Sermon for Evensong on 20th August 2023, the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Psalm 90
2 Kings 4.1-37
Acts 16.1-15

Lessons: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=559621754

Psalm: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=559621924

‘A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday’, says Psalm 90: or as we sing in Isaac Watts’ beautiful hymn, ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone’. I actually think that Isaac Watts’ version of psalm 90 is a bit more positive than the Psalmist’s. The psalm seems to me to be pretty fixed on the frailty of human life – ‘The days of our age are three score years and ten’ and so on – on which basis I have been on demurrage for two years. I know it ends up with a plea for God’s lovingkindness, so that we may rejoice and be glad all the days of our life – quite a contrast with how it starts out. However bleak its message might seem originally, in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer Psalm 90 is given the Latin name Domine, refugium, ‘Lord, thou hast been our refuge.’ 

I think that does set the tone. Life is tough; all sorts of things can easily go wrong; our lives are precarious and impermanent; and if you are a Daily Mail reader, there are always dreadful stories to make you cross about people coming to sticky ends in various ways. But as Isaac Watts says, God is our refuge. ‘O God our help in ages past and our hope for years to come’.

As I look round at you all faithfully gathered here for Evensong, I know that we all have a story, a story that we might or might not want other people to know about. Everybody has good and bad things in their lives. Some of us are probably sitting here wrestling with things that are really worrying or really upsetting or things that really make us afraid. The two stories from the Old Testament about Elisha the prophet, the man of God, give you examples, pretty terrible examples, of the sort of thing that people might be quietly living with, even today.

The first one is all about the poor widow who hasn’t got enough money and a creditor has come to take her two children to be slaves. I’m sure there are people stuck in the cost of living crisis, and some of them may even be here, who just don’t know where the money is going to come from to pay for the basics of life.

Even in The Guardian, which is not usually as gloomy as the Daily Mail, there was an item reporting that bailiffs have experienced a huge boom in their business because people have suddenly become unable to pay their debts. In the poor widow’s case, Elisha fixed it by giving her a miraculous supply of oil which she could sell in order to raise money to pay off her debts. God, through his prophet Elisha, had given her a refuge from destitution. 

Again, for the Shunammite woman, Elisha came to the rescue, twice. First of all he made it for her and her husband to have a baby, and then when the boy suffered some kind of brain fever and died, he raised him to life again. Through his holy prophet, God was a refuge and strength to her.  The Shunammite woman became friends with Elisha. She offered him a meal regularly on his travels through, and she invited him to stay with them. 

In the New Testament that’s what another rich woman, Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth, did for Saint Paul and his party – who seem to have included Luke, the author of the Gospel and also of the book  Acts of the Apostles;  you notice half way through this passage it stops being written in the third party (‘When they had come opposite … they attempted to go into Bithynia… ‘) and changes to ‘we’:  ‘We set sail for Troas …’ ‘We’; so the author is there, so the story is even more vivid. 

But the key thing is that Lydia and her household were listening to what Paul and the other disciples were saying as they were gathered outside the gate by the river. She and her household were baptised, and then she said, ‘Come and stay with me’. She persuaded them: ‘She prevailed upon us’.

So the refuge, God’s refuge, is a literal refuge. It’s a place to stay. Both Elisha, the man of God, and St Paul and St Luke with him and Timothy, that he had brought from Lystra, who had a Greek father. There’s a big tradition for prophets and preachers to be travellers, spreading the word as they go from town to town. In that connection I wanted to mention that, not too far away from here, is Wesley’s Chapel in Bristol. 

It’s a beautiful church – which is configured rather differently from our church, in the sense that the Lord’s table, the sanctuary, where communion is taken, is not actually the most important feature: the most important feature is the pulpit and the lecterns below it; a triple-decker, for prayer, reading the lesson, and preaching; because to the Wesleys and the early Methodists, the ‘Word’ was the most important thing. (As you know, I was brought up a Methodist originally, and I always feel most comfortable when I am six feet above contradiction in the pulpit, as I am now). 

But the really interesting thing about Wesley’s chapel in Bristol is that it contains almost a built-in hotel. There are bedrooms for visiting preachers to stay in, a library and a study where the preacher can write his sermon. Somewhere to stay, a refuge.

Does that ring a bell with you? I’ve mentioned the cost of living crisis and debts and things, and the need for us to pray for God’s lovingkindness in those difficulties. But what does ‘refuge’ put you in mind of? It puts me in mind of refugees. 

I want to tell you that someone, who has become a friend of All Saints (although he is a Muslim), the Jordanian refugee who was living with me for nearly the whole of my first year here in Penarth, is going to be in front of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal in Newport on Tuesday. I would really like to ask you all to bear him in your prayers, to pray that there will be a fair outcome finally to his long quest for asylum here. The alternative, which the Home Office has been trying to achieve for the last four years, is to send him back to Jordan, where he faces at least a year in jail, for a political offence.

I believe that his case falls fairly and squarely within the provisions of the Refugee Convention 1951 and he does now have a good legal team representing him. But he still needs our prayers. He needs our prayers and our willingness to continue to support him and all those others like him where it’s not safe for them to return to their homes for one reason or another – to support them by providing a refuge. 

This is not necessarily the time or the place to discuss in detail the merits or otherwise of government policy in relation to refugees, but suffice to say that it is somewhat questionable whether the latest legislation conforms with the Refugee Convention (which was itself largely drafted by British lawyers at the prompting of Winston Churchill). 

There is no obligation under the Convention on people to claim asylum in the first country they come to. The Convention provides that the country where they arrive, even if their mode of arrival is deemed to be illegal, is not to punish them in any way for that illegal arrival, and there are strenuous provisions against what is called ‘refoulement’, which is a French term which means returning people to another country. If anybody would like to see the text of the Convention, see https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/1951-refugee-convention.

But let’s go back to Domine, Refugium; God, our refuge. We, the faithful people, have been commanded by our Lord to love our neighbour. I don’t know where the idea of the ‘hostile environment’ comes from, but it certainly didn’t come from Theresa May’s visits to her parish church. There is nothing Christian about it. 

What is Christian is a refuge. There is a charity that I support, called Refugees at Home, and I commend it to you. Because you might say, it’s all very well talking about providing a refuge, but there isn’t an awful lot that we as individuals can do. That may be true; but I can tell you that I have had several refugees staying in my spare room from time to time. I’ve had delightful Turks, Syrians, and Jordanians, and I would say that I have learned a lot and made new friends by being able to put refugees up for a few weeks in my spare room. 

Not everybody is fortunate enough to have a spare room; but if you are wondering what you might be able to do practically, and if you do have a spare room, do consider contacting Refugees at Home.  Again, I can give you details, if you ask me at the end of the service. 

Lydia said, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.’ And ‘she prevailed upon us’. I wonder if there will be a Lydia around among here in the next few weeks. I hope so. And I pray so.