Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 8 September 2024.
• First Reading: Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23 (A good name is more desirable than great riches)
• Epistle: James 2: 1-17 (Favouritism forbidden; faith and deeds)
• Gospel: Mark 7: 24-37 (Healing the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman. A deaf mute healed)
It is strange how we get so confused when trying to say exactly what we mean. We may know it when we see it but try to define it clearly and precisely are we are in trouble.
Take poverty. The Sermon on the Mount starts with ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ – a blessing for those who know their need for God, rather than those unable to pay the weekly or monthly rent.
That definition starts with God without any further argument or discussion.
But then what about the child with two left feet on the football field? Or the sole trader, living off what he can scrape together once he has paid his rent, taxes, complied with all safety and other regulations and finding that those who want his services will not pay for them?
Or the plausible person demanding trust but never proving to be trustworthy, and their effects on their victims?
Now matters of wealth and poverty are far more complicated than the cliche and slogan masters would have us believe.
And so our lessons lead us though a thicket of the lonely, the unprovided for, and the conspicuous winners and losers in life.
The lesson from the book of Proverbs carefully selects certain verses, but excludes others. It is for generosity and against injustice. Both rich and poor are made by God in their humanity. And yes, exploiting the poor is a bad thing.
But then we are also warned against scoffers and slothfulness and its petty excuses for inaction.
Yet the letter of James warns against snobbery and any kind of discrimination against the poor.
If our faith is genuine then it will show itself in its actions and relations with other people. The person changed from within will then develop new ways of treating others and of understanding them.
It is not a matter of being patronizing – more one of seeing what and who God has made.
And then there were Jesus’ encounters with people when He had taken time out from the Jews of Galilee, Samaria and Judea.
Not now proclaiming the gospel of grace to a people who should have been expecting it and should have accepted it when it came. Rather, He was in a neighbouring territory not under the laws and customs of the Jews but people had still heard of Him.
This time He was meeting people on the basis of their needs as they came to Him. He was not discussing the finer points of the atonement or the 10 Commandments.
Now He was responding to simple human need and petitions without preaching or making theological points.
And so yes, when approached with simple and personal needs He would meet them with mercy and compassion.
For us the questions of need and mercy are also complex.
Who is in need and how do we recognize it? The person, rejected again and again in many aspects of life, outwardly fed and healthy and yet bleeding and dying inside?
The sole trader struggling in a neighbourhood beset by litter, drugs, vandalism, dereliction, shoplifting, never mind the local gang culture and the pressures to conform to any and every kind of moral distortion?
What about the single parent, beguiled into intimacy without commitment and living with the effects of this false prospectus?
Can and will we really want to endorse the machinery of public generosity, administered by remote, inaccessible and definitely unmanageable computerised systems.
The kind of regime which is self-perpetuating and yet never responsible for the distortions it generates?
So, just who are the rich and powerful, the well-connected and the well-respected? And I am not thinking about the super-wealthy in distant capital cities: more those whose interest is in keeping their clients quiet if not satisfied, but still maintaining the voting machine.
In our lessons, the issues are all personal, and being so, they are also spiritual for they express who we have become as we profess our faith.
They are not about political and administrative machines whose interest is in their self-preservation and self-projection.
They are about our own personal encounters, with the needy as the Lord sees them.
Some may be called into politics – and it would have to be a genuine calling to serve justice and Godliness before all other party or sectional interests.
But all are called to being merciful in our daily encounters, and understanding that need has many faces and speaks with many accents.
