Holy Inclusive, part I

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112:1-9, 1Corinthians 2:1-12, Matthew 5:13-20

In these three Sundays between Epiphany and Lent, I want to look at what it means to be wholly inclusive. Or rather, what it means to be holy and inclusive.

 Now that Putney has joined the revolution, and having enjoyed the company of our new MP at last week’s service, his name is anathema; but the economist and advisor to Mrs Thatcher, Milton Friedman, began his signature work with an interesting claim that you can’t be socialist and liberal.  The two, he argued, have directly opposed impulses: Socialism to planning and centralised control; Liberalism to the rights and freedom of the individual. You can’t be socialist and liberal. Discuss! 

But in the same way, it could be argued that you cannot be holy and inclusive. Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Greek for church is ‘ecclesia’ – from ek-kaleo – literally ‘called out’. The church is defined as a people set apart; holy. You can read this in our architecture. From the West door to the high altar there are three steps. The space narrows. Holiness is selective. Only the few get to the high altar, mostly wayward children. In Holy Trinity Roehampton, where there are more steps, the feet of the priest celebrating at the high altar are higher than the heads of the congregation in the nave. That is the power play of holiness. Even in today’s Gospel Jesus talks of those who are least and those who are great in the kingdom of God, with the warning that our righteousness must exceed the scribes to enter.

But to be inclusive means to be all embracing. And here’s a little thought experiment. Consider for a moment what you think it means for St Margaret’s to be inclusive. We think perhaps of being more friendly, welcoming, accepting people as they come, having a ramp somewhere, we think of those happy words you read on church profiles, “vibrant”, “diverse”. Mostly, I think, when we think about being inclusive, we think about how we can accept more people into our way of doing things. This is how we do things; Come and join in.

 We are less likely to think: We are the diversity of the people here. And that means that over time we will change as the people change. Imagine if the Polish church fell down and suddenly we had 100 Polish families appear at St Margaret’s every week. Would we be happy introducing Polish hymns, having part of the service in Polish?

 That is unlikely to happen. But we might consider whether our version of inclusion is encouraging people to join our way of doing things, Or whether we’re open to incorporating difference in who we are and what we do. So we should ask – who is the in-group at St Margaret’s? Who is at the margins? Where people sit in church, I always think, can tell you a lot about how included they feel. how close they feel to the centre.

 As a church we want to be holy. We confess our sins, we pray for strength; we try to love our crooked neighbours with our crooked hearts.

But we are also seeking to be inclusive. The PCC at the end of last year unanimously agreed to a statement that as a church we ‘celebrate and affirm every person and do not discriminate’. That ‘we will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.’

Helpfully our bishops have led the way on this subject. You may have read recently their pastoral statement on civil partnerships. They reaffirm in somewhat clinical language that the Church only approves of sex within heterosexual marriage, and not civil partnerships. Several bishops have spoken out against it, and there’s a clear desire to be inclusive; So they are also saying ‘God’s love extends to everyone, whatever their sexuality and how they express it, and everyone is welcome in church.’ It’s a somewhat confusing message, which was then apologised for leading to the priceless Times headline: ‘Archbishops ‘very sorry’ for sex advice’.

One always gets the impression of a very English situation. Perhaps there’s a couple of bishops in a drawing room somewhere sipping sherry, and one says to the other “ah yes, you hear Karen and Melissa have got married”
“Ah lovely. And how is baby Beaujolais?”
“oh yes, very sweet really. Darling.” And then some aide comes in saying a pastoral statement is needed about the new law changes on civil partnership, and someone gets out some large dusty tome on canon law and the bishops are very surprised but of course the rubrics in a seventeenth century prayer book really can’t be changed at this late stage so it is a matter of deep regret etc. etc. 

But, to be fair, inclusion here is not simple. The Church of England is part of a worldwide Anglican communion. When bishops make statements it’s heard across the world. In Africa and Australia society and the church are more conservative and they are highly wary of statements coming from Britain and America. Given our, and especially the church’s, colonial history in Africa the Church of England is rightly keen not to exclude these churches. It is very hard to be inclusive if you find yourself steering between the Scylla and Charybdis of colonialism and homophobia. That is the nature of politics and the difficulty of trying to speak across cultural and national divisions.

 But in the church inclusion today is too often restricted to the subject of sex. Isaiah, in some of his most wonderful passages in today’s reading, widens the call to inclusion:

‘is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them… If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness’

There are many damaging things that exclude. Our language and assumptions about gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability. But poverty has always been the most consistent and ruthless of exclusions.Hunger, homelessness, addiction, oppression, all close access to education, employment and society. For all that we are fixated today on issue of identity, we will have the most success in addressing inclusion if we are able to address the poverty that is within our own community. And lest we forget the visit by the foodbank, 36% of children in Wandsworth live in poverty. It’s a staggering statistic I hope we think about every day. And something we need to keep in mind as we’re thinking about the mission of this church for the future.

There is I hope not an open contradiction between holiness and inclusion. Faith is something that – if we are willing – will always take us deeper wherever we are. It’s call to be better, to develop virtue and honesty, can take all of us further.

But it is inclusive and if Jesus’ teaching speaks to anything it is that externals are of little consequence and he is concerned most of all for the state of our heart. And if there is a persisting negative strain in Jesus’ ministry it is his dislike of hypocrisy and judgement. His call to humility that leaves all criticism of others to God. I am aware enough of my own failings to know better than telling others where they are wrong. To avoid what Isaiah earlier described in ‘the pointing the finger, the speaking of evil’. CS Lewis had that great line that those who are looking down on others will never see the God that is above them. Equally, those who are too quick to give their own opinions, and those who with the established multitude are shouting the loudest, will not hear the voices at the margins of those who have also heard the call of God.

There is a call then to be holy and inclusive, to be wholly inclusive. We need to believe that we can be better. But we need to listen to the experience and voices of those who are different to us.

 Now I have heard from a couple of people that they would like a specific task to take away with them from the sermon.  So this is your homework this week. I’d like you to think about yourself and St Margaret’s. And ask yourself what is your, our unconscious bias? Who fits in easily here? Who might be excluded by our language, our music, our welcome and hospitality? Where can we find greater holiness? How can we be more inclusive?  Amen.

Stewardship Sunday: I wouldn't start from here

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Ecclesiastes 5:8-20, 1 Timothy 6:17-19, Matthew 6:1-4, 19-21

There’s a joke that’s always confused me. It runs, something to the effect of, a lost tourist in Hammersmith asking someone how to get to, say, St Margaret’s, Putney, and the person replying, “Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

I just don’t think it’s very funny. But it is helpful in analogical ways.

So if the Australian cricket captain were to ask you: how might we finish off the English and win the series: “Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Or, if a lady were to ask you, how can I achieve consensus to secure the orderly exit of the UK from the EU? “Well, madam, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Or, more to my point today, how can I become a Christian? You might well say, “Well, madam, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” ‘Here’ being twenty-first century Britain.

And it’s not the inexorable drive of secularism, which since 9/11 has shifted to a much greater interest in the place of public religion; and the renewed interest in holistic attitudes to health, especially mental health, that drive against scientific materialism.

But the trend that’s more damaging to Christianity is the seemingly endless march of individualism; that after 50 years has developed to be not simply hostile to religion but to all public life. So while relativism became fashionable in the second half of the twentieth century, with the sense that people became more tolerant of other cultures and religions, rather than seeking to push their own convictions; we’ve reached a stage where world leaders refuse to accept the consensus of evidence, doubling down on their own stories and dismissing the credibility of public institutions. 

Fake news, which in the past has been called propaganda and ideology, has never had such a riot in liberal democracies. never has politics been so dominated by individual personalities. And with that we face more social division than in generations. Next year will be no doubt another divisive American election, while we continue to slog through Brexit towards our third election in 5 years.

It’s interesting that technology, which has sought genuinely to provide greater and greater connection, and has done wonders for many in isolation, has also fuelled division; polarising opinion and destroying the balance that existed within old media. If once you could assume that people were getting their news from the papers and a couple of television and radio stations, the news people pick up on today is seemingly just as likely to come from the bedroom of a teenage fantasist.

One of the fascinating, albeit alarming, trends in the army I saw was the rise of flat-earthers. Not as a religious thing, but it’s what happens if you believe everything you see on Youtube. And it’s a demonstration of a total loss of faith in public life, from government to media and science. Soldiers, generally, are a superstitious lot and prone to conspiracy theories, so I thought it was just an odd army thing – but I’ve already heard of two people in Putney with the same views. In Putney.

And perhaps this is peak-individualism. Where children at school no longer want to be policemen, dancers, or vets. They want to be vloggers and have set themselves personal goals like being a micro-influencer by age 6. You are your profile. I post therefore I am.

But I’m not about to don my sandwich board and parade through West Putney hollering “the End is Nigh”. Where we build consensus, it’s possible to make a huge difference. Because we love David Attenborough, Britain has transformed how it sees plastic. We’ve cut carrier bag use by 90% in 5 years. I suspect it won’t be long till you’ll be pilloried in the street for carrying a single-use bottle of water. “Shame” people will cry and ring a bell behind you as you walk along, “Shame”. And there is in ecology a surprising and needed return of ethics to our society. Where people are prepared to say: ‘it’s not just my opinion – you genuinely shouldn’t do that.’ Which for British people is normally pretty much anathema (with the exception of jumping the queue).

But, this also ties in with the business of churches. The parish church is inextricably tied to the local community. So if you’re getting annoyed because we’re having a lot of baptisms you should know that we’re legally required to baptise all who seek it.  Or if you can’t get a seat at the carol service, or if you think it’s odd that you can only get married in your local church or the one you attend, and not the gorgeous bijou chapel in smartsville, with its beautiful celebrity bijou vicar, where you booked your delightful bijou reception and spa retreat,  it’s because parish and community are bound together and with the parish comes the cure, the care, of all souls within it.

And this means that the parish church is a place to gather not just like-minded people; we’re not an internet chat-room. And it’s entirely possible that in every conceivable way, in politics, interests, in age, career, sexuality, personal wealth, the person next to you is both different and disagrees with you. What draws people to St Margaret’s, then, is a shared commitment to the beliefs and values of Christianity, and our parish: this peculiar little patch between Putney, Barnes and Roehampton. 

And while the world is increasingly virtual, what matters here, despite Laura’s excellent website, is physically coming together. While the matters of the world spin and turn, what concerns us here is eternal, and is largely unchanged for 2000 years. While modern life has created the individual in an impersonal world, what defines the church is our coming together as one body.

I think people often assume that the state pays churches to maintain their buildings, or that we receive support from the National Lottery or Libor. They might think Hilary is paid in her guard post at the back, or that church choirs are populated by those who have sung in choirs since they were children and are now duty bound to continue.

The truth is that churches are autonomous and depend at every moment on their congregation. Everything that happens, paying the vicar (the most important thing) the roof, the choir, the website, the silver, the garden, the magazine, cleaning the church, our social events, playgroups and Sunday school. Everything is written, bought, maintained by this group of people, who simply turn up each week, give, and pitch in, building this dais, decorating it, this altar frontal that was commissioned just before I arrived, fulfilling the last wishes of a parishioner. The pews, every one of which I’m told, has been repaired by Ted.

It is a huge collective work built on the love and sacrifice of generations of West Putney; which makes it a terribly exciting place. The chances are that most of the people who have lived in your house gave to this church, their time, their money: built the extension, the church hall, weeded the garden, read the lessons; left their mark, in visible and invisible ways.

Today’s readings all appear to be about money. They’re really about our attitude to life. In Ecclesiastes, the Eeyore of the Bible, there is an ambivalence about wealth that comes and goes, with the well-attested warning that ‘The lover of money will not be satisfied with money.’
‘Sweet is the sleep of labourers… but the surfeit of the rich will not let them sleep.’ His advice in the end is that ‘the gift of God is to find enjoyment in [your] toil.’ Which is to say that it is the manner of our life and how we find purpose in living that brings happiness.

Similarly, for Paul, the point is not to set your security, your hope, on your riches, recognising that all we are given comes from God, given for our enjoyment. ‘The life that really is life’ means using those resources to be generous and so to share that enjoyment with others. And this is echoed in the Gospel, which again is trying to take our eye off the pretty shiny things of the world, in order to use our riches, in whatever form we have them, to build up our common life; here the alms that would have been shared by the poor of that community.

With all these passages, then, the argument is that the pursuit of riches for their own sake, or the comfort and security of wealth, will not bring happiness, and will not last. Our treasure in heaven is what we are able to give, what we contribute with the work of our hands and how we serve others. 

The word community is one of the most abused today. Faith communities are one of the few places that gather people across demographics and generations. They are also themselves the sum of the work of generations, shaped by hands given in prayer and work. Today is a chance to reflect on our place in this community, where our treasure in heaven is, and how we can shape the future of St Margaret’s. How can webuild a community that celebrates all the good things we have here, that shares its pain and builds something extraordinary.

Well, sir, this is exactly where I would start.