Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
16 July 2017
1
Corinthians 16.1-9
Galatians
6.2-5
You can listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2017-07-06-simon-woodman
You can listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2017-07-06-simon-woodman
Did you know that there are only 161 days to Christmas?
How does
that make you feel?
Excited, energised, depressed, despondent?
Have you started your Christmas shopping yet?
Are you the
kind of person who collects presents throughout the year,
putting
them on one side so that, come December,
it’s
just a question of wrapping and posting?
Or are
someone who leaves it all until the last minute,
for
that adrenaline fuelled flurry of Amazon purchases
and
trips to the packed shops on Oxford Street.
Have I just made your day, or ruined it, by mentioning
Christmas?
Can you
feel it lifting you up, or weighing you down?
Paul Simon, in his wonderful song, ‘Getting Ready for
Christmas Day’,
captures
something of the stress that the expense of Christmas can bring:
Getting Ready For Christmas Day
From early in November to the
last week of December
I got money matters weighing me
down
Oh the music may be merry, but
it’s only temporary
I know Santa Claus is coming to
town
In the days I work my day job, in
the nights I work my night
But it all comes down to working
man’s pay
Getting ready, I’m getting ready,
ready for Christmas Day
It is ironic, isn’t it, that the approaching Christmas
season
is for many
people a time of increased stress,
given that Jesus tells his disciples
that his yoke
is easy and his burden is light (Mt 11.30).
It may be a myth that the suicide rate spikes in December,
- it
actually goes down in the run up to Christmas,
only
to rise dramatically in January,
but the
stress of our cultural celebration of the birth of Jesus
is
for a burden that weighs heavy on many of us.
And I wonder,
do you ever
feel that things are weighing you down?
Is life, as they say, getting you down?
In our reading this morning from Galatians,
Paul tells
his readers that they are to ‘bear one another’s burdens’,
and I have been wondering what this might mean for us
in 21st
century London?
What are the burdens we carry, I wonder?
Perhaps we
can think of a few?
I’d invite
you to call them out…
·
Poverty
·
Financial worries
·
Inequality (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, social
standing…)
·
Addiction
·
Low self esteem
·
Relationship stress / breakdown
·
Mental health problems
·
Illness
All these things are burdens that weigh us down,
but the
thing is, we don’t, each of us, carry every burden.
The person with financial worries may not suffer from
addiction,
the person
with a stressful relationship may not have mental health problems.
But, as we saw last week,
it’s when
several burdens all come together at the same time,
that a
person’s life can reach crisis point.
So, for example, the main indicators of the risk of becoming
homeless,
are the
combination of three key factors:
poor mental
health, financial problems, and relationship breakdown.
If those three come together,
they can
prove a burden too great for one person to bear
without
them in some way stumbling or breaking under the strain.
So, what does it mean for us to ‘bear one another’s
burdens’?
Well, one thing it doesn’t mean,
is a
communal assertion of individualistic
fatalism.
Let me explain…
Have you ever heard people say,
when
referring to some burden that they have in their life,
‘it’s just
a cross I have to bear’?
It’s a comment that’s often said alongside the phrases:
‘these
things are sent to try us’.
and
‘the Lord
never sends you more than you can bear, you know’.
All of which may have some basis in the Bible,
but which,
taken in this way,
become less statements of the good news of the coming of
Christ,
and more a
kind of fatalistic comforting mantra
about the
vagaries of life lived before a capricious God.
We are indeed called to follow the path of Christ,
by taking
up our own cross and following him:
Mark 8:34 tells us
that Jesus
called the crowd with his disciples,
and said to them,
"If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves
and
take up their cross and follow me.
But this call to costly self-denial, and sacrificial
discipleship,
that Jesus
speaks of when he calls his disciples,
is a long way from the idea that we are called to a life
of quiet
martyrdom to our personal burdens.
And similarly,
the idea
that ‘these things are sent to try us’
and that
‘the Lord never sends you more than you can bear’,
whilst having their origins in Paul’s comforting words
offered to
disciples facing suffering and temptation in 1 Corinthians 10.13,
are not biblically valid aphorisms designed to provoke stoic
endurance
through
those times when life seems burdensome and unbearable.
We are not called in Christ, to lives of individualistic
fatalism,
where be
bear our burdens alone,
and just
have to ‘deal with’ whatever the Lord sends our way.
And to assert that this
is what bearing life’s burdens is about
is, I would
suggest, actually a denial of the resurrection.
It is the carrying of the cross,
without the
lived reality of the new life that the cross brings.
Our approach to life’s burdens
should be
one which is motivated by the God’s power of life or uphold and release,
rather than
by the powers of death to stifle and ensnare.
Carrying the cross without embracing resurrection,
is to miss
the point of the gospel of Christ
So imagine the person who is saddled with the heavy load
of caring
for a sick loved one,
and viewing
this as ‘a cross they just have to bear’.
I wonder what difference it might make for them
to come to experience
the care they are giving not as an unsought burden,
but as a
positive choice taken to care for another
as
an expression of the love that God has for the person who is sick?[1]
But how might such a transformation take place?
How can
someone trapped in the spiral of dependency-resentment
find
a new quality of life in their unsought responsibilities?
Well, what difference would it make for them, for example,
if the
burden of caring were shared with others,
as fellow members of the community of Christ
helped bear
that burden with them.
In my own experience of ministry and pastoral care,
I’ve seen
over and over the life-giving difference it can make to a person
when they
realise that they are not alone in their responsibilities,
when others
help carry that burden with them
This is when the cross becomes resurrection,
and we have
to let go of our fatalism, our stoicism,
and
our internalised martyr-complexes,
to allow
others to minister grace to us
in
the name of the one who comes to serve
and
to call us to acts of mutual service.
Do you remember the powerful image
of
Christian in John Bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress, published in 1678?
Christian is weighted down by a great burden,
which for
him, is the insight he has gained into his sinful nature.
He sets out on a journey to see how he can be relieved of
this burden,
and meets
various characters along the way.
Struggling through places like the Slough of Despond,
and waylaid
by conversations with Mr Worldly Wiseman, Mr Legality, and others,
he eventually finds his way to the ‘place of deliverance’
where he is
able to lay his burden down.
However, he then discovers that his journey through life is
far from over,
and he has
to make further adventures through places like
the
valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle,
and along
the way he discovers the importance of friends like Faithful and Hopeful,
who
help him carry on even when he feels the weight of his past sins
coming
back to burden him again.
Eventually, with help from others,
he makes it
safely over the river of death and take his place in the Celestial City.
The allegory is clear and effective:
if we are
to make it faithfully through this life,
we need to
bear one another’s burdens.
And here’s the thing:
it has to
be mutual.
One-sided burden bearing doesn't work:
we all have
our burdens to bear
and
if we take on someone else's burden
without
someone helping us to carry our own,
we just
become even more weighed down.
Some of us here will know the benefit of counselling,
or of person
centred therapies such as psychoanalysis.
Those who have been through such therapy
will have
found that the act of sharing your burden with the therapist
is
crucial in finding it easier to carry,
or indeed
in being able to lay it down altogether.
But although the therapist can help you shed your burden,
they are
also at risk of inappropriately taking it up themselves
through
inappropriate transference.
So a good therapist wouldn’t dream of offering support to
someone else,
without a
good supervision and support structure in place
to ensure
that they don’t end up walking around carrying everyone else’s burdens.
The same, of course, can be said of many of us,
who spend
time sitting with and supporting those
who are
finding life hard to bear.
If I am to be effective as a pastor,
and if we
each of us are to be effective as a burden-bearers for others,
we too will
need support and help.
So, for example, I go regularly to see my Spiritual
Director,
and have
done so since my ordination to ministry
way back in
the last millennium!
And this is the beauty of mutual burden-bearing.
We don’t
have to be strong to do it.
Actually, sometimes, the most effective burden-bearers
are those
who are themselves weak and carrying the scars of life,
because through our weakness we have discovered the
importance
of being
willing to allow other people to help us discover strength
that we
would never have been able to summon up on our own.
I spoke last week about the idea we are exploring
for
offering a volunteer-run debt advice service here at Bloomsbury,
offering
help and support to those who are struggling under the burden of debt.
I also asked for volunteers,
and I’m a
bit concerned that we might have got the idea
that the
only people who can offer such help
are those
who have never struggled with debt or money worries themselves.
Actually, I’d like to suggest that the opposite is probably
true.
The most
empathetic ear,
and
the most sympathetically offered advice,
may well
come from the person who has been there themselves.
This, of course, is why the twelve-step anonymous groups are
so effective:
because
they provide a context where a group of people
can
speak with utter honesty about their addiction,
knowing
that every other person in the room has experienced the same burden.
And the healing and release comes
through the
group bearing one another’s burdens,
through
mutual shared vulnerability,
and not the futile attempt to
exorcise an addiction by brute strength.
You see, this burden-bearing isn’t a theoretical idea with
no practical outworking;
rather,
it’s the sharp end of the transformation of people’s lives,
as they make their journey from the
kind of stoic,
individualised,
fatalistic cross-bearing
that
weighs down and leads to death,
into the living out of resurrection
and
the opening up of the path to new life.
So what might bearing one another’s burdens look like for
us, here at Bloomsbury?
It might look like volunteering to become involved in the
new debt advice scheme,
helping
bear the burden of financial stress.
It might look like giving financially to the church, and to the
hardship fund,
allowing
this place to minister to the immediate needs
of the poor and the vulnerable,
and to
offer long term structural support
to
the congregation and other groups that meet here.
It might look like committing to come to the art therapy
taster session
that’s
happening on Sunday 6th August,
and
discovering for yourself how therapy
can
begin to untie the bonds that hold our burdens onto our backs.
Do you have the courage to do this?
To begin
the journey of allowing another person to take your burden from you?
Many of us, myself included,
live our
lives out of a narrative of strength.
We’re the strong ones, the capable ones,
and even if
we’re not – we have to look like we are.
We may know deep down inside that there is a disconnect,
a pain, and
harm or a hurt, that weighs us down,
and stops
us being the person we could be.
But to admit it to ourselves, let alone to someone else,
is itself a
concept too threatening to contemplate.
Well, all I can say is that without allowing the other to
bear your burdens,
you are not
going to be able to bear the burdens of others.
In order to find release, we need to stop being strong
and instead
we need to find strength in mutuality.
This concept of mutuality isn’t something fuzzy and emotive,
although it
makes perfect emotional sense to admit weakness and seek support.
Rather, mutuality can become something profoundly
transformatory
in both the
political and economic sphere.
The financial institutions known as the Building Societies,
along with
companies like the John Lewis Partnership
were founded
on the concept of mutuality,
and into that mix we might also put workers cooperatives,
Friendly
Societies, and Benefit Societies.
These institutions enabled people to collaborate for mutual
benefit,
in the face
of a workplace environment where otherwise the benefit
went to the
owner, or shareholders, of the business.
The whole concept of the economics of the Common Good,
is based on
the idea of bearing one another’s burdens,
where the weakness of the individual
becomes
transformed through sharing and collaborating with others.
I have a chapter in a book which will be coming out later
this month,
edited by
Virginia Moffatt who used to work here at Bloomsbury with Ekklesia.
It’s a series of essays by activists and theologians,
looking at
how Christianity can reclaim the language of the Common Good.
If you’re interested, there will be a book launch here
on the
evening of the 20th September,
and you may also be interested to know that I’ve been
invited to speak about this book
at a
session at this year’s Greenbelt Festival.
How can we bear one another’s burdens?
What does
this mean for us?
London Citizens, the community organising network that we
are a part of,
interestingly
don't speak about 'empowering' people,
because, they say, that is still buying into the narrative
of the
powerful gifting power to the disempowered.
Rather, they speak of organising the powerless
so that
together they can take the power they need
in order to
release themselves of the burdens of oppression.
In our reading from 1 Corinthians 16 we heard an example of
Paul
doing the
first century equivalent of community organising.
The early Christian community was strung out around the
Mediterranean,
and in
every area it was facing persecution and hardship.
But the Jerusalem church was facing particular financial
difficulties,
and some of
the members there were facing possible starvation.
So Paul set about organising the weak community of
Christians
for mutual
sharing to ensure that none were impoverished.
Each little congregation on its own could not solve the
problem,
but
together they could save their mother church in Jerusalem from ruin.
Paul therefore set in place the motivation and the mechanism
for a free gift of money,
to be sent
from places such as Corinth, to where it was needed.
Not out some kind of early communistic ideal,
but simply
because of the conviction that 'in Christ'
there is an
obligation to care for one's sisters and brothers.
In short, there is an obligation to bear one another’s
burdens.
We spoke last week about the need to move away
from a
patriarchal understanding of charity,
where the strong do things for the
weak,
but in so
doing inadvertently perpetuate the inequality
that
has led to the need for charity in the first place.
And we saw how we need to move from doing for, or doing to,
towards a
concept of doing with.
Well this is what the bearing of each other’s burdens is all
about,
it is about
working with others to see burdens
lifted.
It is about the equalising of power within the community,
it is about
the recognition of mutual weakness,
and the
discovery of the strength that comes through mutuality.
It is about resurrection, and new life,
and it is about
the gospel of Christ
taking
root in our lives and our community,
so that we
might become
the agents of the transformation of
the world.
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