Sermon at Parish Mass the Last Sunday after Trinity (Bible Sunday) 2014

Leviticus 19.1-2,15-18

1 Thessalonians 2.1-8

Matthew 22:34-46

Today, the last Sunday after Trinity, is also known as Bible Sunday. It’s a celebration, but of what? How should we as Christians read and use the Bible?

There’s an old story of a preacher who was lost for inspiration, so the preacher thought, well, all the Bible is the word of God, so it doesn’t matter which bit I use. I’ll just pick something at random and preach on that. So the preacher flipped through the Bible and turned up Matthew 27.5: “Judas went and hanged himself.” Oh dear, that can’t be right, so the preacher did it again. And got Luke 10.37: “Go and do thou likewise.”

There are two opposite errors to avoid in our approach to the Bible. The first is to say that the Bible is just an ancient text of its own time and context and it has no more significance than any other old book. We can read the bits we happen to like if we want to, but we can leave the rest.

The second error is to treat the Bible as a magic book which we can just open and read off the page the answer to whatever problem we have, without any kind of process or engagement.

Neither of those approaches engages seriously with the text as the Church has received and understood it. So, to learn how to read the Bible, let us see how Jesus reads the Bible, in today’s Gospel reading. When he is asked a question to test him, “which is the greatest commandment?”, he quotes from Deuteronomy, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone; you shall love the Lord your God”. And he adds to it the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself from Leviticus that we heard this morning.

For Jesus the most important thing in the Bible is that it speaks to us of God, and of love. Now if Israel is commanded to love God, this presupposes that God loves Israel. But this is a demanding love. It is a love that tells us the truth about ourselves, and shows us the distance between where we are and where the love of God would have us be.

Israel would not have needed a command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul” if it had already been doing so. Likewise the command to love our neighbour, and the practical ways in which that is to be expressed, are needed because human beings tend to forget that that is how we are meant to live.

The Bible constantly presents to us both the love and holiness of God, and the uncomfortable truth that humanity fails to love and fails to be holy. The Old Testament scriptures show this again and again in the history of Israel, who are always going astray after other gods and acting unjustly, and yet are called back by God and return to him yet again.

So this is one thing the Bible does. By presenting us with God’s goodness, it frees us from the illusion of our own goodness and self-sufficiency. When we look in the mirror of our own pride and vanity we see an illusory image that tells us that all is fine. And how destructive it is trying to maintain that illusion. But the Bible holds up to us an undistorting mirror in which we can learn to see ourselves as God sees us. That can be deeply uncomfortable, but it is necessary if we are to learn that we are loved as God loves us.

The second thing Jesus teaches us about the Bible today is to read it the right way round.

Jesus asks the Pharisees, ‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ The Pharisees read the Bible as meaning that the Messiah must be the son of David. So therefore they look for a Messiah who fits that mould. Do the genealogy first and you can work out who the candidates are. But Jesus says that’s the wrong way round. Start with the Messiah, who is before you, and from him learn what the scriptures mean.

This is what the Church has done from the resurrection onwards. Like the disciples at Emmaus, we are walking with Jesus, risen from the dead, as he opens the scriptures to us. Throughout the ministry of Jesus the disciples had failed to understand that the Messiah must suffer. But once you believe that the victim risen from the dead is actually the Messiah, then you can go back and read the scriptures in that light, and read them truly for the first time.

This brings us back to something that is implied in Jesus’ quotation from Deuteronomy. “Hear, O Israel.” It is the community that reads the Bible. The Church Jesus called and formed, like Israel, is the community that reads and is formed by the scriptures. The book and the community go together.

The Bible did not float down from heaven on a cloud. It has human authors, who were part of that community of faith. They were moved by the Spirit of God, as Jesus says today when quoting Psalm 110, “David by the Spirit calls [the Messiah] Lord”. We need to see both the human and Divine elements, both "David" and the Spirit, in the Bible. The Bible is not a Christian Koran. The human authors with their culture and presuppositions and limitations are all there, but the Spirit of God uses and works through those things to convey the truth that he wishes us to know.

So we need to use our minds when we are reading the Bible. Jesus says that, too: when he quoted the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, he added his own words, “and all your mind”.

The Bible is, as the Coronation service says, the greatest treasure this world affords. It bears faithful witness to God’s revelation of himself in Jesus. It contains all that we need for eternal salvation through Jesus. It gives us hope and comfort, but also correction and challenge. We read it in the community of faith gathered for the Eucharist. And we read it also in our private prayers and at moments of crisis and need. We read it because that is part of the way in which we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind. Because the Holy Spirit speaks through these human words it is a treasure that is inexhaustible, always unfolding new insights and guidance, both to us as individuals and in the life of the Church.

So, let us thank God for the Bible, and read it, and ask for God’s help as we continue on our lifelong exploration of his word. Let’s reflect again on the words of today’s collect:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word, we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon Trinity 18 2014

Isaiah 45:1-7

1 Thessalonians 1.1-10

Matthew 22:15-22

There’s a saying that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Meaning, that you can make an alliance with someone else who is opposed to the same person as you. This is not a very reliable saying, however, as it tends to perpetuate violence and spread it further. Though it does seem to be the last resort of western foreign policy these days.

There’s something of this going on in today’s Gospel reading. The Pharisees, we read, sent their disciples to Jesus, along with the Herodians. Now the Pharisees and Herodians were actually bitter enemies, but here they have teamed up together to unite against Jesus.

The Herodians were on the side of Rome. They supported the Herod family who ruled Jewish society as puppets of the Roman Empire. The Pharisees hated Rome and wanted to see their land freed from foreign occupation.

So they are opposed to each other on the very question they put to Jesus, about the tax paid to the Romans. This was a poll tax that had already provoked a rebellion that was then put down by the Roman Army. So it was dangerous territory to express an opinion on. The Herodians were in favour of the tax, the Pharisees opposed. But the two groups find a false unity by aligning themselves against Jesus. Why do they do this? It’s a very cunning trap. Both want to get rid of this troublesome prophet, both fear he will destabilise their own power base, and either one group or the other will have the evidence to do so, depending on how Jesus answers the question – so they will both benefit.

But Jesus’ answer, we are told, amazes them. “Give… to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Why is this amazing? What is Jesus teaching here?

Many people read this as meaning that we can have two loyalties, one to God in the area of religion and another to the “emperor” or the state in civic life. But that would not be amazing. That would just be playing it safe. It would also be running the risk of double-crossing one of our loyalties. Jesus himself has already made this clear, in Matthew chapter 6:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matt 6:24)

Likewise, you cannot serve God and the emperor. Jesus is not interested in playing it safe. To see why Jesus’ questioners are amazed at his answer we need to attend to what he does. He asks for a coin, and a description of what is on it. Like our own coins, Roman money bore the head of the emperor and an inscription in Latin. To devout Jews these coins were themselves scandalous. They bore the graven image of the emperor – forbidden by the second commandment. And the inscription was even worse. At the time of Jesus, the emperor was Tiberius, and around the image of his head were the words “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus”. The coin described the emperor as a god.

It is after pointing this out that Jesus says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ saying does not mean that we can have divided loyalties. It means: give the idolatrous money back to the idolatrous emperor where it belongs. And give to God what is God’s. And what is God’s? Everything. That is what we need to understand. There are not two spheres in which this belongs to God and that belongs to the emperor. To acknowledge God as creator, to reject idols, is to accept that everything is under God’s authority and we owe to him alone our uncompromising loyalty in the whole of life.

So Jesus turns the tables on his questioners by pointing out that their loyalty to Israel’s God is already compromised. The Herodians are really loyal to Rome, and the Pharisees are loyal to their own power and the religious establishment that maintains it.

So, far from being an endorsement of divided loyalties, this is a radical call to loyalty to God alone. Of course, there is a need for earthly authority. There is a need to ensure good order, justice and equity. In the days of Jesus that authority was vested in the emperor and in in our own time in a constitutional democratic state. But the Bible sees all authority as subject to God, serving God’s purposes.

This is why we read about Cyrus in the extract from Isaiah this morning. He was the King of Persia whose invasion of Babylon led to the return of the Jews from exile to their own land. Cyrus is seen as serving God’s purposes, being God’s instrument. Although he was a king and a great military campaigner, that does not matter to Isaiah. The only thing that matters is that Cyrus is serving God’s purposes. So if we have a loyalty to earthly authority, it can only be a relative loyalty, only insofar as that authority serves God.

That doesn’t mean it has to be a religious authority. Cyrus probably knew nothing of the God of the Jews. Christianity has got this wrong in the past, glorifying Christian kings like Henry VIII, or dictators like General Franco, as though their authority was supreme in their own sphere. Just because a state calls itself Christian does not mean that it is above criticism, or that it can claim the loyalty of Christians by right.

Today the boot is on the other foot. The new atheists want to banish faith from public life, and relegate it to a strictly private matter. But a faith practiced only in private is no faith at all. At best it is a hobby. Faith necessarily embraces the whole of life, for it is faith in God who created all things and who has authority in all things.

The privatisation of faith is but another route to giving Caesar – or his equivalent today – absolute authority to do what he pleases. This is idolatry, and idols are destructive and demand sacrifices. If we accept that the state has its own sphere in which it can demand our absolute loyalty, then what is to stop, for instance, euthanasia of the disabled, if that is what the state decides?

But our call is to be absolutely loyal only to God, and to earthly authority only insofar as it serves God’s good purposes for human flourishing. Earthly authority that does not serve God is idolatrous and destructive. We cannot serve two masters. This can be costly, as it was for Jesus, as it has been for martyrs down the ages. But that loyalty is to the God who alone raises the dead, and vindicates the victim; no idols can do this, and any loyalty to them is wasted.

Today Danita joins the people God has chosen and called out of darkness into his marvellous light. Today Danita is consecrated to God by her baptism, consecrated to undivided loyalty, to remain Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to the end of her life. With us, and all the baptised, she will walk the joyful path of discipleship, giving to God the things that are God’s: that is, everything, our whole heart and world and our life from beginning to end.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 17 2014

Isaiah 25:1-9

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

Tuesday will be an important day in the life of our parish, when the Archdeacon of Hampstead, Father Luke Miller, will come to us to conduct his visitation, something that happens once every three years in every parish. The Archdeacon is the senior church officer in this area, under the bishop, and the visitation is a legal check and inspection that enables him to ensure everything is as it should be, from where we keep the chalices to our health and safety policy.

This might seem like a boring bit of bureaucracy, but these practical things are essential to the day to day life of a parish. Among other things, Father Luke is going to ask us about our new mission action plan, which we launched in June, and what we are doing to implement the targets we’ve set ourselves as a parish.

The Bible also talks about visitations and mission action plans, but on a larger scale than a parish. God’s visitation of his people: the Old Testament prophets talk about times of visitation when God seemed to be testing and judging his people. And God’s mission action plan for Israel: the people called to be a light for the nations, so that all the peoples of the world might come to know the one true God. We heard part of that in the reading from Isaiah this morning. God is going to make a banquet for all peoples, he will swallow up death for ever and wipe away the tears from all faces. That’s good news for everyone, without exception. The wedding banquet is an image of the Kingdom of God, and everyone is invited.

One of the things Jesus is saying in his parable today is that God is visiting his people. His coming among them is a time of testing and judging. So, what have they done about their mission action plan? What had Israel done to make known God’s salvation to the nations?

And the answer was, quite a lot, at the time of Jesus. For centuries Jewish communities and synagogues had been spreading across the world, even as far as India and China, but mostly in the Mediterranean world. In the midst of the old religions of many gods and temples and sacrifices the synagogues made known the one God who is creator of all and offers salvation to all.

And many gentiles came to believe. Most were content to attend the synagogue, to listen to the scriptures, to try to act justly, and to pray to the God they had come to know in Judaism. Full conversion, which included circumcision and the dietary laws, was too difficult for most. These communities of gentile believers, attached to synagogues but not fully members, were known as “God fearers” or “devout persons”, and they are mentioned quite a lot in the New Testament.

These groups became the fertile seed ground for the gospel when it expanded beyond Judaism in the first century. The church of the Philippians, to whom Paul addressed his letter today, began with the conversion at Philippi of a devout gentile woman called Lydia, as related in the Acts of the Apostles.

But the Pharisees and Chief Priests in today’s gospel reading aren’t interested in this. The parable Jesus tells is getting at them, as ones who made light of God’s message and disregarded it. They don’t care that they are the custodians of the call from God to all the nations to enter his kingdom. They don’t want everyone and anyone coming in, they want to keep it pure and exclusive, their religion and their people on their terms.

Now it has to be said that not all Pharisees and priests were like this. In Matthew’s gospel they are used as a sort of dramatic caricature: they emphasise what Jesus is teaching by opposing him. Their interpretation of Judaism is narrow and exclusive; Jesus’ interpretation is the opposite.

Jesus teaches here that Israel’s mission action plan really means what it says: God is calling all people to enter his kingdom. Jew and Gentile, respectable and not so respectable, the poor, the marginalised, the excluded. Everyone is invited! But if you disregard the message and don’t want to sit down and feast with the sort of people God is inviting, you will be left outside – but by your own choice.

Now it has to be said that the behaviour of the king in this parable does seem very violent. He destroys the city of the people who refuse to come! Are we meant to understand that God is like this?

Well, this is a parable, and we can’t simply read it as an allegory. Parables are strange, they test and challenge our consciousness, our understanding. Parables read us; what we read into them tells us something about ourselves. What is easy to forget, but is certainly true, is that all earthly cities are destined to pass away. The only city that will endure for ever is the City of God, the gathering of all people into God’s kingdom of righteousness and peace.

And what of the man who doesn’t have a wedding robe, and gets thrown out. What does that mean? The custom at wedding banquets at the time of Jesus was for the host to provide wedding robes for those who didn’t have them. So if you are not wearing a wedding robe it’s because you have rejected the gift. Many have therefore interpreted the wedding robe as the grace of baptism, forgiveness and new birth in Christ, and that we should be careful not to lose that grace, which is God’s free gift to us.

But let’s remember where we are in the bigger story of Matthew’s gospel. We are in holy week, in Jerusalem. In a few days Jesus will be betrayed and arrested. He will be put on trial, and will be speechless, he will say nothing in answer to the accusations made against him. He will have no robe, because he will be stripped of his clothing. He will be bound hand and foot, and led out to the darkness outside the city gates. He will be taken to Golgotha, the place of execution, surely a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth”.

So when we look more closely, that person who gets thrown out of the banquet looks rather like Jesus. Now, we know the end of the story, that Jesus, after he was betrayed and killed, was raised from the dead. We know that it’s the resurrection that takes away the veil over all nations and opens the way for all people into the feast of God’s kingdom.

That rather suggests that the feast of God’s kingdom begins with the outcast, the voiceless, and the powerless, rather than excluding them. It is on the edges and margins of society that God is at work, because that is where God is at work in Jesus.

So the parable takes us on a journey into a deeper consciousness, a fuller vision of the truth. Yes, it is about the feast of God’s kingdom and the need to be reborn through the grace of God, because the kingdom is the new creation which we enter through Christ’s resurrection.

But it is also about discovering where God is at work, on the margins, on the outside, with the outcast and the victim. Because of that, we know that the feast of God’s kingdom is good news for us and for everyone. Especially for those who might least think that they belong. And we, the bearers of that message, have no right to shut anyone out.

Sermon at Parish Mass Harvest Thanksgiving 2014

Deuteronomy 28.1–14
2 Corinthians 9.6–15
Luke 12.16–30

Today we celebrate God’s goodness in creation, God’s abundant generosity. All the blessings of the good earth that are described in our reading from Deuteronomy this morning come to us from God, who is the creator of all. Existence itself is God’s gift, and all created things owe their being to God.

That includes us, as well as the crops and gifts of the earth. But human beings have a unique place in the material creation. Part of our nature, our created existence, is that we speak and think and reason. So human beings have a role, within, creation, of giving voice on behalf of the rest of creation. 

Everything that exists praises God, and gives worship, by the very fact of existing. To worship God is to give God his worth, that is what the word means. But human beings are called to offer rational worship. Worship with our minds and hearts, as well as with our existence. Worship in accordance with the Word of our existence, Jesus Christ through whom all things exist. And that is what we are doing today. 

But worship is not confined to church. St Paul says in Romans 12, “present your bodies [that is, your whole lives] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship”. And part of our worship is to recognise that creation is God’s gift and not our possession. Being the rational part of creation it is our duty to ensure that the earth is sustained for the future and that all people have what they need. This also is part of our worship. We worship by living in tune with creation.

But human sin impairs the role of humans as part of creation. We grasp creation as our own instead of receiving it as gift. The rich man in today’s gospel reading does this. He had abundant crops but he shouldn’t have had to ask “what should I do with them?”. He should have known that his abundance was given to him to supply someone else’s need. If he were living in tune with creation it would have been second nature to him to give away his surplus to those who didn’t have enough.

So human beings fail to fulfil our created calling. We fail to offer God rational worship in our lives. But, in our failure to live in accordance with creation, Jesus comes as our Saviour. He offers us the gift of new life and new creation, revealed in the resurrection. He brings us back to a right relationship with God in which we are once again in tune with creation.

Our attention to those in need is part of this. So today we are collecting food for the Muswell Hill soup kitchen and money for WaterAid.

And we do so as we gather for praise and worship. It is part of the same action. Our worship today is not something we decided to do ourselves. We are doing what Jesus told us to do, celebrating the Eucharist he gave to his Church. Do this, he said, in memory of me.

The only truly perfect worship ever offered to God is that offered by Jesus, the Son of God. As he is himself God he alone can give to God the infinite worship that is his due. As he is also human he offers that worship as our representative and head. That worship was expressed in his whole life, from his incarnation to his self-giving even to death on the cross. 

But that once for all offering has not gone away. Jesus’ worship of the Father, his self-giving even to death, is made present and effective for us in the Eucharist. “This is my body which is given for you.” In the Eucharist Jesus offers his own perfect worship to the Father, and through our participation in the Eucharist we share in that act of worship. 

Jesus’ perfect worship of the Father brings about the redemption of creation. In the sacraments our worship is joined with creation in the very things we use, filling and transforming them with the Spirit of God.

So we use water, the most basic and necessary element of our creation, for baptism. The outward sign, pouring of water, conveys the inward grace of spiritual cleansing and being joined with Christ in his death and resurrection. 

Bread and wine, food for our bodies, in the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ, truly present with us under these outward forms, offering his worship continually to the Father, feeding us spiritually with his risen life.

Olive oil, taken and blessed by the Church, becomes a sign of grace and a means of healing for those anointed in the name of Jesus.

As members of the Church we offer worship, in Christ, on behalf of the whole creation, restoring and healing what was lost, gathering all into the harvest of God’s kingdom.

Today we celebrate as Layla becomes a member of the Church through holy baptism. By this sacrament she will be raised up with Christ and consecrated as part of his holy people, his royal priesthood. Because she will be in Christ she will share with the whole Church the holy duty and joy of offering right worship to the true and living God. 

This is worship that we offer in tune with creation, not only in church but in our lives, in our care for the poor and needy, in our work for justice and equity in the world. Through the worship offered by Christ, which is the worship of his Church, the whole creation is being made new. To that worship, Layla, we welcome you today.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 14 2014

Jonah 3.10-4.11

Philippians 1.21-30

Matthew 20.1-16

Jesus today tells his disciples another parable. Parables are not straightforward stories. We can’t simply decode them into, say, a moral lesson. Jesus often spoke in parables, instead of directly saying what his point was, for a reason. Parables speak to us from a different perspective than the one we are used to. At first glance they look like the world we live in, but look again, and there is always something not quite how we know it. The perspective is different.

For instance, today’s story, where people do different amounts of work but are paid the same, is not the world we are used to. When we read parables it can seem as though we are looking at the world through a distorting mirror. The parable seems strange, but actually it is probing our consciousness. The parable is telling the truth; if it seems odd to us it’s because our perspective on the world is wrong.

How we read parables tells us about ourselves and the assumptions we bring to our reading. Parables read us as much as we read parables.

Many parables begin, like today’s, “the Kingdom of heaven is like this…” and then describe something happening, a story, something in process, not a still picture. The Kingdom is something happening, growing, moving on, so it is not something that we can pin down and say this is it, here, we’ve got it. And if the Kingdom is something happening then we need to take part in it to find out what it is.

Today’s parable is about generosity and envy. The labourers come with the world’s usual expectation of labour and reward. I do X, you therefore owe me Y. But the landowner instead subverts this. His economy is based only on his generosity, not on labour or reward. Not on labour, because he carries on hiring people he no longer needs, up to the eleventh hour. And not on reward because he rewards all equally.

This is new and strange. But his generosity is also a judgement on the labourers’ way of thinking. The order in which he pays them exposes their envy. Those who laboured longest are paid last, so they have seen that those who worked only one hour got the same as them, and this makes them envious.

Note that the action of the landowner is perceived completely differently by different groups of the labourers. The labourers of the eleventh hour presumably are happy with what they got, at any rate they go away content and not grumbling. The labourers of the first hour are envious and grumble. Although they have been rewarded as agreed, they are unhappy.

If the kingdom of heaven is like this then it means our attitude determines how we experience it. The kingdom offers a new way of being, based on generosity not debt. It is also, as we saw from last week’s parable, based on forgiveness not revenge. But to enter the kingdom we have to choose the new life it offers. If we stay in the old life of debt and revenge then the Kingdom will not be liberation for us but torment. In this week’s parable we see that it is not the landowner who makes the labourers unhappy. It is entirely their own attitude that does that to them. Their rejection of the landowner’s generosity makes them miserable.

How can the Kingdom offer this new life of generosity? Jesus tells us, the first will be last and the last first. In the parable this applies to the labourers. But Jesus himself is above all the “first” who became “last”, he is the only Son of God, the Lord of all, who entered this world, taking on our human nature and the form of a servant. In the end he was rejected, cast out of the city and killed. But in the resurrection he who was last became the first born from the dead, the first fruits of the new creation.

The resurrection is the Kingdom becoming real. The resurrection is God’s generosity without limit, flooding into the world, bringing to birth the new creation, restoring what was lost. The resurrection is God’s forgiveness without limit meeting humanity in the worst we can be and do. God’s economy, which knows nothing about debt and does not count cost, is revealed as the economy of the Kingdom, which we are called to enter.

This may have had a particular meaning for the community of Christians in which Matthew’s Gospel was written. This was a very Jewish Christian community, which is why Matthew’s Gospel emphasises the law and the prophets as pointing to Jesus. But this gospel would have been written at around the time that Gentile believers, non-Jews, were becoming Christians too.

The Jews for a thousand years or more had kept the covenant and the law, including the observance of circumcision and the laws about diet and ritual cleanliness, sometimes having to be faithful to these things in the face of persecution. So there may have been some resentment when Gentiles, who had done none of these things, were welcomed into the church too. So this teaching of Jesus, not to be envious because God is generous, would have been important for them to remember.

But this parable also has a meaning for us today, particularly at this time of political change. The Scottish referendum has opened many expectations about the future direction of politics in this country, with all the main parties already promising major changes.

Now we might think, that’s politics, what we do in church is about faith, and the two shouldn’t mix. But the Bible knows no such distinction. The gospel is addressed to the world, it is the summons to all to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And the Church is humanity beginning to live according to the Kingdom.

According to Jesus, the Church is the little bit of salt that will season the world, the little bit of yeast in the dough that leavens the whole loaf. The Church is meant to be a creative minority transforming society from within. God’s economy of the Kingdom should flow out into our political life, that is our life in the polis, the state and society we live in.

A distinctively Christian political life is not allied to any particular party. But it is a life which brings to the wider society the values of God’s Kingdom. So, beware, in the next few years, of the politics of envy and scapegoating, whether it be of benefits claimants or city bankers or of people in different regions. Many headlines and manifesto promises will subtly assume the old economy of envy and seek to co-opt us into it. We will be invited to think that “they” have got more than us, so we are entitled to some of what “they” have got.

When that is the agenda that is presented to us, we need to remember that God’s Kingdom has different values. Just and equitable distribution of resources needs to be rooted in generosity, not in envy. And generosity is not private; it is a way of living for others, so it is intrinsically social. We the church must model what we want to see in the world.

So be on your guard for, as St Peter tells us, your adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Be alert for the politics of envy and scapegoating. Live the politics of generosity and inclusion. This will be a struggle, for it is spiritual warfare. The Kingdom is happening, and our choice for the Kingdom is not a one-off decision in the past but an attitude of life that we commit ourselves to afresh every day. It is from living that commitment that we will play our part in bringing the world into God’s Kingdom.