He has put down the mighty from their seat: and has exalted the humble and meek

This term’s theme has been that of faith and money – whether, indeed, having both is possible, and if so, how we might form a way of life that allows us to both be faithful Christians and yet live in a world which from year to year seems to become ever more a world of greed and lust after individual wealth. The old adage of ‘give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’ – so often overused and misunderstood by generations of greedy and unholy clergy-folk to justify slavish obedience to law, either of the state or of mammon - is, of course, not what it is claimed to be. Absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever, belongs to Caesar – the Earth is The Lord’s and all that is in it – so no easy fixes there, no greedy and self-absorbed capitalism Monday to Saturday and God on Sunday. It doesn’t work that way, and any clergy person, indeed any preacher, who tells you that it does, is not only a liar, buta false prophet and a thief. If we’re going to take the Gospel seriously then it’s a Gospel for every day, and we need to live it like that.

So tonight I’d like to talk about entitlement – about privilege, about how we, and how the church might look if we engaged better with these issues, and what we might learn from secular culture.

In recent years, there has been a great emphasis on privilege – those of you at university and at school have doubtless heard the phrase ‘check your privilege’ more than once, and the very mention of the phrase will send some of you into apoplexy of rage, and others will be fired up with social justice to smash down the oppressors. I have to admit to being one of those people who finds these kind of phrases pretty irritating, and I also have to admit to being one of those people who probably doesn’t, again to use the same kind of language, ‘see my own privilege’. At base level, though, I think I’m wrong to dismiss the concept just because I find it annoying – and I think we’re all wrong to dismiss any proposed system of liberation just because we find bits of it either irritating or impossible to sign up to.

Because deep beneath these relatively recent theories are concrete facts. If you are born white in this country, or indeed in this world, you have already won a huge number of fights that our black brothers and sisters have still to fight. If you are born rich, or earn even a jot over the median wage, you have already lucked out – whether that is rich compared to those still living on a dollar a day – and how utterly vile a species we are to still allow that to happen – or rich compared to those who struggle to make ends meet. When I was in Suffolk doing a GP placement earlier this year, I spent time with people who were choosing whether to put money into their electricity metre or whether to buy a magazine twice a month. That’s the kind of poverty that still exists, those are the kind of choices that we implicitly embrace when talk about ‘making work pay’. If we, by bad luck, had all our money stolen tomorrow we would race to get our compensation, to get the police involved, to punish the thief – yet we still live in a country where, if you are born poor, you are statistically likely to remain so, and over fifty percent of the population think that’s OK. Indeed, many churchgoers do too – but more on that later. 

We hear the same tired rubbish spewed out by politicians that, if only people worked harder, they’d not be in poverty. Tell that to the child of a single mother who gets sent to prison for stealing to feed her family. Tell that to the homeless man who was abused as a child and could never integrate into society. 

And yet we still, too many of us, implicitly believe it. And the reason behind that is our ever-present, pervasive and sickening sense of entitlement. We believe we are, to some extent, entitled to our lives and the way we live them. We have bought into a political consensus that tells us that accident of birth is only our problem if we’re on the wrong side of the cash divide. We should be able to use our money as we please, whether we earnt it in useful occupation, earnt it in an entirely pointless or exploitative way, or simply inherited it. That’s just the way things are. Which is true – but it’s not the way things have to be, and if we believe in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God, it’s not the way things are going to be.

And the reality, of course, is that you are entitled to a grand total of absolutely nothing. None of you, none of us, are here but for the grace of God, the kindness of other people, and encouragement from others to live our lives in a particular way. It is only through our commitment to, dare I say, in Christian terms, love of, other people that we live peaceably with others, respecting their human persons and, indeed, forming a society. Human rights, those maligned and yet utterly fundamental values which underpin the secular vision of the good society, only exist because we choose to love one another as we love ourselves. ‘That which you do to one of these brethren, you do it also to me’ is what Jesus says. For Christians, therefore, this stuff matters, because elsewise we spit in the face of God like the Roman soldiers did those many years ago.

Now this might all sounds terribly convoluted and high-minded, yet this applies to each and every one of us in the Chapel today. It applies to those of us who don’t bother to learn nurses’ names, it applies to those of us who think only of our own fun and treat those who work for us as dirt. How many of us actually thank the serving staff at dinner for what they’ve done? Who on earth are we, as teenagers, to have serving staff in the first place! Most certainly we are no better than they are – yet look at the behavior at Formal Hall all too frequently, and there it is, implicitly written into the very way people are behaving. Jesus was extremely clear – the first shall be last and the last first – yet we still behave just like the Pharisees, who took all the high places at table and treated those they considered ‘less worthy’ as muck.

Every single moment of our life is gift and grace from God and we have a responsibility to treat each and every one of God’s creatures with the dignity they deserve. God made us in His own image, and as the second reading tonight told us, He took flesh and dwelt amongst us, as one of us. As a poor beggar, traipsing through the streets, despised, rejected, a man of sorrows. Jesus gained his authority and power not through demeaning and despising others, but by living the Kingdom message of freedom, dignity and calling us each by our name.

Because, of course, once we shuffle off this mortal coil, that’s it – and there’s no difference in death between the richest and the poorest, the one with the most degrees and the one with the least. As we appear before the throne of God, His question will be ‘did you follow me like I asked you to – did you inhabit the identity I gave you, that I called you by name?’ It is no accident that Christians are given names at Baptism – yet so often we don’t bother to even speak the name of the person we are talking to, or, more often, talking down to. 

And at the bottom of it all, it’s completely ridiculous. Who on earth do we think we are? We are all born, we all live lives of sin and virtue, and we all die. We are all here because God called us into being. We can only live in society if we genuinely love one another, and do some thinking about what that love means. But we also need to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul, because unless we see ourselves as His creatures, we make ourselves others’ masters. As S Vincent de Paul, that great saint and lover of the poor, said ‘it is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them’. 

Now I’m not calling for some kind of puritanism, but I am calling for us to take off that mask of self-preservation and look at each and every single human creature in the eyes and see God there – to share radical hospitality with each and every human person we meet, for however long or short, whatsoever the station that the secular world has given them. Time after time the world has seen us make mistakes in this area – look at how we treated women, black people, Jewish people – the list goes on – and yet we still continue the insidious attitude that underlies all of this in our daily lives. Bishop Philip talked to us about shaking off and voluntarily giving up power last week – yet we will not, indeed we can not, if we don’t take off the mantle of entitlement and see the face of God. God uses us as his hands and feet in the world – what we don’t seem to realize is that He also stares out at us from each and every person in this world, and he blesses us with that stare, if only we took the time to see it.

The church has a lot to do in this area too. A church may have beautiful vestments, or fabulous projector screens, or whatever else floats your boat, but to paraphrase S Paul, if it does not have love, then it is a waste of time. The Holy Father Francis has been criticized for his ostentatious and media-savvy humility – yet, even if it is all done for the media, it is a great thing none the less. For the church needs to be seen to be humble, it needs to reflect something of what God wants in the world. As Christians, and as a church, we are called to reflect that humility – something that Martin Luther, whose anniversary it is this week, made clear in his theses. 

If our churches are not seen as places of humility, then the world really hasn’t got a hope. The Holy Father doesn’t get his authority from being high and mighty – he gets it from being the servant of the servants of God. He gets it from trying, however faintly, to model Jesus’ own life – and we, as a church, through the sacraments, word, social action – in a word, love – we must focus on that, and that alone. Are our rich churches really doing everything they can to help our poorer ones? Our bishops must start asking whether their place is in the Lords or in the homeless shelter, whether they can really justify sitting in first class wearing pectoral cross as representative of Christ. Our priests must start asking whether they are doing all they can to truly serve the people they are called to serve. Service – the ultimate Christian virtue – is the key – and unless all Christian people take it seriously, we may as well give up.

This is not some kind of Green Party manifesto – it’s Christianity. It’s the radical and painful and counterintuitive and extraordinarily generous will of God – the God who quite literally was born, lived amongst us, and died – just like us. None of us are entitled to anything – yet we have been gifted the most beautiful and wonderful gifts of all – grace, life, joy, other people. When we keep it to ourselves, when we love ourselves much more than our neighbor, when we believe our own entitlement, we no longer inhabit the name that God gave us. We gain from society only as much as we gift it ourselves.

And we are not alone in striving to serve God and neighbour. This week the Church celebrates the great feast of All Saints. Chief amongst them is Mary, Our Mother, whose words we hear each Sunday in the Magnificat.  ‘The Lord has done great things for me – Holy is His name’, ‘He hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden’. The saints continually offer their prayers for us, sinful but longing children of God, who still try to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Mary is our ultimate example - despised and rejected by the world – a poor woman in a tiny backwater of Roman occupied Palestine – as the ever-charming S Philip said ‘can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ – who simply put her trust in God and said ‘yes’. Considered worthless, yetMary was to be crowned as Queen of Heaven, to reign with her son in glory. 

If God chose to elevate Mary to such a position, let us ask her prayers to help us see the face of God in those the world tells us are worthless. Let us try to emulate her and let us serve God in others like she served God in Jesus. ‘From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed’. How blessed we would be if we too might have the Magnificat as our own song. How blessed we would be if we truly spoke to people as people, if we truly loved others as we loved ourselves, if we truly saw the face of God in each of the brethren. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek’.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.