Taking Care of our Bodies

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

24 September 2017

Romans 14.1-12

Listen to this sermon here: 
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2017-09-24-am-simon-woodman-podcast

So, are you going to do ‘Sober October’? Or ‘Dry January’?

            Are you going to give up red meat for Advent,

            or go ‘vegan for Lent’?

How’s that diet going?

            Are you getting your ‘five a day’?

            Are you keeping your carbs under control?

What does YourFitnessPal .com tell you?

            How’s your resting heart rate?

Are you tempted by the new Apple Watch

            with its updated health and fitness monitoring?

Are you getting enough sleep?

            There’s an app for that, you know,

            to tell you when it’s time for a duvet day.

Is your life in balance?

            Are you happy?

            Is there enough hugge in your life?

We have, as a society, become obsessed with our quality of life.

            And not without some very good reasons.

The obesity crisis, as it is called,

            is a ticking time bomb of hospitalisation waiting to go off.

The NHS tell us that 1 in 4 of us is overweight,

            and we have the highest level of obesity in Western Europe,

                        ahead of countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Sweden;

            making us the so-called ‘fat man’ of Europe.

Our sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diets

            are increasing our propensity to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer,

with all of the personal and economic costs involved in treating these.

The general stagnation of wages

            and the seemingly never-ending rise in housing costs

has played a contributing factor in this,

            with more and more people ‘treating’ themselves

                        in relatively cheap but unhealthy ways,

            to compensate for their overall lack of resources

                        to take more strategically healthy decisions.

It’s a well-established fact that childhood obesity is a key indicator of adult obesity,

            and that children in economically deprived communities

            are far more likely to be overweight.

This is not just a problem of poor personal choices,

            it’s a structural and systemic problem

            that’s directly related to the inequalities that exist in our society.

Professor Susan Jebb, from Oxford University, comments that,

            “Obesity is a consequence of the abundance and convenience of modern life

            as well as the human body's propensity to store fat,”

And she goes on to note that,

            “The situation in which food is readily available for most people

            has arrived in a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.”[1]

We’re just not equipped, either personally or structurally,

            to deal with the seemingly unending availability

            of cheap and yummy sugar and fat.

And then of course there’s the rising stress levels

            that come with the combination of financial insecurity and poor physical health.

            We live with an ever-increasing expectation

                        that those who have jobs will put in longer and longer hours,

            and we battle with a culture of 24/7 availability

                        where we answer emails in the middle of the night,

                        and bury our heads in our phones whilst we are supposed to be on holiday.

            While those at the lower end of the income spectrum

                        either struggle to find work at all,

            or are taking two or even three low-paid jobs

                        to generate enough income to pay rent and bills.

And all this stress leads to family pressure, relationship breakdown, and time off work,

            with 11.7 million working days lost due to stress related illness in 2015/16.[2]

There’s just too much to do, with too little time to do it,

            and not enough resources to do it properly.

And what, you might well ask, has all this to do with God?

            Why has Simon started his sermon with a mini-lecture on public health?

Well, here’s the thing.

            I think that this is a deeply spiritual issue,

and in my observation it’s not one which we normally speak about in church.

I mean, just out of interest,

            when was the last time you heard a sermon on health and fitness?

Sermons on prayer? Yes.

            Loving one another? Yes.

            Forgiving one another? Of course.

            Working for peace? Absolutely.

But caring for our bodies?...

I think we too often confine our Christian faith to our so-called ‘spiritual lives’;

            and in so doing we deny the reality of the fact that we are embodied beings.

There was an ancient Greek philosophy called ‘dualism’,

            which asserted that the physical world;

                        the one we can see, touch, and taste,

            was merely a shadow of a more real, truly spiritual world,

                        where the imperfections of this world cease to exist.

So, the Simon of this physical world, with all his flaws and imperfections,

            would be understood as merely a shadow

                        of the true, perfected, spiritualised Simon,

                        that exists beyond this world.

Dualism was developed by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle,

            and it was the dominant worldview at the time Christianity developed.

So the early Christians, and those who wrote the New Testament,

            would have found themselves in a world where the split

                        between the spiritual and the physical

            was an accepted part of the way the world was understood.

Interestingly, the Jews had a different perspective,

            and they tended to view the spiritual and the physical as more of a unity,

            with both revealing the nature and glory of God.

In the Jewish understanding,

            worship and prayer were not attempts to reach across a void,

but the conscious opening of human life

            to experience of God who is ever present in and through all things.[3]

So when we come to the New Testament,

            we can trace something of this difference of opinion

            as to the relationship between the spiritual and the physical.

Sometimes it can seem as if God is beyond us,

            and we can only reach him through engaging our ‘higher’, more ‘spiritual’ abilities;

and sometimes it can seem as if God is thoroughly with us,

            at home in the frailty and fragility of our humanity.

However, once we move beyond the time of the New Testament,

            into the second and third centuries,

the philosophy of dualism really takes hold within Christianity,

            and largely eclipses the more holistic approach to life

            that came through the Jewish tradition.

So, the view develops within Christianity

            that ‘the physical world is secondary and shabby

            compared with that which can be experienced by the mind or spirit.’[4]

And we end up with a kind of Christianised version of the classical Greek position,

            where humans are seen as a combination of body and soul,

            arranged in a hierarchy, with the soul ranking ahead of the body.

So forms of Christianity emerged where people would deny or neglect their bodies,

            in order to focus on, or develop, or perfect, their spiritual side.

Of course, in a pre-antibiotic world of disease,

            with death and suffering constant companions through life,

you can see why it would be attractive to people

            to believe that they could transcend their mortal life

            by focussing on the eternal, perfected state of their souls.

Interestingly, this dualism also finds its way into post-enlightenment philosophy,

            to the extent that it is very much still with us today.

I’m not going to blame Descartes for this,

            but I do think we can point the finger at him

            as the one primarily responsible.

You may remember his famous dictum,

            ‘I think, therefore I am’?

Well, this takes us to the heart of his perspective,

            which is that the mind, with its consciousness and self-awareness,

can be distinguished from the physicality of the brain

            as the seat of intelligence.

In other words,

            Descartes asserted that the grey squishy stuff in our skulls

            is merely where our mind sits in our bodies.

According to him, our true being, our true identity as humans,

            is more than the sum of our neurons.

A lot of science fiction, and indeed science,

            has taken this as its inspiration,

as people have wrestled with the idea that our minds can transcend our bodies.

From Frankenstein’s Monster, to Data the Android in Star Trek,

            the question of whether our bodies are inherent to our humanity

            is a recurring theme.

And in medicine, the split between psychoanalytical and pharmaceutical treatments

            remains very much with us to this day.

Sometimes the order of the hierarchy gets reversed,

            with the body finding itself ahead of the soul in the order of priority,

but the underlying split between the two remains.

Are we body, or are we soul?

            Are we physical, or are we spiritual?

            Are we human, or are we dancer?

Should we pay attention primarily to our minds, or to our bodies?

In a sense, we have here the whole basis for the split in contemporary culture

            between science and faith.

If you believe that consciousness is an emergent quality of our physical evolution,

            then you may be tempted to disregard as pre-scientific

            any talk of the spiritual, the noumenal, or the transcendent.

On the other hand, if you believe that we are divinely created beings,

                        made in the image of God,

            then you may be tempted to disregard as un-spiritual

                        any talk of evolution or medicalised treatment.

In a nutshell – if you’re unwell,

            would you go first to your pastor for prayer,

            or to your doctor for medicine?

Of course, it’s a false dichotomy.

            The scientist ignores the spiritual to their loss,

            and the theologian ignores the physical to their cost.

But it is a deeply ingrained dichotomy,

            which we have inherited as the result of two thousand years

            of cultural and religious dualism,

so it takes a bit of unpicking.

And here I want to return to a comment I made earlier,

            which is that we are embodied beings.

It is simply not authentic to the broad witness of scripture

            to separate our souls from our bodies;

and we need to recover something of the Jewish understanding

            of the unity between the physical and spiritual.

Both reveal the nature and glory of God,

            and nowhere is this more clear

            than in the life of Jesus, God with us in human form.

Belief in the divinity of Jesus is not some abstract theological point

            which is increasingly less relevant to our scientific understand of the world.

Rather, it is a crucial challenge to those practices

            which would seek to separate the spiritual from the physical

            by perpetuating the ancient philosophy of dualism.

The idea of God-with-us in the person of Christ

            tells us that you cannot touch the human, without also touching the divine.

You can no more treat the body in isolation from the spirit,

            than you can transcend the physical to live entirely in the spiritual world.

The person who fasts for too long will starve to death,

            regardless of the state of heightened consciousness they achieve along the way,

and the person who attends only to the body and its needs

            will lose touch with the mystery of existence that calls us beyond ourselves

            and into works of love and service.

Many of you will know that I use language of spiritual warfare extremely sparingly.

            I’m not the kind of Christian who sees demons round every corner.

But I do think that sometimes it is appropriate to name evil,

            and in the naming of it to seek to disempower it.

And there are many demons in our world

            that slip through unnamed, and which therefore continue to exercise their hold

            over the lives of those they are seeking to destroy.

So I want to name some demons,

            and give us permission to talk about them and see them exorcised from our lives.

You have heard, I’m sure, the phrase ‘the demon drink’,

            and many of us, myself included, know the temptation

                        to drink a little too much, a little too often.

Well, there were 339,000 hospital admissions last year

            related to alcohol consumption,

and the stories of those who come through he doors of this church

            for our Alcoholics Anonymous meetings

give testimony to the capacity alcohol has to destroy lives

            if its consumption is not regulated in some way.

And related to alcohol are the other addictive drugs,

            which range from tobacco to painkillers, to cannabis and other illegal drugs.

And if we think this stuff doesn’t happen here, we’re wrong:

            the cultural acceptability of substance abuse is prevalent,

                        and Christians are not immune.

But if we perpetuate the dualistic myth that what we do to our bodies,

            is largely unrelated to our spiritual wellbeing,

then we not only give ourselves permission

            to continue in our destructive patterns of behaviour,

            but we deny the image of God in each of us.

And what about diet, exercise, and weight?

I’m very aware that here I stand on treacherous ground,

            because I’m a slim man

            and I don’t want in any way to assume the moral high ground here.

In fact, those of you who have known me for a few years

            may remember that I used to be much bigger then than I am now.

I lost several stone after my 40-year-old man health check

            showed that my cholesterol was significantly higher than it should be.

I remember a few years ago walking round the Christian Resources Exhibition

            (yes, there is indeed such a thing!)

and there was a stall there for an organisation,

            who promote healthy living from a Christian perspective.[5]

One of the people passing by remarked, scathingly,

            ‘oh great, so being fat’s a spiritual issue now, is it?!’

And hearing that really challenged me,

            because I realised that I had been guilty of focussing on my spiritual development,

            to the neglect of my body.

I was going to see my spiritual director,

            but wasn’t taking regular exercise,

and my diet had become one of fast, convenient food,

            consisting mainly of beer and burger, or steak night at Wetherspoons, and the like…

Was it any wonder I was overweight with high cholesterol?

And when I go to ministers’ meetings,

            and I look around me at my fellow clergy,

I see many others are taking the exact same decision:

            Ministers are, all too often, overweight.

We sit at our desks and write our sermons,

            we pray our prayers, and visit the sick, and comfort those who are suffering;

and we neglect ourselves,

            because we have prioritised the spiritual over the physical.

And what has challenged me personally is the realisation

            that this is not only bad practice, it is bad theology.

And the same applies to stress.

I remember my College Principal Brian Haymes once saying to us,

            that many ministers will leave the pastorate due to stress.

And that he wanted to challenge us to consider the possibility

            that this is because they are too lazy to take control of their own diaries.

It’s a provocative proposal,

            but there is some truth in it.

All of us struggle to take control of our own lives,

            and it’s so much easier to allow other people to set our agendas for us.

A church like Bloomsbury, where there is so much going on,

            will suck every moment we are prepared to give it.

There is always more to do, and the need is so great.

And then we factor in the demands of our families, our professions,

            and our other commitments,

and suddenly we find that we are no longer in control of our own lives.

It’s hard, disciplined work, saying no to people,

            and it’s doubly difficult to take back control

            of that which we have already handed over to others.

And yet if we don’t, we simply abdicate responsibility,

            and ultimately pay the cost in our own lives.

We cannot separate ourselves off like this,

            because we are embodied beings,

made in the image of God

            and reflecting the likeness of his son.

Now, the thing is, there is no one-size-fits all solution to these challenges.

            These demons of addiction, obesity, and stress

            will not be exorcised with one simple word.

And here we need to hear Paul’s advice to the Christians in Rome:

‘One person believes it is all right to eat anything,

            while the weak person eats only vegetables.

The one who eats should not despise the one who does not,

            and the one who does not should not condemn the one who does

            – because God has welcomed them…

One person reckons one day more important than another.

            Someone else regards all days as equally important.

            Each person must make up their own mind.’

Not everyone will take the same decision.

            For starters, I’m not convinced that being a vegetarian is a sign of weakness,

                        I mean, I don’t think I have the strength to give up bacon!

            And not everyone will become vegan.

            Not everyone will take up swimming, or jogging, or going to the gym.

            Not everyone will strategically reduce their working hours.

            Not everyone will take full control of their diary.

And it’s not our place to judge the decisions of others here.

            It’s far too easy for us to write our own choices onto the lives of others,

                        and then stand in judgment of them

                        when they don’t measure up to the standards we have set for ourselves.

As Paul puts it:

‘Who do you think you are to judge someone else?’

That is not what we are to do.

But it is our responsibility to ask ourselves

            where we stand before God on this.

And it is our responsibility to stand alongside one another

            as together we seek to live into being our commitment to love each other.

My biggest worry in raising this issue this morning

            is that it would generate feelings of guilt or condemnation.

But my hope is that we can together support one another

            as we find places for honesty about the struggles that each of us has

            to care for ourselves in both body and spirit.

---

[1] http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/loseweight/Pages/statistics-and-causes-of-the-obesity-epidemic-in-the-UK.aspx

[2] http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress/

[3] http://girardianlectionary.net/res/wright_dualism.htm

[4] http://girardianlectionary.net/res/wright_dualism.htm

[5] http://www.fit-fish.co.uk/

Whose lives matter?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

20 August 2017

Romans 11:1-2, 28-32 

Psalm 67.1-7 

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this too,

            but in the last couple of years

                        the incredible scientific feat of decoding the human genome

            has passed from the world of esoteric science,

                        into the world of the mundane.

These days, for less than the price of two theatre tickets,

            you can, and I quote,

            ‘Bring your ancestry to life through your DNA’.

The market-leading company, 23andMe,

            will apparently use their worldwide database of genetic sequencing

            to give you personalized information on your ancestry composition,

                        any DNA relatives you may have lurking undiscovered in your family tree,

                        and even your Neanderthal percentage.

And it occurs to me that whilst it may do one no harm

            to discover that you’re a few percent Neanderthal (after all, so is everyone else),

                        or that you’re only 25% European,

                                    alongside sub-Saharan African or East Asian ancestry;

            discovering that you have a direct match on their database

                        for a sister living in Australia that you previously knew nothing about

            may be rather more problematic.

Of course, there may be some health benefits in terms of inherited genetic diseases,

            but quite what one is supposed to do with the information

                        that you have a slightly increased chance of developing Alzheimer’s Disease

                        is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment…

And anyway, the health reporting isn’t what’s driving this new industry

            in personalized DNA sequencing.

People are, it seems to me, buying into this

            because they are curious to understand more about their identity.

‘Who am I?’ is one of the defining questions of our time.

            Am I a European, an African, or an Asian;

                        a mongrel or a Neanderthal?

            Who should I identify with?

                        Which tribe do I belong to?

In a globalized world of instant communication,

            and social networks that transcend all geographical barriers,

            it seems that we are living through a ‘crisis of belonging’.

It’s the same question that drives the huge interest in family tree research:

            ‘Who am I?’ Or, to quote the BBC, ‘Who do you think you are?’

                        – the title of course of the ever-popular TV show

                                    in which celebrities discover, and I quote,

                                    ‘secrets and surprises from their past.’

Except it’s not from their past at all

            – much of what is discovered, and the stories that are told,

            are from many generations before anyone alive now was even born.

Logically, of course, it’s all nonsense:

            you don’t have to go back very many generations

                        before you have more ancestors

                        than there were people living in the entire world!

The time of the Norman Conquest in the 11^th Century

            achieves this by a fact of three or more.

Which means that, basically, we’re all massively in-bred.

            There is no ‘pure line’ in any of us.

My Nana used to say, with some considerable pride,

            that her ancestors came over with the Normans.

            Well, so did all of ours, if we’re white British!

In fact, did you know that if you’re a white European,

            you are, statistically speaking, a direct descendent of Charlemagne;

                        Carolingian King of the Franks, and Holy Roman Emperor.

It’s just a numbers game:

            he had (at least) eighteen children, and I’m one of his descendants:

                        it just must be true.

So, defining ourselves by our genetic or ancestral heritage

            is a logical nonsense.

But it continues to make emotional sense,

            and people keep doing it,

as the events in Charlottesville over the last couple of weeks

            have vividly and tragically demonstrated.

And as I said, I think this is because we have, in our Western Society,

            a crisis of belonging.

We don’t know who we are.

We’re programmed, at a genetic level,

            to live in villages of about 2-300 people,

which is about the number of people you can comfortably get to know

            and sustain some kind of relationship with.

Any more than this and it becomes quickly overwhelming.

Interestingly, the average number of friends

            that Facebook users have on the platform is 338,

                        but with a median of 200.

The figure 2-300 is about right for a community.

            Churches often struggle to grow beyond 300,

                        because they start to feel impersonal, and people get lost.

It seems we most naturally relate to smaller communities;

            and so, faced with the vastness of our world,

with all its diversity of ethnicity, gender;

            sexuality, social standing; political opinion, and religious conviction,

                        we search for meaning, for identity, for that elusive ‘sense of belonging’;

            and we do it by seeking answer to the question

                        of who we are:

            Are white or black, British or English,

                        European or French, African, Asian, Neanderthal, whatever…?

Which at one level is fine.

            There’s nothing wrong with a bit of quiet genealogical research,

                        I’m partial to it myself,

            and there’s nothing inherently dangerous about having your DNA sequenced.

But if these things are symptoms of a deeper malaise,

            if they arise from our crisis of belonging,

then that same sickness can also manifest itself

            in racism, sexism, white supremacy, neo-Nazism,

                        homophobia, gay-bashing,

            and the worst kinds of nationalistic sabre-rattling

                        such as ‘the world has never seen before’.

But of course, for all of our technological advancements,

            we aren’t the first generation to experience a crisis of belonging,

                        we aren’t the first generation in which people have struggled

                        to know who they are.

The Roman Empire dominated the known world in the first century,

            and has many parallels to the globalized media

                        and financial empires of our own world.

The Romans were technologically dominant,

            with a massive military machine

                        and an all-encompassing trade and financial network,

            all held together by the religious ideology of Emperor-worship.

People who, just a generation before,

            had no experience of life beyond their village,

found the Roman Empire on their doorstep,

            informing them in no uncertain terms

            that they were now part of something much bigger.

The ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of the Roman Empire

            was greater than at any time before it in human history,

and it was something which would not be repeated

            until relatively modern times.

And so, in the first century, people faced their own crisis of belonging.

            To whom did they belong?

                        To Rome or to Galatia? To Philippi, or to Palestine, or to Jerusalem?

            Who were they to regard as their tribe, as their people?

This is the background to what we meet

            in our passage for this morning from Paul’s letter to the Romans,

and you can see, I hope, that it is a context

            which has strong similarities with the world that we find ourselves in.

My hope, also, is that as we explore Paul’s approach

            to these issues of belonging, ethnicity,

                        nationality, and religion in his context,

            we will gain some insights

                        into how we might address such issues in our world too.

Paul begins chapter 11 of his letter to the Romans

            by rehearsing his conclusion from the previous chapter,

            which we looked at last week:

                        Does the inclusion of the Gentile nations into the people of God

                        mean that God has broken faith with, and rejected, the people of Israel?

‘By no means!’ says Paul in verse 1,

            and to prove it he uses himself as an example:

He’s a Jew, a genetic descendent of Abraham,

            and yet he’s also part of God’s Christian people.

He’s no less a Jew because of this,

            and just as he argues that the Gentiles do not need to become Jewish

                        to receive righteousness through Christ,

            so he remains a Jew, even as he puts his own faith in Christ.

And, he says, if it’s true for him, it’s true for others.

            God has not finished with Israel.

Then, in the bit of chapter 11 that the lectionary skips over in today’s reading,

            Paul goes over the same ground again in some considerable complexity,

using his famous metaphor of the olive tree:

            showing that the Gentile branches have been grafted

                        into the historic root and trunk of Israel,

            and that while some of the Jewish branches may have been broken off,

                        they can still be grafted in again by God the master-gardener.

Then we come to the conclusion of this part of Paul’s argument,

            which has been running for the last three chapters,

            as he has teased out the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles,

and here we find ourselves in the murky and distressing waters

            of racism and xenophobia.

The incendiary language leaps out at us in verse 28,

            where Paul speaks to his mostly Gentile audience about the Jews,

                        and says “As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake”.

Interestingly, the New Revised Standard Version, our pew Bible,

            tries to soften this a bit – and adds a couple of words:

            ‘As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God for your sake’,

                        but that’s not there in the original Greek.

Paul is hitting the shock factor here:

            the Jews, who he has just spent three chapters arguing

                        are still part of God’s covenant,

            are now ‘enemies’ with regard to the gospel of Christ.

What on earth is going on?

As we discovered last week,

            when we looked at Paul’s language of justification by works,

we have to recognize that we are reading this

            in a very different context from that in which it was written.

There may be certain similarities,

            but we are reading this post-holocaust.

            We know where anti-Semitism can take us,

                        and so we are careful to avoid it,

                        and we are alert to any hint of it.

We might criticize the Jewish state

            for its current war of attrition against the Palestinians,

                        and we are I think right to do so;

            but that is not the same as saying that the Jews, all Jews,

                        are ‘enemies’ of the gospel.

So why does Paul say this?

            Well, of course, Paul is himself writing this as a Jew

                        – he’s made that very clear already.

This is not anti-Semitism coming from a powerful oppressor

            against a minority population.

But there is certainly a background here of anti-Judaism,

            within the congregation that Paul is writing to in Rome,

and he uses this inflammatory language to call it out.

The majority of the first century Christian congregation in Rome

            was made up of those who had converted from the pagan religions,

and only a minority were drawn from those

            with a Jewish background.

And just as Paul had argued strongly

            that the Gentile converts did not need to adopt the Jewish law,

so he now has to argue that Jewish converts

            do not need to stop observing their Jewish religious practices.

In essence, the Gentiles in the Roman congregation

            had been picking on the Jewish Christians,

probably in retaliation for the efforts by some of the Jews

            to tell the Gentiles that they needed to start keeping the Jewish law

            in order to be proper followers of Jesus.

So Paul echoes their language back to them:

            Yes, he says, the Jews are enemies of the gospel,

                        but that doesn’t mean that they are estranged from God,

                        or cut off from the love of God.

            Their error in rejecting Christ,

                        or misunderstanding what it means to follow him,

                        doesn’t mean that God has broken faith with them.

            And if they are enemies, Paul goes on,

                        they are no more enemies of the gospel

                        than the Gentiles themselves were before they converted;

            so the response of the Gentiles should be to show the mercy of God to the Jews,

                        not to mock, belittle, or otherwise oppress them.

As Paul says, ‘God has imprisoned all in disobedience,

            so that he may be merciful to all’.

No-one is any better, or any worse, in God’s eyes, than anyone else:

            whatever your nationality, religious conviction,

                        ethnic heritage, or political persuasion,

            we all equally need the mercy of God.

In many ways, this verse 32 of Chapter 11

            is a one-sentence summary statement

                        of the entire theological argument that Paul has been developing so far

                        through the letter to the Romans, so let’s hear it again:[1]

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

It may be short, but it makes some bold theological moves

            that it’s worth getting our heads around.

Firstly, the reason all humans, regardless of ethnicity or heritage,

            are imprisoned in disobedience

            is because God has willed it to be so.

Paul’s observation is that there’s something about the nature of the world

            at every level, from the individual to society,

                        from human affairs to natural world in which we live,

            which means that when people pursue paths

                        other than seeking after God,

            they find themselves more and more hemmed in

                        and confined by the consequences of their decisions.

It’s not that God punishes us for our unfaithfulness

            – it is rather that we punish ourselves

                        when our choices in life take us away from God.

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

Secondly, the great irony of humanity’s imprisonment in disobedience

            is that it is at the very moment when we recognize our disobedience

            that we open ourselves up to the mercy of God.

You know how sometimes people say that you have to hit rock bottom

            before you can start to come back up?

Well, that’s a good summary of this.

When we realise how imprisoned we have become

            by our own attempts to be strong and wise in our own strength,

then we open the door to God’s love

            in releasing us from our striving and effort.

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

Thirdly, the ethnic, cultural,

            social, and ideological divisions in humanity

are rendered meaningless by the love of God.

Israel’s covenant privileges have been extended to all,

            and all nations are blessed

            through fulfilment of the Jewish covenant in Christ.

Therefore, there is no basis for any one nation, tribe, or people

            to regard themselves as more chosen than any other.

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

Fourthly, God’s mercy to all

            does not negate God’s absolute anger against sin,

where sin is understood as that

            which shuts human heart from openness

            to the love and mercy that God longs to pour in.

Stating the universal love of God for all that he has made

            does not stop God hating all that distorts that love in action in people’s lives.

So where sin abounds,

            where people conspire to put themselves over others,

                        and believe the lie that one life is worth more than another,

            then God’s wrath hardens hearts

                        in order that the haughty will be brought down

            to the point where all, including the worst of sinners, can be raised up.

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

And Fifthly, there is no mention in any of this about human faith

            – it is God’s faithfulness which does all of this.

God is merciful to all,

            God is faithful to Gentiles in their unbelief

                        and to Jews in the hardening of their hearts,

            God is faithful to creation as it’s creator.

‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’

So, where does this leave us?

            Where does it leave a world living with

                        the consequences of a crisis of belonging?

            Where does it leave us in the days after

                        the Barcelona terrorist attack?

            What does Paul say to us,

                        as we seek to deal in our towns and cities

                        with the ethnic tensions that blight so many of our relationships?

            From Barcelona, to Finland, to Palestine,

                        to the streets of Homeland America.

Well, I think he would say, very clearly,

            and particularly in the light of Charlottesville,

            that Black Lives Matter.

There is absolutely no justification in Christ

            for the view that white lives matter more than any other,

and the alignment of certain segments of the Christian church

            with the views of white supremacy is an evil to be opposed.

And before we say that Charlottesville is not London,

            and that we it doesn’t happen here – believe me it does.

I grew up watching the Black and White Minstrel Show,

            which was cancelled when I was six years old

            – with its perpetuation of grotesque caricatures of racial stereotypes.

The race riots of the early 1980s

            were when I first became aware of the power

                        of ethnic difference to incite violence,

            and I now know that they took place in those very cities

                        where white people had become enriched

                        through the slave and sugar trade of 17^th and 18^th centuries.

We live in a deeply divided country, and a deeply divided city,

            with people of all different nationalities, living and working side-by-side.

And yet if you are a black graduate of a British university,

            you will earn on average 23.1% less than your white fellow graduates.

Since 2010 there has been a 49% increase

            in the number of ethnic minority 16- to 24-year-olds

            who are long-term unemployed,

while in the same period there has been a fall of 2%

            in long-term unemployment

            among white people in the same age category.

Black workers are more than twice as likely

            to be in insecure forms of employment

            such as temporary contracts or working for an agency.

Black people are far more often the victims of crime,

            and you are more than twice as likely to be murdered

            if you are black in England and Wales.

When accused of crimes,

            black people are three times more likely

            to be prosecuted and sentenced than white people.[2]

Saying that Black Lives Matter is not the same

            as saying White lives don’t matter,

any more than saying that Children’s lives matter

            would be the same as saying that adult lives don’t matter.

But we have to recognize that we live with a heritage of ethnic oppression,

            and Paul’s insight in Romans is that all of us are diminished by this.

There is nowhere here for white privilege to hide;

            and simply saying that ‘I’m not a racist’

            doesn’t get anyone off the hook.

In 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,

            I was part of the discussions at Baptist Union Council

            as to whether it would be appropriate for the Baptist Union

                        to offer an apology for their complicity in the ongoing legacy of slavery.

And I heard some interesting responses:

            ‘I’ve never owned slaves, so what have I got to apologise for ?’

            ‘I didn’t ask to be born white, and asking me to apologise for

                        who I am is just racism in reverse.’

            The insight I took from this was all of us are diminished by white privilege.

It has been said that when you are used to privilege,

            equality feels like discrimination[3]

and many white people will cry foul

            when their supremacy is challenged.

And yet, just as Paul argues that God’s mercy

            is big enough for both Jew and Gentile,

so we need to hear him telling us that equality is only equality

            if it works equally for both white and non-white.

Anything less than true equality

            imprisons white and black alike

            into the prison created by disobedience.

So as we pray for our world,

            and as we examine our own lives and our own hearts,

            and as we uncover our own preconceptions and prejudices,

I wonder what it means for us to hear, in our world

            that ‘God has imprisoned all in disobedience

            so that he may be merciful to all.’

---

x

[1] See James D. G. Dunn, Romans, Word Biblical Commentary.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-britain-today

[3] Brian McLaren http://brianmclaren.net/why-ill-be-in-charlottesville-this-weekend/