Nothing New Under The Sun

March 04, 2018

Choral Evensong

Two and a half weeks ago, as we attempted to straddle the overlapping demands of observing both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, as everyone here will be acutely well aware, Nikolas Cruz, a 19 year old former student of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who was known to have suffered a number of mental health issues, murdered 17 current students at his old school, and injured a further sixteen. 

Heeding the call of Bishops United against Gun Violence, of which our own Bishop Lee is a member, we will be one of many Episcopal churches and cathedrals offering a liturgy on Wednesday 14^th March, one month to the day after the shooting. We will do this both to remember and pray for those caught up in those terrible events in Florida, and to bring our own grief, anger, and probably many other emotions before God.

Working with my colleagues to prepare for this service, my attention was drawn to some extraordinary statistics. While Parkland, Florida, is not a place of particular poverty, much of the gun violence experienced in the US is linked with issues to do with both race and poverty, and I was depressed, but not, perhaps, surprised to learn that in the USA today, children of color are disproportionately poor.

Nearly 5M white children – approximately one in eight – are poor (according to the Children’s Defense Fund). But more than one in three black children are poor, and a similar proportion of Hispanic children are also poor – over 10M such children.

And, of course, this is not just true of children. Poverty affects entire families, and we see in the grip of its insidious jaws the hard Biblical truth played out, that to those who have more will be given, but to those who have nothing, even what little they do have will be taken away. Did you know that the massive recession that hit the western world in 2007 did not affect everyone equally? The wealth of white families fell by 11% - but for black families by 31%, and for Hispanic families 44%.

The realities of life are unjust and unfair – and they always have been. I know next to nothing about economic theory, and in a congregation, as educated as this I take my homiletic life in my hands to talk about it, but I’m going to ask if you know the difference between capitalism and communism? Under capitalism, so they used to tell us in language that is now outdated and exclusive, but which works in this particular context – under capitalism, man exploits man – but under communism, it’s the other way round.

But the relative levels of poverty between the different ethnic groups living in the US today is, of course, as nothing when compared to the lot of the despised immigrant workers of whom we heard tell in that reading from Exodus.  They – who truly had nothing – they knew what it really was like to have the little that they did have taken away. These slaves – these people who worked hard – very long and very hard – for no pay at all - they had the very straw from which they could make bricks taken away from them – and were expected to continue working at exactly the same level of production.

Some five or six years ago, the downtowns and financial districts of a number of major cities in the western world had their normal life interrupted rather dramatically by the sudden upsurge of the Occupy Movement, whose occupations and sit-ins caught the attention of many news cameras in the USA, Britain and many other affluent countries. And the anarchic but well-intentioned organizers of these campaigns claimed that the words ‘corporate greed’ ring through the speeches and banners of protests across the globe. After huge bail-outs and in the face of unemployment, privatization, and austerity, we still see profits for the rich on the increase.

And as a direct result of this, the demand of the Occupy Movement was A future free from austerity, growing inequality, unemployment, tax injustice and a political elite who ignores its citizens.

Well, the Israelites would have related to that rhetoric. They were certainly victims of growing inequality and a political elite that ignores its citizens. You are lazy – said Pharaoh - lazy…Go now, and work; for no straw shall be given you, but you shall still deliver the same number of bricks.

But other parts of this would have bemused the Israelites. There was no ‘tax injustice’ in this scene in ancient Egypt, for there was no pay to tax. And the word ‘unemployment’ would probably have sounded a curious luxury to the Israelites, given that Pharaoh would not even grant them time away from their unpaid labors for a brief act of religious freedom.

In truth, there is nothing new under the sun. It is not difficult to translate those harsh words of Pharaoh, set a good 3000 years in the past, into our own age as we read the newspapers, surf the web, or listen to the economic and political commentators tells us of those who, today, have to keep the supply of bricks going, as the straw is increasingly taken out of their hands.

And that is a reminder to those of us who call ourselves Christians, and turn up to worship in a place such as this, that Jesus was not a capitalist. Whatever the claims of those who seek a so-called ‘prosperity gospel’, Jesus was not a capitalist, and there is no shortage of parables and other words of his which should echo loudly around the Pharoahs of today, whether in the skyscrapers of the Loop or Wall Street, or London’s ‘Square Mile’ or the Kremlin, or anywhere else.

But, before we fall into the trap of swapping political dogma for its religious equivalent, let us remember that simple lesson of Economics 101: under capitalism, man exploits man – but under communism, it’s the other way round.

For, although the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles show the disciples living an admirably common financial life together, we should be quite clear: Jesus was not a communist. Indeed, Jesus was not an economist or a politician, and Jesus had remarkably little interest in economic theory, I suspect. In essence, Jesus believed that God had a total, 100% claim on the creation, and Jesus preached of the coming of a kingdom where this could be lived out.

And you need to look no further for an example of what this means than the person who was in the center of the focus in our second reading – that man whose many misplaced confidences turned to rubbish when he came to discover the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Paul was a man of strong views. To modern-day eyes, he is, to most of us, an intriguing mix of conservative and liberal, and there are no shortages of irony in the ways different churches of different outlooks have tried to use selective parts of his writings and teachings. But Paul knew, and knew as an over-arching truth, that Christian ministry and Christian mission is made up of many things because many things matter to people – not just the discriminatory shortage of straw with which to make bricks, crippling though that can be.

Now, as he is only too happy to make clear to all and sundry, Paul was an impressive character. He was someone who ticked all the right boxes. Educated, zealous, active and blameless. He could have championed just about any cause he chose – he could have stood shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed and enslaved Israelites, and demanded the straw they needed to make bricks. He could have stood shoulder to shoulder with the ever loudening voices keen to bring in sensible control of guns, especially since the atrocity in Parkland. Paul could have walked through the troubled neighborhoods of this city, helping us make it clear that black lives matter.

Paul had gifts that made him capable of doing pretty much anything – including, of course, the ability to make some really bad choices (a gift we all possess), which is why, of course, he was at one time a persecutor of the church.

In the film Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock plays a clumsy and awkward cop who

has to go undercover to take part in a beauty contest, the grinning and fawning host of the show asks each of the glamorous but seemingly vacuous beauties What is the one most important thing our society needs?,  Without a moment’s hesitation, each competitor grins inanely and replies World Peace. Bullock’s cop, however, in a typical moment of mental clumsiness, forgets her undercover status and blurts out her own reply:

That would be harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan - and five seconds of shocked silence grip the proceedings, until she comes to her senses, and adds, in the nick of time, and World Peace, of course!

Well, Paul would not, I think, have won prizes in a beauty contest, but he had something better. For God had helped him see a bigger picture – God had helped him to see the ultimate prize, a prize even bigger than world peace, or the control of guns, or an end to racism and other forms of discrimination, vitally important though all of those are. For God helped Paul to say, with total disarmingness:

Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that…I regard everything as loss…. I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Trees sometimes stop us seeing the wood. All of us, as individuals, and in our various communities can find that our interests become our obsessions and that our opinions become our dogmas. All of us can make claims and boasts justifiable claims and boasts about things that are genuinely evil in this word and which should be addressed.

But if we are to make a difference in this world – if we, whose imperative to demand economic justice, racial justice, and every other kind of peace and prosperity for all is rooted in the Good News that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God – if we are to change the world, then we need to make sure that all our claims and our boasts and our teachings and our ideologies – we need to make sure these are rooted in one place and one thing only. And we need to make sure it is something which we can show the world with great clarity, in our lives, and in our actions, and sometimes even in our speech.

We need to be able to show the world around us the surpassing value of Christ Jesus [our] Lord, set against which all else is rubbish. The discovery of this truth was costly to Paul, and the living out of this truth claimed his life and his energy and his teaching with entirety. But without this truth, Paul knew that he had nothing to offer those from whom the economic, ethnic or spiritual straw had been taken as they tried to make bricks.

So, as we continue our Lenten journey, as we come to terms with the horror of Parkland and work out our response to it, and as we seek to change both ourselves and the world to be what God would more fully desire them to be, let us be sure that we have grounded ourselves purely and simply in the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.