Saturday 30 December 2023

'Good news' story, or good 'news story'?

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
11.00am, 31st December 2023


Mark 1.1-8

A Labour Party spin doctor infamously remarked,
            on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001,
            that that day was a ‘very good day’ to bury ‘bad news’.[1]
 
Whilst she was, with some justification,
            vilified by the press at the time,
I think that in many ways her reaction to news management in the wake of tragedy
            was the product of a far wider and longstanding culture of cynicism and opportunism
            in the world of news, media, spin, and propaganda.
 
The question of ‘good news days’, and ‘bad news days’,
            and indeed of ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’
is not a straightforward question
            of the moral difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
 
The thing is, a ‘good-news’ story, is rarely a good ‘news-story’.
            Stories of ‘good news’ are often confined to the final item on the local news,
                        and typically take the ‘lost puppy found’ style.
It is very rare for the headline news, to be ‘good news’,
            rather, the stories we want to hear are stories of tragedy and trauma,
                        of wars and rumours of wars,
                        stories of money, power, and politics.
These are the good ‘news-stories’,
            and they are rarely ‘good news’.
 
On the rare occasion that a headlining story is presented as ‘good news’,
            the cynic in me is always looking beneath the surface of the story
            for the spin, the propaganda, the vested interest.
 
So what is going on here at the beginning of Mark’s gospel
            where the coming of Jesus is descried as ‘good news’?
 
We’ve just had Christmas, where the birth of Jesus
            as described in Matthew and Luke’s gospels
            is presented as ‘glad tidings’ for the world,
and now Mark is calling his advent ‘Good news’ for the world?
 
Human births don’t often get this kind of publicity…
            with the occasional notable exception,
            such as the announcement of yet another royal baby.
 
Whilst the news of human baby is always good news in and of itself,
            a royal baby is only headline good news
            because of the power, wealth, and privilege of the family
            that the child will be born into.
 
And it was ever thus.
 
In the Roman world, the official announcement of the birth of a royal child
            was trumpeted throughout the empire as, you guessed it, ‘good news!!’
 
The Roman propaganda machine would go into overdrive,
            to eulogise the emperor as the ‘divine man’
            and the birth of their child as the birth of a god.
 
There is an ancient inscription, which reads,
            ‘The birthday of the god was, for the world,
            the beginning of the joyful messages
                        which have gone forth because of him.’
 
‘Glad tidings of comfort and joy’, indeed.
 
The birth of an emperor’s god-child was ‘good news’ for the empire,
            because it ensured the perpetuation of the royal dynasty.
 
And so we come to the first verse of Mark’s gospel,
            written to a culture familiar with the carefully managed ‘good news’
                        of the emperor cult:
 
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’[2]
 
Here, right at the beginning of the gospel, in the very first line of text,
            we find Mark setting up a conflict that will dominate everything that follows.
 
He serves notice to his readers, from the offset,
            that this story of Jesus will be one which challenges
            all the apparatus of imperial propagation.
 
Like John’s gospel, Mark doesn’t offer us a ‘birth narrative’;
            we have to turn to Matthew and Luke
            for our singing shepherds, angelic choirs, and visiting magi.
 
Rather, he gives us a dramatic introduction
            to the arrival of the son of God in the course of human history.
 
Mark presents the coming of Jesus as the advent of the ‘anointed’ leader,
            who is confirmed by God himself,
and who bursts onto the scene of history
            proclaiming a ‘kingdom’ to challenge the might
            of the Roman Kingdom.
 
In other words, Mark’s version of the advent of Jesus
            is cast in such a way as to take dead aim at Caesar, the Roman emperor,
            and at the legitimating myths that supported his power.
 
From its very first line, Mark’s gospel is subversive.
 
‘Good news’ in Roman times, as in our own time,
            was usually news of victory on the battlefield
            as the imperial armies marched their way across the known world,
giving the gift of Roman Peace, the pax Romana,
            to a world that had no choice but to accept the gift,
            or to pay the price for refusing to comply.
 
In direct contrast to this, the ‘good news’ with which Mark’s Gospel begins,
            is a declaration of war upon the very heart of the violent empire,
                        as Jesus does battle with the political culture
                        of imperial domination.
 
We live in a world that is addicted to news,
            but as we have seen, ‘good news’ does not usually make good news.
 
A good, or effective, news story,
            is one that hooks the viewer or the reader into wanting to know more.
 
News of battles won, terror threats foiled,
            economic victories, and political standoffs,
are the staple diet of our news media.
 
And they do for us what the Roman propaganda machine
            did for the Roman plebeians:
 
They sell us the narratives by which we then frame our lives,
            and they invite us to rejoice in the ‘good news’ of their protectionism,
                        as it comes to us through the secular deities of militarism and monarchy,
                        and the miracle of free market economics.
 
And it is to us, as it was to the world of the Romans,
            that the Christ-child comes.
 
And Mark would have us believe that he comes
            in a way that subverts the parochial good news stories of our time
            with a transcendent message of ‘good news’ for all time, and all people.
 
And so Mark takes us on a journey from the world of global domination,
            to the world of those who see history from the other side.
 
He invites us to step with him into the world of the under-dog,
            the world of the dominated,
                        the world of the refugee, the alienated, and the exiled.
 
And so he invokes the prophet Isaiah,
            and we hear a voice reading quotes from the prophet of the Jewish exile.
 
Interestingly, if you actually turn to Isaiah in the Old Testament, to find this quote,
            it’s not there quite as Mark has it,
not only because he was quoting from a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures,
            (whereas our modern Old Testament is a translation of a tenth century Hebrew text);
but also because the first half of the quote isn’t from Isaiah at all,
            it’s a mish-mash of quotes from Exodus and Malachi (Exod. 23.20; Mal. 3.1).
 
But the second part of Mark’s quote is, however, from Isaiah, chapter 40v3.
 
As an aside here, for a moment,
            the fact that Mark can take three quotes, from three different places,
            and edit them together to form what he presents
                        as a unified quotation from Isaiah,
            tells us a lot about the way in which the early followers of Jesus
                        thought about their scriptures.
 
Not for them some restrictive doctrine of scriptural inerrancy,
            or any idea that the text is immutable
            and universally applicable in all times and all places.
 
Not for them a statement of faith
            that regards scripture as the sole and absolute authority
            in all matters of faith and practice.
 
Rather, Mark, in common with the other Gospel writers,
            regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as holy stories,
            that explored how and why God was at work in the world,
drawing people to the divine
            and reshaping human history
            away from oppression and towards liberation.
 
For them, scripture was more of an inspiration,
            than it was itself inspired.
 
It was there to engage with, to hear from, and to argue with,
            not to settle arguments and close down conversation!
 
Anyway, the way in which Mark edits these three quotes together is significant,
            because it tells us a lot about his subversive intent.
 
I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but the word ‘redaction’
            has come back into fashion over recent years,
with government reports often published
            with key passages ‘redacted’ in the interest of national security.
 
But just in case you’ve missed this word, it means, ‘to edit for publication’,
            and it’s a word that Biblical Scholars are very familiar with
                        as we look at the ways the gospel writers
                        edited their source material together,
            in order to bring their different versions of the Jesus story into being.
 
So the scholarly discipline of ‘redaction criticism’, as it is known,
            looks at the motives for why
            things have been edited together in certain ways.
 
However, the word ‘redaction’ arrived into more popular use
            through the way in which government departments respond
                        to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act,
            where documents are released, but in so-called ‘redacted’ form,
                        with section obliterated where that particular content
                        is deemed unsuitable for public consumption.
 
The association with concealed statistics and government cover up
            has lent the word an air of mystery and intrigue;
                        it speaks of the mystique of subversion.
 
Which is exactly where Mark is taking us
            in his redaction of Exodus, Malachi, and Isaiah.
 
The Exodus reference, and its equivalent passage in Malachi,
            are combined and translated by Mark to read:
See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
            who will prepare your way.’
 
And here, Mark takes us into the world of the Jewish slaves in Egypt,
            making their journey through the wilderness of Sinai
            on their way to the promised land.
 
The messenger who goes ahead through the wilderness
            is heralding the way for the people of God
            to make their own journey of liberation;
the Lord himself blazes the trail.
 
This is a story of emancipation, of freedom from slavery.
            And as such it is an inherently revolutionary story.
 
For any empire dependent on the enslavement of humans,
            the release of those slaves from bondage
            is an act of treason against the system that requires their servitude.
 
Whether it’s the Egyptians of the time of the exodus,
            or the Romans of the time of Mark’s gospel,
or the American plantation owners of a bygone century,
            or those who currently serve in the sweatshops and brothels of our own time,
            held in economic slavery to the empire of global capital
                        that dominates our own world:
 
the release of slaves is an act of subversion.
 
What Mark leaves open for interpretation, though,
            is who the messenger of freedom is in the context of his gospel.
Is it John the Baptist, heralding the arrival of Jesus?
            Or is the messenger Jesus himself,
                        preparing the way for those who will follow him?
            Or is the messenger none other than God,
                        sending the gospel writer to proclaim to readers down the centuries
                        the good news of the advent of Jesus.
 
The answer to this conundrum may well be that all three are intended,
            because the advent of God is not a once-for-all event,
                        fixed in time and space.
 
            The God who comes to us in the infant Jesus,
                        a sign of hope in a world of oppression and darkness,
            is the same God who comes to us in the adult Jesus,
                        opening before all of humanity a way of being,
                        that is not dominated by death and enthralled by empire.
 
            And this is yet again the same God
                        who comes to us by the Spirit of Christ,
                                    as the stories of Good News that we encounter
                                    through the pages of the gospel
                        inspire new ways of engaging our humanity before God.
 
Sometimes, the coming of God into the world
            is full of ambiguity and uncertainty,
because this is the God who comes in the wilderness,
            to those who are lost,
offering a way through the desert to the new world of love and acceptance
            that he is bringing into being.
 
And so Mark introduces us to John the Baptist,
            the herald in the wilderness,
            living a marginal existence, surviving on locusts and honey.
 
John is found in the place where the exodus people fled
            as they left their slavery in Egypt.
 
He is found in the place where Jesus faces his own temptations,
            the place where Elijah sought sanctuary
                        when hunted by the political authorities,
            the place of solitude, loneliness, and liminality.
 
And it is from this peripheral place
            that the challenge to the centre emerges.
 
The voice of the one proclaiming the advent of the good news of the coming of Jesus
            is heard echoing from the hills.
 
If earthly power takes the centre ground,
            whether that be Rome, Jerusalem, or Westminster;
the prophetic voice of challenge comes from the margins.
 
Mark’s gospel deliberately sets up a spatial tension
            between two places that are symbolically opposites.
 
The disparity between the margin and the centre,
            between the wilderness and the temple,
is something that Mark’s gospel returns to time and again.
 
According to the dominant Jewish nationalistic ideology of salvation history,
            Jerusalem was considered the hub
            to which all nations would one day come.
 
Mark turns this on its head;
            and far from beginning his story of good news
            with a triumphal march on Zion,
rather, he tells of crowds fleeing to the margins,
            to be baptised with the baptism of repentance.
 
Mark is setting the scene for a conflict
            that will only resolve itself at the crucifixion,
as the new kingdom of Jesus comes from the margins,
            to challenge the powers that dominate the centre.
 
The priestly and scribal establishment of the temple,
            whose social power was derived
                        from systems of religiously legitimates social control,
            finds itself in the same category as the emperor of Rome:
and such power is deemed illegitimate by the coming Christ.
 
The good news of the coming of Jesus
            is that all expressions of illegitimate power,
                        whether secular, sacred, or some fusion of the two,
            are called to account by the voice of repentance from the wilderness.
 
And so John the Baptist calls people to repentance,
            he invites them to confess the sin of their complicity
                        in the idolatrous powers of Rome and Jerusalem,
            and he baptises them in the Jordan as they, like the exodus people of old,
                        pass through the waters of the river
            as they make their journey from the old world to the new,
                        as they complete their pilgrimage
                                    from enslavement to the powers that be
                                    to freedom in the new kingdom
                                                that they are being called to bring into being.
 
The water-baptism of John, the baptism of repentance,
            heralds the baptism offered by Jesus,
who will, says John, baptise with the Holy Spirit.
 
If John’s baptism of water in the wilderness sets up a challenge
            to the dominant powers in the world,
the baptism of the Holy Spirit proclaimed by Jesus
            inaugurates a confrontation on a spiritual level
with the underlying forces of idolatry
            that give rise to earthly expressions of centralised authority.
 
There is no darkness so dark
            as that which lurks in the human soul,
and we have such endless capacity to wreak havoc in creation.
 
The baptism of the Holy Spirit
            shines the light of the Spirit of Christ
                        into the darkest places of our souls and imaginings,
            bringing to the light all that would otherwise eat away at our humanity,
                        destroying us one day at a time until all that is left
                        are the false gods of our own devising.
 
Baptism is not simply about being sorry to God
            for the wrong things we have done.
It is about opening ourselves to the transformative power of the Spirit of Christ
            that takes us away from the centre,
                        away from our dreams of power and our fantasies of success,
            into the wilderness where dreams are transformed
                        and fantasies redeemed.
 
It is only as we are baptised to be a marginal people
            that we find we can effect true change in the world.
 
The challenge here, at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, is clear:
            It asks us to consider in what way we will regard
                        the coming of Jesus to the world as good news?
 
If we see the coming of Jesus as the advent of power,
            to transform society from the centre
                        by forceful application of Christian values,
            then we side with Rome and Jerusalem,
                        not with John the Baptist.
 
If, however, we hear the one who comes to us,
            calling us to the wilderness to repent of our sins,
            calling us to baptism of water and the Holy Spirit,
then we hear the voice of the one crying in the desert.
 
The waters of Baptism speak to all of us,
            maybe reminding us of the promises
                        we ourselves have made in years long past,
            maybe challenging us to consider baptism for ourselves,
 
but above all, calling us to the margins:
            calling us to the wilderness, to the land beyond the Jordan,
            calling us to repentance of our worshipping of other gods,
            and calling us to receive afresh the baptism of the Holy Spirit,
                        who opens within us the stream of living water
                        which leads to eternal life.


[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1385043/A-good-day-for-No10-to-bury-Jo-Moores-career.html
[2] The following sermon draws on Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man.

Monday 11 December 2023

'I Want My Country Back!'

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.