Sunday Worship 21 June | Speaking Up

Luke 4:16-21

[Jesus] went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,  because he has anointed me  to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners  and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Matthew 5:13-16

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."

This morning we come to the last of our holy habits. That’s not to say that by the end of this morning we will have covered every holy habit there is, only that this is the last of the seven we are covering in this series. I’ve called this one ‘speaking up’, which is deliberately a little ambiguous. I wanted to include something about sharing our faith, because that is part of the great commission and so should certainly be part of a holy life, but I was wary of using words like evangelism, because I think they can narrow down what it means to share our faith. I also wanted to include something about working for justice, which is connected with the themes of living well and serving others that we have looked at over the past two weeks, but which is also very much about how we use our voices. And it seems really important to me that sharing our faith and working for justice are held together in a healthy relationship, because the reality is that as Christians we can’t do either well without doing both. So I hope that ‘speaking up’ holds all of that together.

Let's start with sharing our faith. I have admitted before that evangelism is not my strong point, or at least not the kind of evangelism that might first spring to mind. I've always been happy talking about theology with anyone who shows an interest, as my classmates from primary school onwards would attest, but the idea of starting a conversation about why you should accept Jesus into your life is enough to bring me out in hives. I mean to be totally honest, I'm not all that confident with starting conservations full stop, so it's a character thing more than anything else. The problem is, I grew up in a very evangelical context, which meant I was led to believe that I needed to convert my friends or they would go to hell. You can probably imagine the fact that I wasn't very good at this was the source of some anxiety. I no longer believe that to be true, mostly because I think God is more generous than that suggest, but also because I think God is more realistic about our abilities. The eternal fate of every soul is surely too important to leave to us. Now that I come to think about it, it also seems a little contradictory to insist that we are not saved by our own works, but then imply that our salvation depends on the efforts of others. So evangelism is no longer such a point of stress, but that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking it's important. 

I love being a Christian. Knowing that I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God who is gracious and compassionate gives me purpose and hope. Following in the footstep of Christ who lived and loved in the way of the kingdom gives me a pattern for how to live and love well. Opening myself to the movement of the Sprit who nurtures good fruit gives me peace and encouragement. And belonging to the family of the church gives me a community of love and joy. Even if eternity is up to God, I still want to offer the blessings of the life I know to those I meet. And so for me, evangelism is less about heaven and hell, and more about here and now. It is saying “This is what I believe and have come to know. It has been good for me and I hope it will be good for you too.” That feels a lot less frightening and a lot less pressured than the picture of evangelism I grew up with.

Let’s move on now to working for justice. Scriptures is full of calls for us to speak for those who have no voice, although I will caution that we need to be careful how we do that. However well-intentioned we are, we can easily come off as patronising, and we can actually disempower those we are trying to help if we speak over them. Our first approach should always be to emphasise and amplify the voices of those who have been marginalised, and to speak only when absolutely necessary. As an example of what I mean by the latter, I was once at a diversity training day for ministers, when one male minister made some pretty misogynistic comments. It was a bit of a rant about how women want to do everything that men do but also still want men to do everything for them. There were a lot of women in that room who were more than capable of responding to him, but I think we all sensed that he wouldn’t have listened to us. And so thankfully it was another male minister who calmly explained to him that women are only seeking equality, but for men who have known privilege that can feel like disadvantage. It was a great moment of allyship, recognising that he would hear something from a man that he simply would not hear from a woman.

Perhaps you are thinking that this kind of working for justice sounds like all talk no action, but that is not my intent. Creating a more just society is going to take a lot of practical effort too, a lot of serving others as we talked about last week. Think of it this way, if you see a lot of people drowning in a river, you’re going to want to pull them out, but you’re also going to want to go upstream and work out why so many people are ending up in the river in the first place. Speaking out on matters of justice is heading upstream, trying to identify and resolve the systemic failures that are the source of the injustice. That has been part of this church’s history since the very beginning, from taking a stand for pacifism during the world wars, to challenging the South African government on apartheid in the 1960s, to offering a counter voice against religious homophobia and transphobia today. Long may that continue into the future.

I said earlier that you can’t do either of these forms of speaking up well without also doing the other, and this is where the readings we heard earlier come in. Jesus began his ministry by declaring that “[the Spirit] has anointed me  to proclaim good news to the poor”. He was quoting from the prophet Isaiah, but it feels like a very deliberate choice. Jesus was sharing his mission statement, and in fact this passage is often known as the Nazareth Manifesto. In saying that he will proclaim good news, Jesus is clearly indicating that the words he says will be important, and the nature of who is means that he cannot help but reveal God. And in saying that this good news will be for the poor, he is surely telling us that there will be an element of justice to his words, that they will reshape the world as we know it. Likewise, light brings revelation while salt brings change, and we are called to be both. If we are sharing our faith, then that has to include how Jesus reshapes things. And if we are working for justice, then we should he honest about where that impulse comes from for us. So here is to speaking up, because the Spirit of the Lord is upon us too.

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And so we have come to the end of this series on holy habits. I suspect many of them will have already been familiar to many of you, but I hope these reflections might have offered a different perspective or a different thing you might like to try. As I said early on, we also call these holy habits spiritual practices, and that is no accident. We need to practice them, to get stuck in and have a go, to keep going with what works and tweak what doesn’t. And so to round off the series, I thought it would be good to reflect back over all of the holy habits together. For each one I have a question for you to think about. You can work through all seven or just pick one or two to focus on.

deepening prayer – how do you create silence for God to speak?

engaging scripture – how are you engaging with scripture?

practising ritual – what rituals do you find most meaningful?

being community – how do you make a group feel like a community?

living well – what does it mean for you to live well?

serving others – do you need to let someone else serve you?

speaking out – what do you need to speak out about this week?