jesus
            as the one who’s life, death, and resurrection bring an end to violence.
 
What is at stake here, as far as I’m concerned, is something that really matters,
            because it takes us right to the heart
            of what it actually means to be a Christian.
 
Here at Bloomsbury we have long taken the view that we are a ‘peace church’:
            we have our peace candle lit each week,
            we sell white poppies in the run up to Remembrance Sunday,
            and we hear sermons on the importance of taking nonviolent action.
 
Of course, not all Christians agree,
            with many Christians drawing on Augustine’s Just War Theory,
to argue that there are circumstances where it is entirely appropriate
            for a Christian to engage in violence and warfare.
 
Indeed, many early Baptists took this position,
            and fought on the side of Cromwell in the wars of the seventeenth century;
similarly many from this church
            fought in the two world wars of the twentieth century,
and many of us will know, love, and respect people
            who serve in the armed forces today.
 
So, to suggest that we worship a nonviolent God,
            made known in the person of a nonviolent Jesus,
and that this means those who follow that revelation,
            should also be nonviolent people,
is not an uncontroversial statement.
 
Some of you may remember a few years ago,
            Bloomsbury was involved in putting together a debate
            entitled ‘Who Would Jesus Shoot?’,
which explored in detail the discussions around Christian nonviolence,
            and I’ve put this on our church website if you want to listen to it again.[1]
 
And it strikes me that any attempt to argue for Christian nonviolence
            must grapple with what is going on
            in the cleansing of the temple,
which is the single event in the ministry of Jesus,
            where he gets anywhere near an act of violence.
 
What revelation of God are we seeing here,
            as God is revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus?
And what does it say to us
            about how we might live as followers of Jesus?
 
This is one of those rare stories that appears in all four gospels,
            although its placement in the timeline of Jesus’ life is different in John
            compared to what we find in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
 
In the three synoptic gospels,
            the cleansing of the temple occurs at the end of Jesus’ ministry,
            and it is the trigger for the events that lead to his crucifixion.
 
But in the fourth gospel, it comes right at the start of his ministry,
            immediately after the sign of water into wine.
 
This is no accident, because placing these two incidents side by side:
            the blessing at the wedding in Cana of Galilee
            and the condemnation of the Temple system in Jerusalem,
has the rhetorical effect of asking us to consider them together,
            and it creates the beginning of an answer
            to the question of where the presence of God can be found.
 
One might have expected that God would be found in the temple,
            but it seems that the presence of God made known through Jesus
            is rather to be found in the abundance of wine at a wedding reception.
 
I’ll resist enquiring too deeply as to whether this wedding party with lots of wine
            could in fact have been considered a work event,
and will instead concentrate on what it meant
            for a national system of governance to have so lost its credibility
            that it deserved righteous condemnation from Jesus!
 
Who says times have changed!?
 
In those times, the institutions of the state and the faith
            were deeply intertwined,
even more so than in our country where Bishops still get seats in House of Lords.
 
In the first century, the national influence and importance of the priests,
            was much more like this country in the middle ages,
with civil power and religious power in a symbiotic relationship.
 
And in that context, the Temple should have been the place of divine encounter,
            it should have been the place where God’s blessing was made available for all,
and it should also have been the place that defended justice for the weak,
            the place where the vulnerable could come for sanctuary.
 
Certainly, it should have been a house of prayer,
            but from that prayer should have flowed the abundant blessing
            of new life and hope for all those seeking God.
 
But the revelation of God in Jesus
            was that blessing of abundance was not, in fact, found in the Temple in Jerusalem,
            rather it was experienced at a party in Cana of Galilee.
 
The Temple had become a place where the wealthy could gain easy access to God,
            but the poor faced often insurmountable costs to purchase their sacrifices.
The Temple was not a place where God was available to all,
            it was a place of benefit for the few, not the many.
 
Wine at a wedding, given freely to all, regardless of who they are,
            is, it seems, a much better sign of God’s intent and God’s grace.
 
There is something important here that the author of the gospel wants us to grasp,
            about the revelation of God in the person, life, and ministry of Jesus:
and this is that God will no longer be contained or constrained
            within religious or structural systems;
the blessings of God were no longer the exclusive property of the elite,
            the abundance of God was no longer the preserve of the capital city in the south.
 
Jesus’ condemnation of the sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves,
            and his overturning of the stalls of the moneychangers,
was a symbolic action to demonstrate a deeper condemnation
            of the system that required their presence in the first place.
 
It’s noteworthy that what Jesus said as he enacted this visual parable,
            is different in John’s account compared to the other three gospels.
 
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus declares,
            “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’;
            but you have made it a den of robbers." (Matt. 21.13; Mar. 11.17; Lk. 19.46)
 
In the fourth gospel, by contrast,
            Jesus makes no mention of either prayer or robbers.
Instead he cries:
            ‘Take these things out of here!
            Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!’ (Jn. 2:16)
 
In John’s version of this story, it isn’t a critique of corrupt mismanagement,
            but rather of the entire financial system
                        that had grown up around the presence of God;
            it is a condemnation of the principle of buying forgiveness.
 
The presence of the animal-sellers and moneychangers
            was a function of a system which said
                        that you had to make certain sacrifices in the Temple
                                    if you were to be cleansed of your sin
                        and restored to a right relationship with God.
 
And the message of Jesus cleansing the temple
            was not that the animal-sellers or moneychangers were inherently wicked,
                        they were simply providing an essential service,
                        for the smooth running of the temple system.
 
Rather, it was that very system itself came under Jesus’ condemnation,
            because the witness of the sign of water into wine
                        had been that the blessings of a restored relationship with God
                                    are to be freely and abundantly given to all,
                        and not contained and constrained within an economic system
                                    which privileged the wealthy, and disadvantaged the vulnerable.
 
When Jesus says, ‘Stop making my Father's house a marketplace’,
            the Greek word used here is emporion,
                        from which we get our word ‘emporium’
                        meaning a ‘centre of commerce’ or a ‘place of trading’.
 
The trigger for Jesus’ action in flipping tables and grabbing a whip,
            was not sinful behaviour on the part of those trading in the temple,
                        but the very economic and religious system
                        that required their presence in the first place.
 
So when we look at who, or what, is under judgment here,
            we find that it’s not individual people being whipped for their corruption.
 
This isn’t Jesus taking an action of anger
            against acts of personal dishonesty.
 
Rather, it’s an act of condemnation against the system
            that has turned the free and abundant grace of God
            into an economic transaction that generates profit for the priests,
                        advantages the wealthy,
                        and keeps the poor far from God’s presence.
 
It would be very easy at this point
            to find ourselves making analogies with Martin Luther,
                        railing against the selling of indulgences by the Catholic church,
            and there are some strong similarities,
                        but where we need to depart from Luther,
                        is in the alignment he made between corrupt Catholicism
                        and what he regarded as Jewish legalism.
 
As we saw last week with the stone water jars,
            Jesus was not condemning Judaism,
                        he was restoring it,
            bringing it back to what it was always supposed to be,
                        which is a religion of grace,
                        founded on the gift of God’s presence to all people.
 
What was judged was not Judaism,
            it was the Temple system;
which had turned the gracious gift of the covenant
            into a transactional system to the benefit of the privileged.
 
This condemnation of the Temple becomes even clearer
            in the exchange which follows,
where Jesus makes a parallel between the Temple and his own body.
 
It’s important for us to realise
            that Jesus is not here casting himself as a temple-destroyer.
 
He does not say that he will violently destroy the temple.
            Rather, he says to the priests,
            ‘destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’,
and we are invited, as readers of the gospel,
            to realise that he is speaking not about the Jerusalem Temple at all,
            but of his own body, the new revelation of God’s presence on earth.
 
The Temple had become a system of violence,
            a system of oppression,
and the original readers of John’s gospel would have known
            that the temple was, in fact, destroyed by the Romans,
            some thirty years after the death of Jesus.
 
And the author of the gospel is inviting his readers
            to make a comparison between the violent end of the temple system,
            and the violent death of Jesus on the cross.
 
The oppressive system of religious exclusion
            that had grown up around the presence of God in the Temple
            met its violent end at the hands of the Romans, never to be rebuilt.
 
And although the body of Jesus,
            the nonviolent revelation of God’s abundant grace for all,
also had its moment of violence at the hands of the Romans on the cross,
            the testimony of the faithful was that this was not the end.
 
The cleansing of the temple is therefore to be understood
            as an enacted parable of the crucifixion,
            as a sign of the new way that God is present with people.
 
No longer is God to be made known through exclusive institutions,
            no longer is God to be sold for profit,
            no longer will God be complicit in systems of exploitation
 
Rather, God is found in the abundant sign
            of wine, freely given to all,
            and the blood of Christ on the cross, freely given for all.
 
And the people of God, the church of Christ,
            continually need to re-hear and re-learn
                        the lesson of the cleansing of the Temple,
            if we are to remain faithful to the revelation of God in Jesus.
 
It is too easy, I think, for us to become focussed
            on the preservation of our institutions,
too easy for us to seek the preservation of our Temple,
            too easy for us to fall into the trap
            of monetising that which God would give freely to all.
 
Over the years here at Bloomsbury,
            we’ve had to decline or terminate bookings
from groups who are charging to supply a religious experience
            which we believe should be freely available.
 
And it is of fundamental importance to us
            that access to worship in our church
            is never a matter of payment.
 
The wealthy do not get more privileged access to God than the less wealthy.
 
But as we consider Jesus’ enacted parable of judgment
            against the Temple in Jerusalem,
we do need to ask ourselves honestly
            whether there are barriers
            that nonetheless creep into our institutional life?
 
We need to keep ourselves honest
            about, for example, our attitudes towards wealth and education,
            or race, gender, and sexuality.
 
On the whole, I think, Bloomsbury does pretty well
            at keeping the barriers to full inclusion in church life quite low.
 
I could certainly point at other churches who preach a prosperity Gospel,
            who will only elect middle-class people to leadership,
            and who exclude either explicitly or implicitly
                        on the basis of certain essential characteristics.
 
But only those who are without sin,
            can cast stones at others for their sin;
and none of us are without sin.
 
So this is an invitation for us to consider our own situation,
            and to begin to identify those barriers
                        that we continue to construct or perpetuate within our own community;
            barriers which keep people from God,
                        the negotiating of which turns the house of God into a marketplace.
 
And it is an invitation for us to think once again
            about what it means for us to be followers of Jesus,
the one who absorbs the violence of the cross
            turning the certainty of death into the possibility of new life.
 
It is in invitation for us to consider what it means for us to be a people of peace
            who nonetheless take action to challenge those systems of oppression
            that embody oppression and exploitation in our society.
 
If the blessing of life in all its fulness, that we say we believe in,
            is not experienced abundantly by all, without exception,
            (and I’m afraid it is not),
then we still have a task before us.
 
Our involvement in London Citizens,
            is one of the best ways I know
            of turning the world as it is, into the world as it should be.
It is a mechanism for challenging the injustices of our city in the name of Christ,
            and building a society where the poor and vulnerable are lifted up.
 
From welcoming refugees, to promoting fair employment practice,
            to lifting people out of fuel poverty
            to addressing our carbon emissions,
to building a community where all are listened to
            and where the voices of the oppressed are raised up,
the partnerships we have through community organising
            take us close to the heart of Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem.
 
There will be plenty of opportunities this coming year
            for us to take our place as a church alongside others
as together we embody the good news of Christ
            in a world of inequality and injustice.
 
So, who’s up for overturning a few tables in 2022?


[1] https://www.bloomsbury.org.uk/who-would-jesus-shoot/