Sermon 6th November

Third before Advent - 6^th November 2011

If you heard this preached you will note that these notes are in a slightly different order!!

Amos is probably not the first name that springs to mind when we consider the current state of our nation. Yet, with campaigners still camped out on St. Pauls Churchyard in London, today we have a nearly three thousand year old clarion call against social injustice and a nation which has become far too self reliant.

Some of you will be more than familiar with the events which had brought the people of Israel to this point – but let me just catch those of you who are a bit wobbly up on some Old Testament history. We are all probably somewhat familiar with the idea that God called Abraham and then Moses. That the Israelites escaped from Egypt and wandered in the desert for forty years. We remember that then they settled down and began to build cities in their new land. Eventually they appealed for a king and got Saul and then the great king David.

But then things started to go very wrong. Even as God was allowing a king in Israel he was warning the people, through the words of the prophet Samuel, that this was a very bad idea – that they would introduce a system where they would be giving huge amounts of their income and land to a political elite – that they would be working not to feed themselves plentifully but to support a huge royal machine.

The books of Kings and Chronicles, which contain the stories of the kings of Israel, have a rating system – they give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to successive kings. Solomon, David's son was the third king of the united Israel and the last – after him the kingdom split into two. Whilst the kings of the Southern Kingdom sometimes get a thumbs up from the writers of the history books in the words – he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord – the kings of the Northern Kingdom do not – they all did evil in the sight of the Lord. King after king sets up altars to other gods, increase political and economic disenfranchisement and sell out to other states.

By the time Amos is on the scene the situation is beyond precarious – the poor are so poor that they are dying from hunger and the rich are arrogant and have forgotten their place in the covenant with God – relying instead on themselves.

And that has always been the point of Covenant – from the earliest mention of it to Abraham – there would be a great nation living in relationship with God. The rules surrounding this nation would not be anoti-capitalistic, but they would ensure a level of justice where the widow and orphan would be provided for, where debts would be forgiven on a regular basis and where all the people would base their lives around the worship of God.

Amos talks about the Day of the Lord – this phrase pops up in several prophetic texts - it seem to have been a day when the people expected God to come and vanquish their enemies – to remove oppression and let justice rule – but the sort of justice which the people were expecting was highly political and the sort of justice which God was offering was about a parity of expectation across His people. Watch out, says Amos, there is a day of reckoning coming but it will not be against foreign nations surrounding Israel but against Israel itself.

Their worship is also lacking in real meaning. They go through the motions but in ways and places which are foreign to their own traditions – they may be saying the right words but their whole being belies the real truth of everything they are doing – and everything they are doing has become foreign to the God who loves them. They can burn all the sacrifices they want but without the real heart of the nation – without justice and a real burning love for God, they are wasting their time, and worse than that offending against God.

So, a few weeks ago when tents appeared outside St. Paul's I was relieved and intrigued that apparently the Church was siding with those who were questioning a top heavy system – I understood that the Occupy movement was a little fuzzy in it actual objectives – but then if the World Bank and International Monetory Fund cannot come up with a coherent solution to the financial crises around the globe, perhaps simply expressing dis-ease with the situation, calling out greed and excess, was a good enough place to start.

Then we had that bizarre roller coaster ride through the establishment and the Church looking just like it was worshipping at the high places of the corporations which inhabit the City of London. Now things have calmed down again, and the official line seems to be that we must engage with the debate and this is a frightening position to put ourselves in because we will not, suddenly, have specific answers, we do have knowledge of God who puts people first, a God whose justice and mercy is like an ever-flowing river.

Now, in case you are thinking, trickling brook here, don't. The river of God's mercy is a desert river, a wadi over flowing after heavy rain, it is a powerful flood. How dare you behave like this God says to the people – not a polite comment but a roar of outrage.

Our nation needs a roar of outrage, our world needs a roar of outrage. Christians need to stand up, to give up on the petty squabbling about really quite small pieces of theology and return to the meta-narrative, the big message, of the Gospel. That message starts with two simple commandments – love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength – stand in the flood of God's mercy and be strong, remain. The second is love you neighbour as yourself.

Whilst many of us do not understand the intricacies of economics, and my brain does not do well with those theories that actually seem to run in the opposite direction to what I would feel is common sense – we can all open our eyes and look around us. We know where we are, we know what life is like and we know that we are people who must speak for those who have no voice around the world – we have to keep justice and mercy for all human beings at the top of every agenda.

The criticism of the bridesmaids who ran off at the last minute to get oil was that they seemed totally unaware of the situation they were in. They knew the bridgroom would be arriving – weddings tend not to drop out of the sky – and yet they were not prepared and not only were they not prepared but to make it worse they ran off instead of waiting for the one they had been anticipating.

But I hope we are not those bridesmaids because despite the fact that the only thing which the Church seems to get into the news about, until the past week, are the endless wrangles about human sexuality we have always have this back beat of justice, or crying out for the poor and it is time to turn the tables on the news which we are proclaiming – to turn our division into a quiet conversation and to allow the voice of the Gospel – the Good News for broken people – to be heard again in our nation and the world.

A call for reformation, a call for the poor and needy, a call to right relationship is most certainly what we have been saying all along – but our voices have been tenuous – as if we are not sure. But what is there not to be sure of here? That our system has become self-supporting, that people are greedy, that public money is, in effect, lining already deep private pockets – the voice of the Church should not be quiet assignation in a system of which is is part – it should be outrage.

Let me finish with the words of the Bishop of London, Rt. Rev. Richard Chartres, who is at the heart of the current happenings at St. Pauls:

“Commentators have derisively written off the Church, and the Church of England in particular, as having nothing to offer, with a tale simply told of dwindling congregations; but the appetite for examining some of the great questions that face us through the Christian prism suggests that we are on the verge of a challenging but cery significant perions in the history of the Christian community.....” he goes on to conclude....

“ I believe that this is a moment in which St. Paul's, and the Church in general, has been shown how it can get away from an in-house ecclesiatical agenda and its passion for elaborating defensive bureacracy, in order to serve the agenda of the people of England at a critical moment in our history.”