The Great Levelling

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

8 December 2019

Isaiah 40.1-11 

Mark 1.1-4  

Luke 4.14-21 

In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, nearly 400 years ago,

            it must have seemed as if English society was being turned upside down,

as this famous picture from the mid-1640s depicts:

            with a cat chasing a dog, a rabbit chasing a fox,

                        a cart before a horse, an upside down church,

                        fish swimming in the sky,

            a candle burning the wrong way up,

                        a wheelbarrow pushing a man,

            and gentleman who clearly got dressed in the dark.

So what caused such upset?

Well, to start with, there were the political ramifications of the civil wars,

            with Cromwell and his armies trying, and eventually succeeding,

                        in their attempts to overthrow the monarchy

                        and reform the entire mechanisms of government.

But the political and constitutional crisis was just one half of the story,

            because the execution of the king was a theological crisis as well.

At this point society was only a hundred or so years on

            from Henry VIII’s infamous break with Rome,

and his setting up of a national state Church of England,

            with himself and his heirs as its head, in place of the Pope in Rome.

So, when we get to the seventeenth century,

            the regicide of King Charles at the hands of Cromwell and his armies,

                        was an event that struck a blow

                        at the roots of all the dominant structures of English society.

Suddenly, the national Church of England itself was under threat,

            and this created the context in which rebellion could flourish,

with breakaway groups such as the Quakers and Baptists

            refusing to pay their tithes or baptise their babies,

and other even more radical groups such as the Levellers and the Diggers

            arguing on religious grounds that the wealth of the country

            should be redistributed for the benefit of the poor.

And I want us to pause for a moment here,

            because I find the Levellers particularly interesting;

                        not least because of their links

            to the early pioneers of our own, Baptist, tradition.

Unlike the more anarchist Diggers,

            the Levellers were not arguing for some proto-Communist ideology,

            where the rich are thrown down and the poor raised up.[1]

Rather, the Levellers took a more nuanced and creation-centred approach.

            They argued that the land itself was a gift from God,

                        given for the benefit of all those live upon it.

And so their issue was not that some were wealthy and some poor;

            rather it was that the land,

                        the fields and the forests of England,

            belonged to neither the rich nor the poor.

The land of England, according to the Levellers, was God’s territory;

            and the humans who lived on it, whether royalty or peasant,

            did so only as God’s tenants.

So the Levellers took particular issue with the enclosure of the common land,

            and argued for the right of each person

            to be able to make a living from the soil.

The Levellers also argued for greater democracy,

            believing that all humans are worthy of a say in the running of society;

they argued for greater religious tolerance and freedom;

            and for the equality of all before the law.

The movement only flourished for a few years,

            in the mid- to late- 1640s,

but for that time they were hugely popular,

            reaching many people through their extensive pamphleteering.

But they were also, as you can imagine,

            hugely controversial with the powers that be.

Although many in Cromwell’s army were sympathetic to the Levellers,

            he himself was rather more sceptical,

and there’s a memorial in Burford in the Cotswolds

            to three Levellers shot on Cromwell’s command.

They weren’t a political party in the modern sense of the term;

            so you couldn’t vote for them in an election, for example,

                        not least because they didn’t have elections

                        as we know them in the seventeenth century!

But nonetheless they were a populist political and religious movement,

            seeking to change the face of society

            in the direction of social justice.

But here’s the thing, as we gather on the Sunday before an election…

            on many of the issues they took a stand on,

                        I confess I find myself in considerable sympathy with them:

            I do believe each person has the right to make a living,

                        the right to vote, the right to believe as they choose,

                        and the right to be judged impartially by the law.

            I’m in favour of religious tolerance,

                        and of the innate value of each human before God.

Back in the seventeenth century, the Levellers of London,

            many of them members of a Baptist church over in the City,

            mounted a campaign, with petitions and actions,

to present to their civic leaders,

            in the hope that their cause would be heard,

            and changes could be brought about

                        to benefit the poor and curb the excesses of the rich,

            without the need for wholesale revolution.

In the end of course, as we know, the Levellers didn’t succeed;

            revolution came, armies were mobilised,

            a king lost his head, and a nation fought for its identity.

But I like to think their spirit still lives on.

In many ways,

            the challenge of those turbulent years from four centuries ago,

            still rings down to us today.

I’m not sure that those early Baptist Levellers were all that different to us,

            as we put pressure on the political powers of our time
                        to make the city a more just place for all to live,
joining with other churches, mosques,

                        synagogues and educational establishments

                        through the work of London Citizens.

So don’t forget to put Tuesday 21^st April in your diary,

            to join with the others from Bloomsbury

            at the Copperbox in the Olympic Park

            to engage the 2020 London mayoral candidates

                        on issues of youth violence, homelessness,

                        climate change, fair employment, and the like.

The fundamental issues that inspired the Levellers

            to organise their members for a better society

            are still issues that inspire people to do the same today.

And the cost of failure still remains just as high:

            if these things are not addressed,

            then even more people will die on the streets of our city.

It matters deeply to us, just as it did 400 years ago,

            that society is just, fair, equal, and impartial.

And here’s the thing;
            another lesson we can learn from the activism of the Levellers:
it is the responsibility of each of us

            to make every effort to bring a better society into being.

And we do this, not just out of self-interest,

            although that should not be underestimated.

But rather, as Christians, we do this

            because be we believe it is in the interest of God.

The passage we had earlier from the book of Isaiah

            speaks of every valley being lifted up,

                        and every mountain and hill being made low;

            it speaks of uneven ground becoming level,

                        and of rough places becoming a plain.

It is a vision of the levelling of society,

            of the evening out of those areas

                        where people are laid too low, or raised too high,

            of the removal of the obstacles to inclusion and participation

                        that cause people to trip and stumble.

            It is a vision of the in-breaking kingdom of God,

                        and it tells us that this process is the mechanism

                        by which the glory of God is made known amongst people.

This morning's passage from Isaiah was written towards the end of the exile in Babylon.

            And if you were here last week,

                        you may remember that we were hearing from the Prophet Jeremiah,

            who predicted the start of the exile

                        and the downfall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian army,

            and yet offered words of hope

                        to people living in the midst of despair.

Well, chapter 40 of Isaiah comes from a few decades later,

            when Jerusalem has indeed been destroyed

                        and the people carried off into exile;

            but the message of hope is still there.

Isaiah prophesies a return to Jerusalem,

            and he offers the exiles words of comfort.

He says that the punishment for the people’s sin,

            foretold by Jeremiah and enacted in the exile,

                        is nearly at an end,

            and that the restoration of Israel is at hand.

And I want us to pause for just a moment here,

            to consider the theological implications

            of this idea of the exile being a punishment on Israel for unfaithfulness.

This assertion that a people group, in this case Judah,

            bear the consequences of their leaders’ sinful decisions

can seem a deeply troublesome concept:

            after all, why would God punish the ordinary people

                        by sending them into exile,

            just because their king took decisions

                        that were displeasing to God?

Except, of course - this happens all the time, everywhere.

            The people always pay the price for the bad decisions of their leaders.

And I wonder if the way to look at this

            is to recognise that terrible leadership

            can lead to terrible suffering,
and this is true whether we live in ancient Israel,
            or 21st Century London.

It’s not as if God hadn’t warned Israel!

            In the first book of Samuel,

                        when the people cried for a king in place of judges to rule them,

            Samuel had told them in no uncertain terms

                        of the price they would eventually have to pay

                        for having a King like the other nations (1Sam 8.10-18).

But no, they said, they still wanted a king

            to lead them and fight their battles.

In our days of more enlightened democracy,

            we might say that people get the leaders they vote for

            - but even here that’s not always true.

Many a prime minister has been elected to office

            with far less than a majority of the population having voted for them.

And it is so often the disenfranchised, the impoverished, and the vulnerable

            who pay the price for bad decisions taken

            by even their most democratically of elected leaders.

It is a fair certainty that by this time next week,

            some of us are going to be disappointed in the election result

                        - whichever way it goes!

And in the midst of this,

            perhaps we will need to hear again the wisdom of Isaiah,

            who proclaimed that nothing lasts for ever.

Even the punishment of Babylonian exile came to an end eventually.
            Isaiah proclaimed that those who are lost will come home again,

            and those who mourn will be comforted.

Injustice does not get to win forever,

            because God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness

                        is forever breaking into this world

            through the faithful witness of the people of God

                        to the faithfulness of God.

Martin Luther King famously said that,
            "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice".

The comfort proclaimed by Isaiah to the exiles in Babylon

            was no shallow Pollyanna-ish message of hope.

Rather, it was a comfort based on the faithfulness of God.

            Because even if God’s people are unfaithful to God,

            God remains Faithful to them.

And so Isaiah calls for a way to be made straight in the desert,

            for God to come to his people once again.

He calls for the mountains to be laid low,

            and the valleys to be lifted up.

The obstacles that stand between God and people

            will not last forever,

and God will come again to the world

            to bring the good news

            of a renewed and restored relationship.

There is a personal challenge here for each of us, too,

            to consider what the barriers are in our lives

            that stand in the way of God coming to us.

What needs levelling in us to allow Christ to come to us?

            The capacity for sin to quietly build up until it obscures God from our view

                        is something that each of us needs to guard against.

But there is good news in Isaiah too for those of us who feel far from God,

            which is that we are like sheep cared for by a good shepherd.

Isaiah portrays God as always at work, seeking those who are lost,

            and carrying us gently and safely home,

            lifting us up when we feel too weak to take another step under our own energy.

I think that there is an eternal truth here,

            which is that we are never abandoned,

                        because God is the Good Shepherd,

            and it is God who satisfies our deep hunger

                        to be deeply known and deeply loved.

And so we come to the proclamation of John the Baptist in the wilderness,

            which was that Jesus came to bring forgiveness for sins,

            to open the path for God to come to us.

And that message of forgiveness and reconciliation

            is as much for us gathered here today

            as it was for those in the Judean wilderness,
            waiting for their messiah to come, two thousand years ago.

Just as Isaiah’s message of comfort

            is as much for us

            as it was for those in exile in Babylon, some 600 years before that.

God comes to us,

            with good news, with forgiveness,

            with justice, with comfort, and with reconciliation.

And so we gather in Advent,

            to prepare ourselves for the revelation of God in Jesus,

and we do well to hear the challenge once again:

            that God is discovered in our lives and in our society

            when injustices are undone.

In Christ, God comes to us;

            yes, as the infant in the manger,

but also again and again, God keeps coming to his people and his world,

            by the Spirit of Christ at work in our midst and in our lives.

According to Luke’s gospel,

            at the beginning of his ministry in Nazareth,

            Jesus also quoted from the book of Isaiah,

Luke 4.18-19

  ¹⁸ "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,

 ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."

The call to become involved in the levelling of society

            runs like a thread through both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament,

I could have pointed us to the sermon on the Mount, or the Magnificat,

            or to countless other places that speak of justice and reconciliation.

And it challenges each of us to take the faith that we have in God,

            who comes to us in Jesus Christ,

and to turn that faith outwards to the world,

            to have faith in a new world

that comes into being as we live and pray it into existence.

The vision here is of a world where wrongs are righted,

            a world where the poor receive good news,

a world where those captive

            to forces beyond their control find release,

a world where those blinded to the humanity of the other

            are able to see clearly for the first time in their lives,

a world where those oppressed by ideologies of hatred

            are finally released to love someone other than themselves,

a world where those who are despised by all

            find themselves the object of God’s favour.

This is the levelling we long for,

            this is the levelling that brings life and does not take it,

this is the levelling of the coming kingdom of God for which we pray and long,

            and it is before us, as it is before every generation.

And it begs of us a response.

            If God comes to us in Christ,

                        what earthly difference does that make

                        to the way we live today, tomorrow, this week?

And that is a question to take away and ponder,

            as we look for the one who is coming,

and pray for the coming kingdom of God,

            on earth, as it is in heaven.

[1] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 119