Sunday Worship 7 June | Living Well

Isaiah 58:6-12

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

Between guest preachers and cafe church,  our holy habits series has been on a mid-season break (how very Netflix of us!) so let's get back into it with a recap. We started with deepening prayer, following the Bible's lead by getting on and praying. We filed some complaints with God, gave thanks for the good things in our lives, asked for help for the world, and spent some time creating a silence in which another voice could speak. Next was engaging scripture, and we thought about how we can use research and art and discussion and imagination to dig deeper into the Bible, before giving some of those things a try. Then it was practicing ritual, which I described as something we do with intention and attention and repetition. We recognised the place ritual has in our shared life, bringing both structure and meaning. And finally we reflected on being community. We focused on the importance of love, and the need to hold all we are and all we have together, stitching our lives into something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves.

Those four themes hold loosely together as things we do here in church. Of course they spill out. We can and should pray and engage with scripture in our own space and time, we will all have private rituals as well as rituals with friends and family, and this is neither the only place we are community nor the only community we are part of. But prayer, scripture, ritual and community feel like they are grounded and nurtured in this place. This morning the balance shifts, as we take on more of an outwards focus with our remaining themes of living well, serving others and speaking out. Of course these will spill in. Our work will inform our worship just as our worship must inform our work, and the front door of the church must be a gate not a fence. But they are grounded and nurtured in the world outside.

So, turning to today’s holy habit, how do we live well? For me this is about living a good life, both in the sense of a life that brings pleasure, because Jesus did promise life in abundance, but also in the sense of a life that has moral virtue. I asked the kids this week what they thought it meant to live well. Eddie told me “be kind and eat cheese” because he is definitely my child. Miri wanted to tell you for herself: If someone had a jar of sweets and you really wanted one, and you thought they won't notice and took one, that would be a bad decision. You should be good even when no one is looking. And what if your mum and dad were ill? Would you use oven gloves to be careful and make them a hot drink, or would you watch telly all day while they couldn't say no? I think you should make them a drink, because you should look after people.

The passage we heard from Isaiah gives us some more ideas. Tackle justice and oppression. Make sure the needs of everyone are met. These are not small asks and they can feel so overwhelming that they paralyse us. There is a danger that if we do not know where to begin then we do not begin at all. But as the Jewish text the Talmud puts it, “you are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it”. We will not end injustice or satisfy everyone on our own, and we may not see the fulfilment of those things in our lifetime, but that does not mean our efforts are useless, and it must not stop us from playing our part. As I have said before, we can at the very least work on changing the three feet of world around us, because living well is really a thousand little decisions, that can create some enormous ripples.

I suggested earlier that living well means living ethically, and if you’ll forgive me for getting technical for a moment, there are three main ways of thinking about ethics. Deontological ethics is essentially a rule based system. Actions are right or wrong because they are allowed or forbidden by an agreed code. Utilitarian ethics seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Actions are right or wrong depending on whether or not they achieve that aim. Virtue ethics is concerned with developing good moral character. Actions are right or wrong because they are in accordance with or antithetical to virtues such as kindness. They all have their merits, but deontology can often fail to account for the complexities of life, and utilitarianism risks allowing the suffering of a minority for the happiness of the majority, and so I find myself most drawn to virtue ethics.

It is also the ethical approach I see most clearly in scripture. The Bible may have lots of commandments, but the highest of these is love. The beatitudes speak of mercy and humility and peacemaking. The fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. These are all virtues, qualities that we must seek to embody if we are to live well. It starts with who we are and leads into what we do. I also think Miri summed it up well when she said we should do the right thing even when no one is watching. We do the right thing because our character means we cannot do otherwise. That is not to say that we shouldn’t follow rules or that we don’t need to think about the consequences of our actions, but I believe that if we concentrate on developing these virtues, on nurturing good moral character, we will instinctively follow the rules we need to follow, and the consequences of our actions are more likely to be good.

Perhaps it might be helpful to have a worked example of what it can look like to live well. You may remember that some months ago we signed an open letter written by Leicester Friends of the Earth, in support of new legislation which would hold businesses accountable for environmental damage and human rights abuses in their supply chains, wherever in the world they occurred. It seems to me that this would essentially codify the aims of Fairtrade, so that all trade that passes through this country must be fair. It would create new rules and it would ultimately be for the greatest good of the greatest number, but it is also about practising virtues of justice and compassion. It would be an act of love towards those it helps and would require a measure of self-control on the part of the companies that it would cost. This would be an act of living well on a global scale, but in order for it to happen, it requires many acts of living well on an individual level.

On Friday evening, I joined Leicester Friends of the Earth and representatives from other local groups that had signed the open letter to visit Shockat Adam, the MP for the constituency we are part of as a church. We wanted to ask him to speak in favour of this legislation in parliament, and I am delighted to say that he seemed to be very engaged and fully on board. We will keep holding him to account, as we hope he holds his fellow MPs to account, so that they can then hold businesses to account. This is what I mean about ripples, or we might perhaps say a chain of consequences. It is so easy to look at the world and despair, and sometimes our first response must be lament and even anger, but if we stop there then nothing changes. We need “hope and optimism in spite of present circumstances”, as a postcard I have at home puts it, and we need to keep pressing into the virtues that we see in the life of Christ and the fruit of the Spirit. If we can do that, we will truly be living well.