Dives and Lazarus | hughdbryant

Sermon for Mattins on 19th November 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221698

When I led the team running the food bank in Cobham, Surrey, in the second richest borough in the country – I mean in the UK, not just Wales – the old saying about the political inclinations of Anglicans rang very true; you know, that the Church of England is the ‘Conservative Party at prayer’. I can see you bristling, because I’m no longer in England, and what holds good for the Church of England may well not carry sway in Wales; and also when I see our Labour MP and our Labour MS and our Labour Police and Crime Commissioner and our Labour Mayor, all happily ensconced in the congregation here at All Saints, I can’t help feeling that perhaps the political orientation of the faithful in the church in Wales might be rather different from how things are in the darkest parts of Surrey.

What, you may ask, has this got to do with the parable of the talents? ‘For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ In the Authorised Version, ‘…from him that hath not, it shall be taken away, even that which he hath’. Surely this is one of the toughest things which Jesus is supposed to have said; so tough that I wonder whether he really did say it.

But then if you look at Saint Mark’s Gospel, chapter 4, you’ll find that he said almost the same words, but not referring to a parable like the parable of the talents, just rather a version of the ‘golden rule’ to do as you would be done to. ‘…the measure you give will be the measure you receive with something more besides. For those who have will be given more, and those who have not will forfeit even what they have’. That’s what is in Saint Mark’s Gospel chapter 4 [4:25].

What made me think about these socio-economic issues was when I was ‘Googling’ these lines to see if there were any brilliant insights in the University of Google, and I found in the Quora app the response to the question, what does this saying of Jesus mean, and someone had given the answer, ’It means that God is a Republican. He clearly wants the already wealthy to be given more, and for the poor to have what little they have taken away.’

Surely that can’t be right. I can dare to discuss it, because it has been neatly transposed by Quora into an American context and the parallels between the Republicans and any UK political parties are, of course, not exact; so I don’t think that I am saying anything rude about British politics, if we just keep it at this academic level. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Did Jesus really approve of that?

There are even more puzzling things to tangle with if you look at the rest of the parable, because it looks like an invitation to, or at least an endorsement of, speculation. ‘You have to speculate to accumulate’, some people say, and the first two slaves did exactly that – and were successful.

It doesn’t say exactly what their trading activity was; whether they invested in making something or whether it was pure speculation, futures and options perhaps. Who knows? It does look a bit as though Jesus is attempting a Marxist analysis, that what he is talking about is capital, the uses of capital; and the third slave, the one who buried the talent in the ground, and got no credit for looking after it carefully, perhaps put into words a Marxist critique.

‘You were a harsh man reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not scatter seed.’ Perhaps he was a shareholder in one of the water companies, being paid in dividends the money which should have gone to improving the quality of the water so as to put Surfers against Sewage out of business. Or somebody like the Glazers, the brothers who took over Manchester United. They borrowed all the money needed to buy Manchester United, and having bought it they used the profits of Manchester United’s activities to repay the loans. ‘Unto him who hath, it shall be added’. And the season ticket prices went through the roof – ‘… from him who hath not, …’

But are we meant to think that the absent capitalist in the parable stands for Jesus or for God, and if so, does God approve? Does He approve of speculation, more than just keeping something safe that you’ve been given to look after? The capitalist says that he should have put it in a deposit account and got interest on it.

That’s quite a change from the usual Old Testament position in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. All condemn usury, which is lending at excessive rates of interest, to the detriment of the poor. It’s something that the Old Testament seems to condemn, but here Jesus seems to approve of the idea that somebody should benefit from the payment of interest on deposits.

And the poor slave doesn’t get any credit for keeping the capitalist’s money safe. He didn’t lose it; whereas the speculators could easily have lost it. Investments can go down as well as up, as the small print always advises. Perhaps what Jesus is trying to point up is that it is better to be active, to try to work hard rather than just to sit back and go with the flow.

The reading from Zephaniah has the same sort of theme. ‘I will search Jerusalem with lamps and I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs’. Another translation says, ‘I shall search Jerusalem by lantern light and punish all those who are ruined by complacency, like wine left on its lees. Who say to themselves, the Lord will do nothing neither good nor bad.’

These people are so comfortable that they don’t care about God. But their wealth will be plundered, their houses laid in ruins. They will build houses but not live in them. Think about the new Embassy Quarter in London near where the new American embassy has been built on the south side of the River Thames, where at night there are no lights in the buildings and the restaurants are closing, because nobody lives there.

Absentee speculators have bought up the flats. They don’t live there and they don’t let anyone else live there. Just imagine the effect on the housing crisis if the councils could house some of the people on the waiting list in some of those flats. It looks as though Zephaniah was another person in the Bible with at least some views which Karl Marx would recognise.

Altogether this is challenging teaching. Perhaps Jesus was just deliberately trying to make us think. In distinct contrast with the parable of the talents, there are the stories of Dives and Lazarus, or the Good Samaritan, about generosity or the lack of it; or turning the water into wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee.

I don’t see that the apparent meanness of the parable of the talents really squares with the second great Command, to love one’s neighbour as oneself, so I think it must be a discussion piece, a deliberate provocation to the disciples to think hard about economics. Granted that Jesus made five loaves and two fishes go a long way, I still don’t see him as being terribly enthusiastic about zero sums – you know, what I gain, you lose.

What would Jesus’s take on it be today? Surely he would think that the gap between the rich and the poor is far too great. And I don’t necessarily think he would recommend aggressive speculation as a way of making money. ‘Render unto Caesar’ seems to me to be a clue. Progressive taxation might be on Jesus’s agenda today, I would have thought. ‘Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves,’ might be as far as He would go. But I don’t think that the widow, with her mite, was listening.

Sermon for New Year’s Day 2023 at St Dochdwys, Llandough

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

May God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Amen.

Before I say anything else, let us give thanks to God for the work of Emeritus Pope Benedict, and pray for our Catholic friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, as they mourn his passing. And although the ball may be the wrong shape, we mourn the passing also of the great footballer Pelé. May both these great figures rest in peace and rise in glory.

Numbers 6.22-27

Psalm 8

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=538997803

It’s a bit of an upside-down sermon this morning. Indeed if you’re still waking up after last night, you might have thought that our service was back to front. Our first lesson was the blessing. It is the most beautiful blessing, which is called the Aaronic blessing. It was passed on to Aaron by Moses. But a blessing usually comes at the end of the service. It probably will still come at the end as well – Jimmy may well say it today. This is it, from the Old Testament lesson:

May the Lord bless you and keep you;

may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Don’t get up. It’s not the end of the service yet! Because the last bit of it in the lesson from Numbers, just after the blessing, says this:

‘So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them’.

It is about the people of God being given their name, Israel, which means literally in Hebrew, people who have wrestled with God. That went back to Jacob, wrestling with the angel. So Jacob became Israel and the whole of the old Testament had a theme running through it, of the relationship between the chosen people of God, the Israelites, and God himself. It was like all the best love affairs, pretty bumpy. People who really do love each other have rows and they do fall out. That was certainly true of the Israelites and their God. They worshipped the Baals and the Golden Calf – and God punished them. (See Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 12).

This story of the Israelites getting their name is at the beginning of their story, and it’s appropriate on 1st January to think of our religious beginnings and where they might lead. Now today we are focusing on the other end of the Bible, on baby Jesus – I was going to say, on Jesus’ ‘christening’ – but that sort of thing worked differently in those days. Instead the baby would be named, and if he was a male baby, circumcised as part of the Jewish tradition. The angel had told Mary that his name would be Jesus. That name means, God saves us, God is our salvation. So we have moved from wrestling with God, Israel, to salvation through God, Jesus.

The mighty God who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the God who was capable of tremendous wrath and destruction, has now come, with all that power, to be concentrated into a tiny baby. That is the miracle of Christmas. We are perhaps none the wiser about exactly what God looks like, apart from just being a baby. In the blessing, with God lifting up the light of his countenance upon us, we get the feeling that there is someone up there, beaming down with a beautiful smile. But we can’t actually see that God: No one could. But people could see Jesus and they did see him. He certainly lifted up the light of his countenance on everyone he met.

Although we can’t see Him, what is our relationship with God? In St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, God puts us alongside that little baby, so that we are children, children of God, calling God ‘Abba’, which is more like ‘Daddy’ rather than ‘Father’ in the Aramaic we are told. Saint Paul goes on to suggest that, as children, we are heirs; we inherit the blessings of God.

But there is a missing bit. We need to go back a bit to the Old Testament and look again at the people of Israel, the people wrestling with God. The heart of their relationship was what was known as God’s covenant with Israel. What is a covenant? As a lawyer, I can tell you that a covenant is an agreement or a contract. The two parties agree together and they agree to do things one for the other. That’s it. It’s very simple.

The covenant between God and Israel was indeed very simple. The Israelites agreed to worship God as the one true God, no other gods, and in return God promised to bless them and keep them, as the blessing says. And it’s a very useful idea, this covenant.

What can we say at this service, at the beginning of 2023? We have to cope with all these challenges and difficulties in the world ahead of us:

– the war in Ukraine,

– the cost of living crisis here at home,

– the energy crisis, where we are all worrying because we can’t afford to pay three or four times what we used to pay for our houses to be heated,

– and the pay crisis, all the strikes which the public servants, and in particular the nurses and ambulance crews, are involved in, because their pay has fallen back so much that many are now forced to go to food banks, which seems to me to be a very unfair development after all their bravery and sacrifice brought us all out clapping on our doorsteps while the Covid pandemic was on.

I hope that you will not think that this falls outside the bounds of what a preacher is supposed to cover, but it does seem to me that we were, and we are, very happy to rely on these dedicated public servants, and now we must provide them with a decent living. And, most importantly, there are theological reasons for supporting the workers’ fight for better pay and conditions of work.

Frankly our government of millionaires in London needs to think again, quickly, about this. We were all made equal in God’s image: not so rich and so poor, all in the same country – the sixth richest country in the world. Remember Jesus’ story known as Dives and Lazarus, the Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16:19-31. Jesus surely didn’t approve of such a huge gap between the rich and the poor.

So as we embark on 2023, as we see our world facing all these challenges, what do we, as the people of God, the people in the church, do about it?

Quite a lot of Christians do something every New Year, which seems to me to be a great way of preparing themselves to tackle these challenges; and that is, they renew their covenant with God.

It’s an idea which started with John Wesley and the early Methodists. For Methodists the first service in a new year is still known as Covenant Sunday. The ‘people called Methodists’, as they used to call themselves, have recited the same or very similar words every year since 1780 to make their covenant, their agreement, with the Lord. I’ll give you a quick preview, and then we will say the whole of this covenant prayer together later on in this service. So this is just to introduce you to it if you haven’t heard it before. What the Methodists pray goes like this.

We are no longer our own, but thine.

Put us to what thou wilt, rank us with whom thou wilt.

Put us to doing, put us to suffering.

Let us be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.

We freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

‘Put us to doing, put us to suffering;

let us be employed for thee or laid side for thee ….

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.’

Those are John Wesley’s words from 1780. They’ve been repeated every year since. That’s it. We have to do what the Lord commands us to do, just as Jesus commanded his disciples; you know, not having two cloaks, letting other people go before us, so the last shall become first: loving our enemies, not turning our backs on poor people like Dives did, on people like nurses, and instead doing things that may not necessarily be that good for us as individuals but which reflect God’s love, and which Jesus told us to do.

‘Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.’

This is the agreement which we are invited to make, and which should be our guiding principle in the year to come. We have moved from Israel, wrestling with God, to Jesus, God is our salvation.

So let’s agree on that. Let’s make that covenant. Let’s do what we have to do in order to keep our side of the bargain. It’s not just a question of words. But if we do, if we do do more than just talk: then, the blessing will come; and now, here, it will be in the right place, at the end of the service, but it will be more than that: it will be a continuing blessing. The Lord will bless you and keep you. The Lord will make his face to shine upon you, so that it will, truly, be a happy New Year.

The Parable of Zero Sums

New Year 2023