Article
- Date:
- Sunday 5th February 2023
Year A, The Fifth Sunday before Lent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Isaiah 58.1-9
Matthew 5.13-20
The Lord is looking down on us, the people of the New Jerusalem; and of course we are not offering animal sacrifices from which the smell of wood smoke and roasting lamb's flesh are going up to heaven. We are altogether more sedate in our religious habits with our worship spanning five hundred years with the Book of Common Prayer, Common Worship and contemporary worship. And after times and between times we eat pizza or drink coffee in fellowship, we sustain our internal teaching functions and organisations, we learn our notes and ring our bells, we raise money for our organisation but we also contribute to our associate charities, as well as Christian Aid and the Diocesan Family Support Work.
So what does the Lord think of us? To what extent are we fulfilling the required balance in Isaiah between worship and the achievement of God's social justice or, in the words of the Sermon on the Mount in our Gospel Reading, are our lights raised high on lamp stands, are we beacons in a naughty world?
Well, of course I don't know what The Lord thinks but we can ask ourselves two questions: what are we doing about the accelerating environmental crisis of our planet? And what are we doing about growing inequality between the rich and poor worlds and between the rich and poor in almost every country, including our own?
These two issues may look separate but they are remarkably closely entwined as the richest 1% of the world's population, which is getting richer every day, controls the means which delay the implementation of green policies. We have recently learned that as long ago as the mid '70s one of the major oil companies forecast very accurately the phenomenon of global warming.
What Isaiah and Jesus were both talking about was justice in private dealings. There were no state social or medical services and no benefits system, so the poor were the responsibility of the not so poor; but in our society the fate of the poor, in our own country at least, lies with the state, so every good Christian must concern her or himself with state policies concerning the way that the poor and the rich fare in our society.
It is not enough simply to pray in our Intercessions for the Lord to fix what we have broken. Humanity has been the creator of injustice and it is our collective responsibility to put right what we have got wrong; not individually and actively but almost always collectively and passively.
The first stage, then, is to understand how we are where we are. Next Tuesday, on 14th February, I'm running a session on the economic causes of inequality, so if you want to attend, please ask to be put on the list for a Zoom link; but if you don't fancy that, I do recommend that we look into these issues carefully and prayerfully not just for the good of the world but also for our own good as children of God with an inescapable responsibility for God's justice.
This is by far the shortest sermon I have ever preached as the argument will not improve by being repeated. There has never been a time in my life when I have seen so much greed and neglect, so much hopelessness and callousness. We have been battered into submission by the sheer weight of the disaster and the sheer indifference of the rich and powerful. We are sleep walking into multiple disasters. It is time for us to wake up, to study and to pray, and then to behave as active, responsible citizens and Christians, our lights held high, shining in the darkness.