This week's sermon

There is a great deal of discussion at present about homelessness and begging. That is partly due to the large number of refugees – or asylum seekers, or economic migrants, or whatever you care to call them (I would suggest “people”) who have come to the UK believing it to be a “soft touch” - is the UK a soft touch? I would love to think so – and find themselves at best in government hostels waiting for their application to be processed and at worst on the streets, begging. It is also partly due to nerves about the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. A certain amount of controversy has arisen, as, to my surprise, many are claiming that people choose to be homeless and live on the streets and do very well out of those who give sleeping bags, soup and money. It is true that some do choose to live rough, though few of those are of sufficiently sound mind to be said to “choose” anything (I do know that a few are, but very few, and I suspect they are easily recognisable. I am clear in my own mind that they should be allowed, and been helped, to live in the manner they have chosen) but most of those on the streets, or in car-parks, or under the hedgerows, have come there by a route not of their own choosing. Some have become homeless at the end of a relationship; some young people have been forced to leave home; some have been thrown out of a shared home or rented accommodation due to injustice or lack of funds; some have found themselves destitute through a habit of substance abuse which they never expected to bring them to that point. It can, in one way or another, happen to anyone. On two occasions in my life I would have been homeless had it not been for generous friends.

We have heard the opinions and feelings of many about beggars and the homeless and they vary from the unreservedly supportive to the unreservedly damning. Sometimes the statements of the latter group are prefaced by “As a Christian” (always a danger-sign). Well, I’m a Christian too; a bad one undoubtedly, but if I do not always live according to the Gospel I do know what it says, and I am afraid this is one of the points on which Jesus was unequivocal and very, very clear; following in that the teaching of the Law and Prophets sent by Himself in the Old Dispensation. There is nothing about the deserving or undeserving poor in the Gospels, or, so far as I remember, in any of the Bible. There is of course the delightful portrait of the sluggard, nut nothing is said about the way in which he is to be treated. As to the New Testament, Dives the Rich Man may have been a bad lot and Lazarus a saintly man; but equally Dives may have been a merry old soul with one fatal flaw, and Lazarus his ex-employee who had been justly given the sack for being a lazy and impertinent so-and-so. Being a lazy and impertinent so-and-so may disqualify you for employment with Dives (or anyone else) but it does not disqualify you for being taken up into the bosom of Abraham or for being a sacrament of Christ (“whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me”) and thereby a sacrament of the One who sent him.

The point is quite simply that Lazarus was poor. Not deserving, just poor. That alone gave him a title to be helped. The point is that Lazarus was Dives’ brother, just as surely as those five brothers by blood whom Dives desired so ardently to save. In the Old Dispensation, while God was slowly and painstakingly educating humankind, he began with a single compact group, as easier to teach uniformly than a large unwieldy world. One’s brother, therefore, for the time being, was just any member of the Children of Israel. But now, since the world has shrunk to a sizable village that no longer applies. The word “globalisation” is much bandied about and people do not even seem entirely sure what it means. I will tell you what globalisation means, and it does not belong to the twenty-first century specifically but to the first; the world became a global village on the day that Our Lord Jesus Christ died for all and destroyed the walls of separation. From that moment every person on earth becomes the brother of every other person on earth. Not just neighbours, but brothers. I do not mean merely by blood or by common fatherhood; that was always tre, since we are all children of God and of Adam. I mean a brother with a special title to my care, to whom I owe in strict justice the treatment I owe to the members of my family. And again whatever one does to the least of these, one does it to God. The first commandment is to love God with all your heart, with all your strength and with all your mind; if the second commandment is “like it” that is because it is the same commandment. To love God is impossible if you do not love your neighbour; or, better, the fact that you do not love your neighbour makes it clear that you do not love God. Jesus presented as evidence for the restored relationship of love between the "woman who was a sinner" and God the fact that she was performing a service of love for him as a man.

Search the scriptures, and you will not find any support of any but the most radically generous treatment of these people, deserving or not. If a person is in need, you help them; you lend, if there is any likelihood of the loan being repaid and if the person wants to repay it – and most people do. There’s not much point in taking a pledge, since it must be returned if they have need of it, whether the loan has been repaid or not. If there is no likelihood of repayment, then you must give: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the homeless – yes, even into your own house. I am afraid that if you give money to a beggar, it is his affair what he does with it; by giving you have fulfilled the unambiguous command of God. You may, of course, choose to buy the person something instead; that’s up to you. But you are, in any case, not to look for gratitude. You are serving God, not man; and what you are giving is far less than what you owe.

Does that mean that we must always give, even to the limit of what we possess, that we must never enquire into the character of the beggar, never note that the baby in the gipsy’s arms bears a singular resemblance to the baby in the previous gipsy’s arms? I am afraid it does. God does not deal in what ifs; God is not Gordon Brown: human prudence does not figure in his list of virtues.

I am aware of the dangers of the cry “Back to the Gospel!”. But I do think it is occasionally worth flicking through its pages to see what Jesus really said, and rearranging our lives and our priorities accordingly, even if it means flying in the face of tradition. Today I have focussed on one question whose Gospel answer is uncomfortably, and maybe surprisingly, clear and uncompromising, but there are many others. For example there is not a shadow of support for the doctrine of a just war; there is nowhere a recommendation to live and ascetic life. But there is insistence on unconditional charity; the necessity of prayer; the importance of right belief as well as of right action; the necessity of baptism and of the eucharist. The list could go on, but the list that strikes me of what is, and what is not, in the Gospel will not be the list that strikes you or the list that will be most profitable to you. As we move slowly towards the beginning of a new Church year, the exercise of making one’s own list might be a good foundation for some New Year resolutions which might bring our lives more into conformity with the Gospel. As Kierkegaard said, you won’t understand it all – and you won’t even notice it all. But you will have plenty to do – for the rest of your life – in your attempt to fulfil those things in which you can hear God clearly saying to you as an individual: “Go, and do thou likewise”.