A Sermon for Bloomsbury
Central Baptist Church
17
December 2023, 11am
Ezra 1.1-5; 3.1,3,10,12-13; 4.1-3; 9.1-3,12; 10.9-12,44
‘I want my country back’
has become something of a rallying cry in recent years.
From calls for Scottish independence,
to Brexit, to Trump,
the desire for land,
to have and
to hold, till death us do part,
is firmly back in vogue,
although I
suspect it has never really gone away.
From Islamic State, to the
Englishman whose home is his castle,
from Israel and Palestine, to Russia and Ukraine,
the idea that this particular patch on the surface of God’s
green earth
should belong to ‘me and mine’
is a compelling narrative
that drives everything from war and terrorism,
to oppressive dictatorships, to the entire capitalist
system.
The idea that land ownership
can be defined
within a hierarchical system of tenure
which ascends from the individual, via the family and tribe,
to the homeland,
is fundamental to our
understanding of the post-feudal nation state,
and you only have to look at the hell that breaks loose
wherever people are required to live across
borders
that are not of their choosing
to see how wedded our human societies are
to the land that we live on,
the land which gives us life.
And the thing about land
ownership
is that it is always a multi-generational issue.
You don’t change these things
overnight,
because there is always an ideology at play
behind whichever individual or family or corporation
has actually got their name on the title deed.
So, for example,
whilst it may be perfectly acceptable
for a member of the English landed gentry,
say, the duke of Westminster,
to own most of the land on which the better parts
of London are built,
it is deemed less acceptable
for foreign investors to buy up large tracts of
prime real estate
with
a view to long term profit
from what is often referred to as ‘our
land’.
And so we come to slogans such
as,
‘I want my country back’, or ‘Stop the Boats’,
or ‘Rwanda is a safe and stable country’…
And the question of whether
such sentiments, however heartfelt,
can ever be enacted in any meaningful way,
is as troubling today as it ever has been.
The
thing is, many of today's most divisive political issues
revolve
around land ownership,
and have their roots firmly in the
past.
So if
you want to understand Brexit, or Trump,
or Scottish Nationalism, or ISIS,
or the Palestinian problem,
then
you have to go back a very long way
into the history of why we are where
we are,
and why certain people feel so
entitled to their territorial assertions.
People
may forget the details, but the grudges remain,
and the sense of prerogative for ‘my
nation’,
coupled
with the sense of fear and frustration
when it feels as if someone is taking
‘my country’ away from me,
lies
behind much of our experience of the world.
It's
not all about skin colour, of course,
although that can be one of the most
enduring
and vicious forms of segregation.
It's
more usually about land (who owns it),
money (who has it), and power (who
wields it),
and
these are multigenerational issues
which echo down through civilisations,
creating
the context within which each rising generation
stakes their own claim on the world.
In
all of this, who your parents are
continues to matter very much indeed.
If
they were blue-collar steel or textile workers in the Deep South of the USA,
people who saw their jobs disappear during
the twentieth century
because of overseas manufacturing, and
immigrant labour markets,
then you will probably be
voting, again, for Donald Trump
in the hope that he will make
your country great again.
The
irony here, of course, is that Trump is hardly the personification
of the defender of the working man.
If
anything, he's the exact opposite,
he’s the landowner who represents
the vested interests and entrenched
power of inherited wealth.
But
he is, at least, an American landowner.
And like the Grosvenor Estates here in
London,
British born and bred,
Trump
represents an embodiment of the all-American dream,
which remains compelling to those
who desire an opportunity for
a better life,
and are frustrated because they feel
as if someone else is taking
it from them.
What
we call neoliberalism,
the free market economic model that
has prevailed in the Western world
primarily since the second
world war,
has, it seems to me, largely failed in
its aim of reducing social inequality
and controlling the
monopolisation of production
through competition and
reduced regulation.
And
I want to suggest that this is because
it was just the latest manifestation
of an ancient story of
control
based on land, money, and power.
The
rhetoric of the free market simply created a situation
within which the rich have remained
rich,
and where land has remained
centralised into the ownership
of those who inherited the
power to assert their rights over it.
And
this is where I want us to turn, for a few minutes,
to the story of Ezra, and the
rebuilding of the temple.
Because
I think this ancient story, from a land far away,
helps us to unmask the deep systems of
domination in human society
that continue to make their presence
felt in our own world.
So,
firstly, a bit of the back story.
The
first temple in Jerusalem was built by Solomon,
as a religious symbol of the political
unification of the land of Israel,
that had occurred during the reign of
his father David.
That
story tells us that King David had succeeded
where all other Jewish rulers before
him had failed,
by
uniting the disparate tribes of the Jewish people
into one nation, with one King, and
one border.
In
many ways, David was for the Jews,
what King Arthur has been for the English:
a
mythical figure of old who set the ideology of the nation,
defining for future generation what it
means to be part of this people.
Well,
Solomon’s temple was part of that narrative,
and it cemented the relationship
between the house of David,
and the so-called ‘God of Israel’.
However,
David’s political union of the land didn’t last,
and it was already starting to
fragment by the time of Solomon,
hence his grand building project to try
and unite the people.
However,
after about 250 years,
the Assyrians conquered the northern
part of the land of Israel (740BCE),
and
then a century and a bit after that, the Babylonians conquered the south,
destroying Solomon’s temple,
and carrying the King and the ruling
elite off to exile in Babylon. (587BCE)
This
Babylonian exile lasted for about fifty years,
before the political situation shifted
in Babylon,
with
that great city itself falling to the Persian king Cyrus,
who, it turned out, had a different
policy
with regard to exiled and displaced
peoples.
Whereas
the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar
had believed that the way to control a
conquered nation
was
to take the elite into captivity,
and to put his own rulers in place
to extract tribute and taxes
from the local population,
Cyrus
pursued a policy of letting people be ruled by their own leaders,
worshipping their own gods,
and
as long as they paid their taxes to him,
he was happy enough to live and let
live.
And
so Cyrus decreed that the Israelites in exile in Babylon
should be allowed to return back to
the land of Israel,
and
he encouraged them to rebuild their temple,
and resume the worship of their God in
Jerusalem.
And
this is where our reading today from the book of Ezra
picks up the story.
It’s
a book that is written firmly from the perspective of Judah,
the southern kingdom of the Jews
which had Jerusalem as its capital
city,
and
it is clearly written to justify their ownership of that land.
This
is history being written by the victors,
who are telling the story of how they
got to where they are,
in such a way as to legitimate their
current situation.
So,
the returning Jews rebuilt their temple,
and assumed power in the land,
and
Ezra is their story of how they did it.
But
there are enough glimpses in this story of the darkness of that time
for us to recover from it what a
terrible price had to be paid
for this ideology of land ownership to
reassert itself.
The
thing is, those returning to the land
were not the same people as those who
had left it.
We’re
talking two generations later, here.
And in the same way that the New York
Irish are more Irish than the Irish,
so the Jews returning from
Babylon were more Jewish,
by a certain definition of Jewishness,
than
those who had remained behind in the land.
You
see, the Jews in exile had been busy
constructing a national and religious identity
for themselves.
Many
of the books of the Bible that make up
what we might call the Jewish history
were actually written by the Jews in
exile in Babylon.
So
the creation stories of Genesis
are clearly re-written versions of the
Babylonian creation myths;
and
the stories of the rise of the nation of Israel under the judges
and the political unity achieved by
King David and his successors;
are
stories written to create and sustain
a specific vision of national
belonging
in
a time when the land itself was under occupation
and
the people were in exile.
We
may never know what historical echoes lie behind these stories,
but it was these narratives of
identity that came to be true
for the Jews who returned from exile.
Did
King David ever actually exist? Who knows?
Quite possibly he didn’t.
But
that doesn’t matter, because the stories about
him
defined a nation and a culture,
in much
the same way that the stories about Arthur
came to define what it meant to be
English
in our own time of imperial dominance.
So
those returning to the land did so
with a vision before them of
national purity,
a vision of what it would mean to
worship their God in their
temple,
with their king on the throne.
They
were, to coin a phrase, getting their country back!
And
it was Ezra’s job to make that happen,
he was the leader tasked with
delivering on the decision
to return the exiles to the
land they believed was theirs,
and I can almost hear him assuring the
returners,
that ‘return means return’.
Of
course, this doesn’t mean that the implications of the decision to return
had been fully thought through in
advance.
Some
of this was going to have to be worked out on the hoof, so to speak;
such as the thorny issue of those
already living in the land
who
might also have thought that they too
had a legitimate claim to the land
they lived in,
and
indeed, a claim to also be considered the legitimate children
of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob.
The
land that Ezra and the returnees came back to was not empty,
it was inhabited by the descendants of
those
who had been left in the land by the
Babylonians.
But
when these locals asked if they could join in the fun,
pointing out that they had been
faithfully worshipping God,
through all the years of
Babylonian invasion,
and that they would like to help with
the rebuilding of temple,
they
are dismissed as ‘adversaries’,
and made into enemies.
And
so the ethnic segregation begins,
and two groups of people emerged, with
two different cultures,
both feeling that they had a claim to
the same piece of land.
Let’s
call them Palestinians and Israelis,
for the sake of argument.
But
Ezra’s vision of radical ethnic purity doesn’t end there,
and what we meet in the book that
bears his name
is the heartbreaking story of the fate
of those among the returners
who had married local women
and had children.
Clearly,
for the exiles during the long years in Babylon,
the pressure to not marry out of the
Jewish clan,
had been crucial to their ability to
remain distinctive.
Much
as some immigrant groups in our own country
might frown upon those who
choose to marry out of their own
ethnic group.
But
once the exiles had returned to their historic homeland,
clearly some of the men had decided
that their cousins who had remained
in the land
were more relative than
stranger,
and had married among them and had
children.
This
would be like, fifty years from now,
the Syrian refugees to Europe
finally being able to return to a
rebuilt Aleppo.
Or
diaspora Jews in the 1950s being encouraged
to return to their newly recreated
homeland.
It’s
the same story, told over and over again,
as people are displaced, and people
return.
It’s
the story of ethnic segregation,
of the dream of racial purity,
and of the challenges of
multiculturalism.
But
Ezra’s answer is clear:
these women and children must be sent
away.
It’s
horrific, it’s barbaric, it’s xenophobic,
and it’s where this story ends.
The
vision of God that we see here,
is of a God who dwells in the temple
in Jerusalem
desiring to be worshipped by an
ethnically purified people.
It’s
a problematic story,
and we might wonder why it’s there in our
scriptures at all?
From
the point of view of the author of the book,
the sending away of the women and
children is a good thing,
it’s a sign of the piety of Ezra
that he prioritised the
purity of God’s people
even at the cost of great
suffering.
But
this is not the God that I recognise, as revealed in Jesus Christ.
And I refuse to worship a racist,
vindictive God.
I
think the value of this story,
as with so many of the deeply
troubling stories
that we meet elsewhere in the Old
Testament,
is
that it bears terrifying testimony to those dark places
where unflinching adherence to the fusion
of nationalism with religion,
can take human beings.
This
is the ideology of the terrorist,
it is the ideology of the crusader,
it is the ideology of Christendom.
And,
thank God, there is another story in scripture
which offers an alternative vision of
what it means to be human,
a
vision which allows us to step away
from the narrative of Ezra and those
like him.
Psalm
24, for example, proclaims:
‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that
is in it’.
It
is not mine, it is not yours, it belongs to God.
And
the book of Revelation gives us a a glimpse of heaven’s perspective
on the kingdoms and nations of this world,
as
the loud voices of heaven cry out that:
‘The kingdom of the world
has become the kingdom
of
our Lord and of his Messiah’.
Not
in some future tense – but very much in the present tense:
The earth IS the Lord’s, and all that is in it
‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom
of our Lord and of his Messiah’.
So, what do we say to the
ideology
which leads people to cry, ‘I want my country back’?
I think we say this:
It was
never yours in the first place.
The book of Genesis,
one of the texts written by the exiled Jews in Babylon,
and brought back by them to the land of Israel on their
return,
offers a perspective on the
earth
where humans dwell there as stewards of creation.
The significance of the Genesis
creation stories
is not that they offer a competing narrative
to the insights of contemporary science,
but rather that they offer a
competing narrative
which contradicts the localised, nationalistic view of God
that drove Ezra and his contemporaries
to rebuild their temple and drive away the foreigners.
We need to decide which God
we will worship,
and it is a decision with significant consequences.
Ezra made his choice,
and the people of that region
have been living with the consequences ever since.
The current violence between
Israel and Palestine,
and the decades of violence that have preceded it,
need to be heard in the
theological and geographical context
of Ezra’s return and reforms.
The terrible irony of Ezra’s
situation
was that the very people who had just been released
from their own horrific displacement
so quickly themselves became the agents
of the violent displacement of others.
And that is a story that
echoes down the centuries,
speaking directly to our own global situation.
So what God will we choose to
worship?
And what difference will it make to the way we live on this
earth?
What if we live out the
conviction
that all that we hold, we hold in trust for God?
Not for our children, nor for
our nation, but for God?
What if we live in such a way
as to be accountable to a different authority,
resisting the free market forces
which constrain us to act for prudence and profit?
What if we discover in our
midst ways of living generously,
exercising hospitality,
with our homes, and our land, and our decisions?
What if we live to subvert
the notion
that England is, or should be, a ‘Christian nation’,
because the God we worship is
the God of the whole earth,
not just our patch of it?
What if we live out in our
lives and community
the calling to advocate for those who have lost their
homes?
What if we speak out in
welcome
for those who are displaced from their land?
What if we seek to understand
and live out before God,
the implications of asserting that this is not ‘our’
country,
and this is not ‘our’ land?
The earth is the Lord’s
and all the fullness thereof.
