Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 October 2011 12:00:10
Writing my sermon for next Sunday I came up with the idea that I could alter the one I am going to give which is for church people and focused more explicitly on mission than anything political to be a sermon for those Christians involved in the Occupy movement in the UK and elsewhere. Therefore what follows is a very long post, but one which reflects where my heart is on this stuff and explains where I think faith people should be coming from - and this is a different position to those coming at Occupy from a political position. This is a sermon I would never give in church; because of awareness of different audiences but which has been amended from one I have/ am using which talks more about how we need to re-engage with mission through learning how to party. (Note I have tried to sort formating, but not always worked when I have copied and pasted from elsewhere and then sought to ensure all text in right block paragraphs).
The texts I am using are Nehemiah 8 and Matthew 23: 1- 12
Occupy involves tents and is about asking corporations, governments and others to engage in good leadership and practice. It asking many of them to ensure that their actions match their words. Whilst in the Matthew reading the focus is on the religious elite of the time the principal still holds true - we want good leaders who show integrity and work on a basis of understanding, as one flyer we have used in Newcastle says, "there is enough for everybody's need but not everybody's greed".
The Occupy protests are based around saying that our political and economic leaders need to have more integrity and they are focused around trying to give people hope when they feel disconnected. That is central to statements which has been agreed upon and used by many of the UK occupations.
The Feast of Tabernacles which is also known as the Festival of Booths or Festival of Tents is festival that our reading from Nehemiah.The Feast of Tabernacles at the end of the Old Testament was an eight day festival which involved sleeping outside in temporary shelters, and so has similarities in some ways with the protests we have been seeing around the world and have been part of.
This Jewish Festival of tents continues the new year celebrations which precede it, and the purpose of this festival was to remember the time the Jewish people spent in the wilderness during the from Egypt. This period in the wilderness was a group of people who had been freed from slavery and were being led by God into a new land and way of living. Nehemiah chapter 8, tells us the shelters were made from olive, wild olive, myrtle and palm branches (aswell as some from unmentioned trees). It also tells us that these booths or tents were built on roofs, in courtyards, in the courts of the house of God, in the square by the Watergate and the square by the Gate of Ephraim. This was a big party and it was a party which involved the reading and celebration of the bible every day. It was a party which Nehemiah, Ezra and the Levites were leading.
To understand what was going on here and what type of leadership was being displayed we need to
get our heads around the context that they were celebrating this festival in.
The people that Nehemiah and Ezra were leading were a worn out people who had moved into a city
nobody else had wanted to. They had been invited back after the exile because their ancestors had been Jews but they didn’t really know about their heritage or anything about the Torah, the Jewish bible.
They wanted to know about their heritage and what their grandparents and great-grandparents had
believed in. They wanted to know about what it was that had spurred Nehemiah to put in the effort he had and so they came together and told Ezra who was the teacher of the Law to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses to explain it to them. They wanted some advice on how to live. Part of the reason their interest was so great was because they could see that Nehemiah had integrity as a leader.
This festival then was a big event for them. Imagine one of those scenes from the programme Who Do You Think You Are when a celebrity finds out something really important about their heritage but on a
much bigger scale. Ezra had even had a high wooden platform built for the occasion and all the dignitaries were there. But the platform wasn't to give the dignitaries status it was simply so they could be seen and heard. There was leadership and power but it was being used in a specific way for a positive reason.
Then it happens, the book is opened and the people stand up and praise God before the Levites, the
people who had been like the keepers of the family history start teaching the people standing there. They didn’t just read it out like if we were to stand up and read the bible to a bunch of people who’d not come across it before but rather explained what it meant to them.
As the people had listened they had become overcome with emotion because they had realised how far their lives were from what they should have been and how far away from God they and the ways of their ancestors they had drifted as a society. Basically they were off on a collective guilt trip, but this wasn’t what it was about. The purpose of teaching them their heritage and God’s law wasn’t to send people
on a guilt trip. These were already a physically and emotionally worn out people – they didn’t need anymore wearing down so what Nehemiah, Ezra and the Levites do is teach them how to party.
At this point Nehemiah and Ezra are illustrating responsible leadership because they are not trying to misuse their power. They aren’t looking to control people’s emotions in a negative way or to try and get a certain response by grinding people down. No, Nehemiah and Ezra are giving hope to people – one aspect of responsible leadership.
The people at the meeting get told that it is a holy day but holy days are days for celebration. Nehemiah sends them away saying go and enjoy good food and sweet drinks and some to those who have nothing prepared. The message here was that everybody had a reason to celebrate and should join in with the festival.
This is shows their integrity because they weren’t trying to divide people, rather they wanted to make sure that everybody was included. Their own actions reflected this too, I believe. As I said one of the leaflets that the Occupy movement has produced starts, “there is enough for everybody’s need but not everybody’s greed”. This was something that Nehemiah understood and made sure his leadership reflected.
The Levites didn’t whip up emotion here, they spent some time in serious pastoral care calming people down and sending them away happy because they had gotten through to them that the law wasn’t about sending them on a guilt trip it was about worship and praise.
The people who were gathered then got instructed to celebrate a festival which God had given Moses
to remember the time of the exodus. It was a festival which had not been celebrated properly by the people at all during their time in exile and everybody joined in. Their joy, obviously, was very great. This again shows positive leadership because it is a leadership which looks at the way things were done in the past and why they were done that way and then puts it into practice in a way which is right for the present.
I guess if we want to put it into contemporary terms it was a bit like going to the Durham Miners Gala or something ready to beat yourself up about how you had let the cause down and then finding out that God had told your ancestors to celebrate like you were at the Glastonbury Festival instead and hearing all the brass bands start playing. Their joy understandably was very great.
Whilst they were partying and enjoying the festival they went each day to hear Ezra read from the book of the law. This meant that it was a week long festival and Ezra was the main stage act each day. Then on the eighth day it was time to get back to reality, because whilst taking time out to party sometimes is good it can’t last for ever. On this eighth day in order to prepare them for getting back into the real, harsh, world they had an assembly and worshipped God in a more solemn way. This shows that the leadership understood what was going on for people and the realities of what was going on in their lives. They had given hope and then made sure that that feeling of hope could carry on into the everyday hard reality of life.
So what has all that got to do with us now?
Firstly, I think it gives us who are part of the Occupy movement, but particularly people of faith a model to follow. We are like the Levites, the people who still have the knowledge of the Law and what it means. We have a responsibility to ensure that we share that bit of our heritage which we are custodians of with others. And we have a responsibility to do that with care and sensitivity. We need the same type of integrity as they had.
This means that we have to explain what the faith based perspectives to money, power, and wider resources are and how our scriptures say they should be used. The Make Poverty History and Jubilee 2000 movements many of us were part of taught us the economics. Similarly much of the environmental theology which is around teaches us why the current way of doing things is unsustainable and needs to change how it does stuff. Micheal Northcott's stuff is particularly useful on this. We therefore have something useful to contribute to the discussions which is faith based and rooted in scripture but understands what makes our current system unsustainable and in need of change.
We need to be ready to share what the bible says and what it means with others, in ways they will
understand. Just like the post-exilic Jews in this situation who wanted to understand what their ancestors had believed and what their society had lost we need to be able to answer the questions being asked and explain how secularisation has been part of the reason for the growth of corporations and the development of an unsustainable system. We also need to be ready to recognise the part that religious organisations as institutions and the misuse/ abuse of the bible by those who were meant to be good leaders has caused.
The Levites could take on their role because they had studied the Law and knew both what it said but what it meant. They were also ready to ensure that people didn’t beat themselves up about how far off the mark they’d ended up and about how they had let both God and their ancestors down. The Levites were clear that nobody should go on a guilt trip, but rather they should learn God had good news to give them and a reason to celebrate. The Occupy movement needs similar principles of people doing thier research and being able to communicate how people can change things, by going back to some basic moral ideas and using some new imagination, rather than sending people on a guilt trip.
Secondly, I think we need to learn how to do protest and communicate the faith based element or the wider political ideas again without turning into killjoys who make people feel that they need to be miserable and serious or get rid of all their creature comforts in order to make a difference.
The Occupy movement gives us huge opportunities to build relationships and find ways of sharing faith and wider political ideas if we can re-learn how to party and share parties with the local community. In Newcastle this has been happening by one church allowing us to collect hot water from them and the protesters giving out free mugs of tea and coffee for example.
I think that is really exciting that people are starting talking about what we’ve lost in society and where it's gone wrong. Both as part of the Occupy movement and as people of faith we can offer them something which is still there and still relevant, although it seems lost. This can be done in a range of ways, but one way is through supporting the Occupy movement.
Nehemiah and Ezra as I say are models of good leaders who acted with integrity and encouraged people
to take time out and celebrate but then came to a point when they said that it was time to move on back into “real world” with all the problems that has. It is clear from this passage that the purpose of the celebration and the teaching of the law was worship but it was also refreshment. They were giving hope. Giving hope is a big part of what the Occupy movement is about. It does not deny the problems and realities of "the real world" beyond the occupations but rather the camps are there to recognise and engage with these.
People were encouraged to take time out so they could then return to the ordinary everyday, but living in a different way which put the law into practice in a way which was right for their situation. They were also going to be moving forward in a way where they would be more supported. The fact is when people are relaxed, they are more likely to get to know each other and take time to chat in ways that they wouldn’t when they are busy. Celebrations also give us new topics of conversation. In addition through their inital experience of misunderstanding the law and going on a guilt trip the Levites engaged in some serious pastoral care. The support the Levites gave I think would have been ongoing.
This is important for those involved in Occupy. We need to be working out ways of supporting people as they move back into the everyday and away from the protest centres. Additionally we need to be ourselves engaging in serious pastoral care of broken and hurt people who are disillusioned with society or have been hurt by it. This cannot be done on our own and we need to be realistic about this. There is a need for those who do have these skills to teach them.
So we have a role, as the modern day Levites, to act as responsible protesters and as people of faith to help people take time out to reconnect with God/ a more moral way of looking at things in special and specific ways and to celebrate with them but then to support them when they go back into the everyday.