(A sermon preached in Newport Minster, Isle of Wight, on 16th March 2025)
Readings: Philippians 3:17-4:1 and Luke 13:31-35.
I’d like to tell you about my neighbours. My wife Sarah and I live in a small newly built house on a large estate in Newport. As you look at the house, to the left, there’s a nice young born and bred Isle of Wight couple with a very enthusiastic ruby labrador called Bea. On our right live a couple who are so quiet I wouldn’t know they were there had it not been pouring with rain on the day they moved in and , since they were sheltering in the alleyway between our two houses while waiting for the Estate Agent, I asked them in. They’re husband and wife from Africa -we haven’t had enough conversations to know which country- working in a care home. They’re two of a very large group in the UK recruited directly by employers in the care sector on visas restricted to that work, from many different countries in the world. This happened when our exit from the EU left the country short of such workers. (I meet quite a few of them in my Citizens Advice work and we had one in our congregation in Ventnor). In other words, they’re here because of two political decisions in the last 10 years, decisions you or I may or may not agree with. But now they’re here and they need to know which days the bins go out.
To the right of them are a lovely family from Ukraine: husband and wife, their son and his grandparents. They’re here as a result of a decision by Vladimir Putin and, every so often, such the day which followed what I call the ‘mugging in the Oval Office’, we talk about the war.. But most of the time we talk about the weather and how to get a good window cleaner.
Like it or not, politics affects our lives and even our relationships but, does it define them? The writer of our first reading, St Paul, knew a great deal about politics, nationality, identity, and citizenship. He was born a strict Jew, a Pharisee – a heritage of which he was very proud- , in the Roman empire, of which he was a citizen. This last thing was a status which he played to his advantage in disputes with the authorities on at least one occasion. Yet, in the light of his newly found relationship with Christ, he declares (in today’s NT reading) that ‘our citizenship is in heaven.’ On another occasion, addressing a group in Athens, he said that ‘of one blood God made all the peoples of the earth.’ The churches he founded were made up of Jews and Gentiles from many nationalities, as well as slaves and free people. In the letter to the Galatians he wrote , ‘In Christ there is no Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female: all are one in Christ Jesus.’
This, I believe, lays down a challenge to our increasingly nationalist world order. Look at two out of the three great powers of our modern world: USA and Russia. Both are now governed by strongly nationalistic leaders. Trump, with his ‘America First’, MAGA policy -whose nation already has in its past mythology the notion of a divine ‘Manifest Destiny’- seeking to expand into Canada, Greenland and Gaza, and Putin with his belief in ‘Holy Russia’, looking to claw back Ukraine and who knows where else into Russian orbit however great the price to the world and his own people. Tragically, these leaders are cheered on by many (though not all) Christians in both countries, and yet a country is not a religion. Our citizenship, our ‘commonwealth’ (KJV) is in heaven, reigned over by the God and Father of us all.
Nowhere focusses this more clearly than Jerusalem. 8 years ago I was (in retrospect) extremely lucky to go on a diocesan pilgrimage to the Holy Land, including Jerusalem and to pray at the Western (sometimes called ‘wailing’) Wall, the only remaining part of the biblical Temple, believed by ancient Jews to be God’s dwelling place on earth, destroyed by the Romans in AD70. Above that, on the Temple Mount, is the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s 3 holiest shrines, less than half a mile away from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over (it was believed) the site of the Crucifixion and Empty Tomb, and sacred to Christians. All 3 sites have been fought over for more than 2500 years, but are now held together by a longstanding but fragile agreement. As I prayed at the ancient Temple wall I used words from Psalm 121, ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee’. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem the city that kills….(said Jesus nearly 2000 years ago) ‘how long have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings but you were not willing.’
‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’ What are the marks of that citizenship and what are the duties of its citizens? I love my country, and am proud to stand under the royal crest and preach in a church with royal connections. But I do not worship it nor give it my full obedience. (Nor would Charles our KIng and supreme Governor expect me to). My loyalty is to God and to Jesus who taught us to ‘love Him with all our heart and our neighbour as ourselves.’ What is more, in the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus taught that our neighbour can be a despised foreigner as much as a home-grown country man or woman. And I remember with horror the European nationalism of the last 120 years and with pride the service people that stood up to it in the first and second world wars.
Jesus was no politician but nor was he apolitical. If he had been, why would Herod the Governor of Judaea have wanted to kill him? (As we read in the Gospel). His answer to this news ‘Go and tell that fox for me ‘listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow and on the third day am finishing my work’ is somewhat cryptic but I understand it like this. ‘Let him think what he thinks; I’m getting on with the work my Father has given me.’
So must we. Our church must be open to our neighbour from all communities and nations. In the words of the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas who, in common with many thoughtful Americans, must be a little fearful at the moment,
‘We in the church can show the world a manner of life it can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.’
May we become that family. Amen.
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