Sermon for Gonville and Caius

30th October 2011

I hope that you have been sparing a prayer for Dr Giles Fraser, his colleagues at St Paul’s Cathedral and the village of protesters outside on the piazza. They are all at the eye of a media storm. My particular concern is for Giles. His decision to resign rather than to be associated potentially with a violent removal of protesters further down the line is a fine demonstration of integrity. But I wonder, does such an action have any impact beyond seeing a clergyperson on the front page of newspapers for something well done? Do you think that you can make any difference to the world? People using social media seem to have had an impact on the Arab Spring and maybe you were among the supporters; but what we see in the ordinary media is so overwhelming and can make us feel totally powerless. Should we believe the words of that little-known theologian, Doris Day, Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be. The release of one Israeli soldier is only matched by 1,000 Palestinian lives. A retired bishop I know has just come back from three months spent as an observer at an Israeli checkpoint on the border with the Palestinian Authority. All he could do was record numbers of crossings and the daily humiliation of ordinary working people. Back in the early 1980’s I wandered around the Peloponnese on rickety buses with students and witnessed a level of poverty among the Greeks to which they may soon return. It was as nothing to the poverty I have seen more recently in the Sudan. The neo-Malthusians tell us horror stories about a world population of 7 billion people and how most of them will be hungry: they would not be, however, if the world were fair and the world economy were structured differently.

This takes us directly to what Jesus says in his Sermon on the Plain, much of which we have in our New Testament reading. The sermon is Luke’s version of the material which in Matthew is the Sermon on the Mount and is likely to be much closer to Jesus’s actual words. The address is made largely to his wider group of disciples after he has called the Twelve Apostles. Those who are poor and hungry and abused are encouraged to rejoice and dance for joy because their reward will be great in heaven. This is what Marx satirised in the life of capitalist churches preaching the wonderful eternal jammy future awaiting those having a hard time now. In fact, Luke gives us a picture of Jesus who of course sees the whole tide of human history moving towards fulfilment in perfect relationship with his Father in heaven; but he is not talking mostly about a spiritualised future which numbs the present. He is talking about the material conditions of this life which will be overturned. History is not superseded, it is to be transfigured. The Kingdom of which Jesus speaks is the kind of society that Jesus came to set up, a society based on mutual love, sharing and support. It is the kind of society which is being trailed and even created whenever Christians celebrate the Eucharist and go out from Communion to be and do what we have been taken and blessed to be. Every Eucharist is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet and a revolutionary witness to the coming of God’s Kingdom in the here and now as well as in the completion of salvation history.

This is good news for the poor and destitute, those in deep sorrow and living under the burden of various kinds of abuse. This appears to be woeful for those who amass wealth at others’ expense and those who over-consume and live for pleasure alone, some who feed on the envy and celebrity-worship of those around them. If this sounds like us, then we are some way from this Kingdom. A very devout Christian man died and went to heaven. He was met by a very distracted St Peter who asked him if he would mind letting himself in through a side door because they were rather busy just then. The man was crestfallen but did as he was asked. As he came close to the main entrance to heaven from the inside he heard a roaring of the crowd of saints and fanfares. Then he saw a bishop being carried in shoulder high. He approached Peter reproachfully and asked why he had been given such an understated welcome by comparison with the bishop. Peter answered, “We get lots of people like you, but so few bishops that we make a fuss when we get one.” To enter the Kingdom, we have to unload our obsessions and attachment to all that we worship which is not God and let go. Instead of concentrating on what we can get; we can put our mind and will to sharing what we have. In the North East there is a saying that if you cast your bread upon the waters it comes back as ham sandwiches. It is no wonder that it is in tough communities that the churches worked with others of good will to establish cooperative societies and are now working to build up a network of credit unions.

I can make ham sandwiches. I know nothing about computers, so I may be entirely wrong about this; but I have been told that in the relatively short history of computing so many basic commands and codes have become embedded that more recent software sits upon them and assumes their operation. The real challenge which Jesus goes on to make in his sermon to his disciples is what the decisive underlying command to being a Kingdom person is. In the Greek, Jesus says, “I say this to you who are listening”: “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”. This is the core of Jesus’s teaching, which he practised himself. He refused to define himself over against anyone, even mixing with Pharisees and centurions. For this reason all the hatred of the other became fastened on him.

And he asks Kingdom people to make a difference by loving our enemies. This does not mean the love that literally gets us into bed with them or even the love which involves liking. This love is defined in the Greek as the active verb, áγαπαω. ‘Agape’ is a special kind of love which is full and ambitious for the flourishing and wellbeing of others. It is the love which says I want what God wants for this person. It is, like God’s love, a one-sided love because it is freely given and expects nothing in return. It is a love which is relentless and undiminished even when there appears to be little impact.  It is a costly love which took Jesus to the cross.  It is a love which changes us to be compassionate even as our heavenly Father is compassionate, so that loving the poor puts us in solidarity with them. Mother Teresa wrote: “Love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise there is no love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.”

Being asked to turn the other cheek seems so absurd in our macho culture. And why would you give away your clothes and be naked? The point is that we are called to that vulnerable place where we give up our default lines of reference about who we are and our self-sufficiency, even what protects us from being badly wounded. I came across a remarkable woman who had fostered over fifty behaviourally challenged children and became their mother, even though she was a single woman who could not contemplate as full sexual life herself because of systematic sexual abuse by her father. When he was old and alone, there was no one prepared to look after him. So she did. As a Christian she felt that she could do no other. Asked whether she had forgiven him, she said that she still had not; but took great solace from the fact that on the cross Jesus asked his Father to forgive. This was her prayer for her own father.

I am very interested in the dynamics of restorative justice in which a perpetrator meets and seeks the forgiveness of the victim of his crime. It is often assumed that the perpetrator is the beneficiary. This is very true. But the refusal of the victim to hit back breaks the cycle and by neither claiming power over the other, both help to create a new experience of peace and forgiveness. My favourite western movie is The Big Country in which Gregory Peck is thought to be a coward because he will not fight as the usual way to settle a dispute. He is much abused until he is revealed as a person of real moral courage whose stand makes a difference. That can be each of us, even more when we operate together as the communion created by grace and lived as sacrament.

Our banking crisis and all that has followed from it makes me wonder whether our financial system is now so complicated that no one really comprehends it. There are many principalities and powers which have a deep hold on us; but we can say enough is enough and look at new ways of organising markets and funding for flourishing. I am not down-hearted  because I remain convinced that we are wired as human beings to love mercy, do justly and to walk humbly with our God.  And we are not alone. We stand on the shoulders of all the saints who have gone before us as Kingdom people, most of them known to God alone. They are all praying on a brighter shore for the bringing in of God’s Kingdom of justice and peace. This Tuesday we shall rejoice with them for All Saints’ Day. For now, Amen.

Bishop Stephen Conway, Bishop of Ely.