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Sermon for Ordinary 22 Humility
The Reverend Charles
So Brian Belo won Big Brother and the £100,000. I was surprised to hear this
on the main radio 4 news on Radio 4. Apparently the series is in 'Big
Bother' because viewing figures are down, Max Clifford, the PR expert,
yesterday said he believed the Big Brother format had peaked.
"It's been very successful as a gimmick, but now people are looking at it from a value point of view and of course there is no value to it. Big Brother is just exhibitionists being outrageous because of their own egos and desire to be famous."
Nevertheless, an average of 3.8 million people had turned on their
televisions to watch. This is because we live in a society where everybody
wants to be famous, there is the cult of the celebrity, many young people
believe that all they have to do is be discovered and they will be famous.
'What do you want to be' young people were asked, they did not want to be
great poets or inventors, but just to be 'famous'. So the queues will
continue as thousands of young people audition for X Factor and dozens of
other programmes promising fame.
This seems as though I am being critical of all young people, I am not,
nowadays it just seems young people want to work their way to being famous.
But let it be said, in each generation we have all seen people who will do
anything to get on. It’s not even just a secular thing, people in the church
regularly try to climb the greasy pole of clerical success, to gain the
admiration and subservience of others. The Church Times this week tells the
story of a Bishop of London who when visiting a church in his diocese
objected to where he was seated and “Comes to something,” he growled, “when
I’m given a back seat in my own diocese.”
So the Bible Reading today is bang up to date as Jesus speaks about the
human desire to get noticed, to be important, to have position and prestige
in society.
Luke, records an incident in which there was a party. It would have been one
to which everybody wanted to go. It was being held at the home of a
prominent Pharisee and so it would be important for the social climbers and
career clergy to get an invite and get noticed. Jesus was invited, but
probably not because he was on his way up through the ranks. He was invited
most probably as part of a trap, at best a floor show. We are told that they
‘watched him closely.’ They would have done this if it was a trap, an
opportunity to test Jesus on his approach to the sabbath.
Jesus was faced with a man with dropsy, his swollen appearance would have
set him apart from the great and good at the party. Of course Jesus did
heal, he knew it was a trap, but he met the human need around him. Jesus was
uncompromising when met with human need, a day would be too long to wait for
Jesus. He broke laws, taboos, rituals, religious sensibilities. He cared not
for what other people thought about him, as long as he was convinced that
God believed it to be right.
So how are we ? Are we uncompromising when faced with the needs of the
vulnerable? Is compassion more important to us than religion; rites, rituals
and theological debates about God?
We are told that his opponents stood silent. To stand silent when the power
to heal is within reach; that is sin. In the face of great injustices
silence is consent. There is so much that we have to do in our society
today.
So this is the first part of the story - Jesus focuses his attention on the poor and their needs, those who know they are in need of God. He is not one who courts favour with the powerful. He does not care about 'getting on' or making an impression, why should God made man care about human approval?
Jesus went on to reinforce this message by telling the assembled gathering a story. Just as they were all going for their seats, scrambling to get the best and most prestigious seat closest to the host, just at that moment when they were about to sit or lie down, Jesus tells them they should choose the most lowly seats. This was the message to the guests, then Jesus turns his attention to the host. He announces that when compiling a guest list, we should not invite our friends and the rich neighbours, instead we should invite the poor the crippled - the down and outs. Looking around the room the assembled guests would see that their party included only the rich and people who could return the favour. Indeed the only guest who resembled the kind Jesus advocated, was the man with dropsy who had been wheeled in as part of the trap to catch Jesus out!
So let's try and bring this teaching of Jesus ban up to date and ask ourselves, 'are we concerned about the same people that Jesus would have cared for in our community today?'
Let me look at two areas of significance, I could pick lots but let me choose two which are both topical and local. I am aware of teh danger of doing this, it was Dom Helda Camara, who said that when he told about the need to give the poor bread they called him a saint, when he said how to give the poor bread they called him a communist. But he goes!
We heard this week of the prison strike in England. Striking is not
allowed for Prison officers, but these men and women are not happy with
their conditions of service or the state of our prisons. Apparently inmates
in Cardiff prison taunted officers on the picket line with shouts of,
"you're breaking the law". It is good to see some humour in a dreadful
situation. However we are locking up more and more people, and politicians
tell us that we have to build more and more prisons. There are now more than
80,000 inmates against 61,467 10 years ago. Our prisons are places of great
injustice. It has been said that he greatness of a society can be measured
by its treatment of the least. On that measure our society has serious
problems, our prisons are full of the uneducated, the mentally ill, and the
drug addicted.
An officer in Bedford prison was quoted in a national newspaper this summer
as saying.
"People don't realise that around 80% or 90% of the prisoners have some sort
of mental illness through substance abuse, either drugs or alcohol." Little
wonder then that there are about two suicides a week in our prisons
More people agree with the statement "prison doesn't work, it turns people
into professional criminals who then commit more crime" than think "prison
punishes crime, keeps criminals off the streets and deters others".
What would Jesus say about locking people up because we won’t spend the time
sorting their problems out. In the reading from Hebrews today we are
exhorted to think about people in prisons as if we were their fellow
prisoners. If we had to be in prison we would be calling for reform.
Instead, too often prison is seen as a dumping ground, take all of the
problem people and and put them 'out of sight, out of mind.'
As Christians we are not only allowed to speak on these issues, we have a
duty. We should not be silent in the face of injustice.
There are lots of these issues, we don’t need to look very far.
The week before last I was out delivering leaflets in Brickhill inviting
people to Church and enclosing copies of Partnership News. I was asked for
help by a young mother with three children under the age of three. Their
father is in Angola, he was an asylum seeker who has been here in our
country for seven years, but he agreed to go back to Angola willingly to
sort out paperwork. Now he can’t get back and his wife and children have
been without him for months.
All I can do is to write letters and try to persuade our authorities to do
what they can to help. But I have written about other people who end up
being sent off to Yarlswood and and disappear.
When you read about all the thousand of people who are flooding our country
and the calls to send them all back. Think of those who are unable to be
with their families. Our society has many injustices, we don’t have to go to
other continents to see poor people struggling, exploitation and a widening
gap between the rich and the poor.
These may sound like political issues, and they are, but I believe that
Jesus would have spoken out against such injustices and the systems which
create them. Well you and I are his voice and we have to speak his words.
We all have to look around us and see with they eyes of God’s compassion and
care.
We might say ‘what can I do.' You may feel that you can only do a tiny bit.
Listen to the words of Mother Theresa. Born in Albania in 1910 Mother Teresa
of Calcutta worked with the poorest of the poor in India. A journalist once
asked why she bothered working with the poor in Calcutta, because it was all
just a drop in the ocean - there being millions of poor people in India.
Mother Teresa said in reply that she was not concerned with a big way of
doing things - she was concerned with individuals: "This person", she
pointed to someone, "thinks it makes all the difference!"
Mother Teresa said, "We do no great things, only small things with great
love."
When Jesus spoke to the assembled guests, one of the main sins which he
spoke against was pride. It is often pride which prevents us from seeing the
needs of others. We are concerned about ourselves and our own needs, we
ignore the needs of others. We might think that the reason why we don’t end
up in prison is because we are better people and live better lives. But the
sad truth is that if we grow up lacking educational opportunities, if we are
brought up in poor homes, then we have much more chance of ending up in
prison. We end up in prison because of the postcode where we live, not
because we are more or less worthy. It is our society which has allowed
drugs to be freely available on our streets, can we wonder that our children
get into trouble, that we eventually have the situation where young children
are shot on our streets every week.
We must learn to have humility to recognise the truth of the statement,
‘there but for the grace of God go I’
As we grow in humility, we realise that which allows us to advance in life
is a gift. Nothing intrinsically better about us. Humility is grounded in
this deep psychological awareness. Therefore, how can I boast?
If we took the words of Jesus to heart it would change so much in society.
We could never have endured years of slavery, we could never have had the
sitgma of society placed upon groups of people whose only crime was to be
different
Jesus spends his ministry trying to press this message home. Do not place
yourself above others, be willing to serve. Jesus told his followers to
serve others, as he washed the disciples feet. Pride is a great cloud which
block out God's an awareness of God's grace.
There is a always a place at God's table, not because I am great, but
because God is! I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs. This is
in a sense a terrible phrase because it makes us sound like worms, but in
the other senses it says, I am highly favoured by God, because of who he is,
irrespective of my own goodness. It is a word of reassurance.
So we leave today, mindful of Jesus calling to avoid the desire to impress others and get on. We take to heart his call to care for those at the bottom of the pile. We remember that as we show kindness to the poor, the outcast and the unlucky, as we care for the least of our fellow human beings, so we show care for Jesus himself.