There is nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered

Sermon at Parish Mass, Trinity 2 2020

Planned monument to enslaved people in London. Not yet built. Source: bbc.co.uk

Jeremiah 20.7-13                    

Romans 6.1b-11                     

Matthew 10.24-39

About thirty years ago, I used to attend a church in the City of London, a church well known for its commitment to inclusion and social justice. In the baptistery, prominently looking at you as you went in, there was a bust of a local dignitary and philanthropist called Sir John Cass, who died in 1718, and with his wealth founded a school and a charitable foundation which are still going. I must have walked past that bust very many times without giving it a second thought.

On Thursday last week, the bust was removed from the church, after an emergency meeting of the PCC and a very rapidly granted Faculty from the Chancellor of the Diocese. Sir John Cass had made his fortune by trading in enslaved people. The sudden focus on public memorials has put figures like John Cass in the spotlight, and aspects of our history are being revealed that are deeply painful to acknowledge.

Jesus says in today’s gospel reading, “nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known”. But he warns that this uncovering will lead to conflict. Truth telling is not popular, the powers that be very often don’t want the truth told.

The issues around statues and public monuments are complicated of course. Everyone has done good and evil in their lives. But if a monument in a public space is effectively concealing the truth about exploitation and oppression, then the demand that the truth be told still needs to be addressed, somehow. Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered.

The truth must be told. But that will not always be popular. It will lead to opposition, as Jesus clearly warns. In only a minor example, the church in London that removed the bust last week has been subjected to a storm of abuse on Twitter.

There is nothing new in this.  Jeremiah laments in the first reading today, complaining that God has overpowered him, and made him tell the truth that no-one wants to hear. Violence and destruction are at hand for the wayward people of Jerusalem, but they don’t want to see it or hear about it. If only they would repent and mend their ways. God wants to save them, but they won’t listen.

And in the Gospels, Jesus, the prophet who is the Truth in person, meets opposition. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Not a literal sword, of course. Later in the Gospels Jesus rebukes Peter when he tries to use an actual sword. In Luke’s version of this same passage Jesus says instead “I have not come to bring peace, but division”, which helps us understand the meaning as we read it in Matthew. A sword is a thing that divides, a symbol of division.

The mechanisms of oppression in the world tend to work in secret. There are the secret police of authoritarian states, and plans for persecution hatched behind closed doors. But there are also the secret mechanisms in our own hearts by which we collude with oppression, and don’t even know we’re doing it.

Do we see the victims of oppression? Do we see what we are doing, and our own need to change? The call to repent, to change, is the beginning of the gospel. To examine the depths of our hearts in the light of God’s searching but kindly Spirit, to uncover our own sin in order that we can know the deeper truth that we are loved. If we read the scriptures only as addressed to other people and their need to repent, then we are missing step one: what is this saying to me?

Jesus, the Truth in person, has come into a world of falsehood and oppression. His truth exposes what the world is, uncovers its division and violence, all the ways in which its security is maintained, precariously, not with peace but with a sword. His truth calls the world to repentance. His truth calls us to repentance.

And Jesus forms around him a community whose task is to tell the truth. First of all, the truth that involves searching our hearts, confessing our sins, and following the path of repentance. But then, also, because we have learned to tell the truth about ourselves, we are called also to tell the truth about injustice and oppression. In spite of the risks and the opposition. And Jesus promises his community of truth-tellers that we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.

The Church fails in this, often. Most recently we may think of the ways in which many senior figures in the Church ignored or covered up allegations of sexual abuse by clergy. And the current debate about statues reminds us of the past collusion of many prominent church figures in the slave trade. In Germany in the 1930s many Christians seemed to sleep-walk into the rise of Nazism, not noticing or wanting to notice what was going on.

Many, but not all. In every generation the Spirit of Jesus in his Church raises up some who are valiant for truth, who speak out prophetically in spite of what it might cost, for it might indeed, as Jesus says, cost them their lives.

The first stage in following Jesus in the path of truth, is to examine ourselves, to let ourselves be examined and judged by the Spirit speaking through the scriptures. We can’t just look back and say, well, they got it wrong in the past, but we are better than that.

We might ask, how will we our generation be judged, in a century or two? Whose statues will be taken down in years to come? Yesterday the Pope added a new invocation to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, “Comfort of Migrants, pray for us.” A fitting title for Mary, who with Joseph carried her Son into Egypt, a refugee from Herod’s murderous rage. But are we, is our nation, a comfort of migrants?

Again, are we listening to those prophetic voices who warn us about the consequences of climate change, and the abuse of the environment? Or about the relentless rise of inequality and exclusion? Those voices that lament, “all is not well with you”, the voices like Jeremiah that society does not want to hear.

But the Gospel is good news, and the good news is that truth-telling is the beginning of repentance. And repentance is the only sure beginning of true and lasting peace, for building that justice in which all may live. The voice of truth calls us to repent, but also says to us, “Do not be afraid… What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops”.