Sermon: Evensong - 30 March 2014

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Date:

Sunday 30th March 2014

Service:

Evensong

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Download Recording (MP3, 13.2M)

If I were to say the word, ‘segment’ you might think of an orange or a grapefruit. Well, segments are no longer just about oranges or grapefruits. Segmentation is the latest thing in political research. It combines psychological and sociological insights to help political parties gauge what policies could be tailor-made to certain groups. If you can identify the biggest segments, and make your policies the sort of thing those sorts of people like, then your path to power may be smoother.

Segmentation, then, is the identification and exploitation of the diversity of human society. It identifies the despairing and optimistic, the cosmopolitan and nostalgic, the anxious and the calm. As a political tool we need to be cautious about it: it is one thing to acknowledge and celebrate diversity and difference, and quite another to exploit it. Fragmenting societies is a neat way for the powerful to exert control over them. Play one off against another. Colonialists and empire builders were never above a bit of divide and rule.

‘Segmentation’ and its cousin ‘diversity’ become loaded words. Indeed the word diversity makes those categorised as the ‘comfortable nostalgic’ feel nervous and the ‘cosmopolitan critics’ feel the country is going in the right direction.

I serve on the University of Surrey Equality and Diversity Committee. It has good people working to good ends. That end is the dignity and well-being of the whole University community where no one is adversely affected by the characteristics most integral to them: race; gender; faith; sexuality and disability. The danger though with Equality & Diversity legislation is that segmentation happens: the ‘protected characteristics’, which are defined by law, are then are set up as competing against each other. So, for example, the protected characteristic of ‘religious or non-religious belief’ is set up against that of ‘Lesbian, Gay, Transgender’, or the desire to advance women in employment can be portrayed as being at the cost of Black and Minority Ethnic communities.

So how do segmentation and a secular vision of diversity sit alongside where we find ourselves generally as Christians in society today and, in particular, read along with our texts tonight? What is the vision that the Gospel of Jesus Christ offers as a gift to human society?

It is the vision of the Kingdom of God. A vision of a healed, renewed and restored creation, unsegmented, where the lion and the lamb lie down together, the child plays by the hole of the asp (Isaiah 11.6, 7). It is heralded and tentatively pioneered by the Church in which there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’. It is a vision of the time when Christ will be ‘all in all’ (Colossians 3.11).

I relate this not to say that the Church has got it all right. Far from it. But that segmentation tends to distinguish and then alienate or demonise. The experience of Jewish people in Europe for centuries culminating in the Holocaust illustrates the worst excess of that. A Church focused on the Kingdom rather than becoming another segment of society may have been more prophetic and courageous in naming anti-Semitism for what it was, the hatred brought about by radical segmentation.

So a segmented and segmenting Church is not a faithful witness to the Kingdom. Competing groups and labels betray God’s mission through the Church. The neo-Puritan does not wear a black outfit and a funny buckle in a ludicrous hat. Today’s Puritans are those who see the Church as being made in their image and likeness. The Puritan Church could be evangelical, Anglo-Catholic or liberal in tone, stripping out those who don’t fit. It would be a Church in which relationships are only formed amongst people who look the same, or think the same, read the same newspapers and are always destined to agree.  

With a heavy heart the prophet Micah saw a segmented society:

they all lie in wait for blood, and they hunt each other with nets. Their hands are skilled to do evil; the official and the judge ask for a bribe, and the powerful dictate what they desire, thus they pervert justice. Micah 7.2b, 3.

And he goes on to describe a segmented and fragmenting society where friendships and relationships are not simply not sustained but are hostile,

For the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; your enemies are members of your own household. Micah 7.6.

That is an uneasy passage to hear at any time, not least on Mothering Sunday, as Micah holds up a mirror to his society. Micah in turn holds a mirror up to a segmented church, a church that fails to hold together in relationship those of different perspectives and lives.

Our second reading from the letter of James also recognises the danger of the segmentation of rich and poor, the one exploiting the other and expecting deference to be shown even in church. And in a beautiful passage he describes the restoration of the person in terms of the Church coming together to pray, anointing by oil and the Spirit the broken and dis-eased person. James envisions a Church where relationships are possible and honest amongst people of different shapes, sizes and backgrounds. That is the Kingdom breaking through.

Micah’s lament was that he had become like one who finds no cluster of fruit to eat and no first-fig for which he hungers (Micah 7.1). Micah and James tell us that a segmented society or Church is not fruitful.

So what might a fruitful, unsegmented Church have to give the world? She will give a constant vision of the Kingdom which we pray will come ‘on earth as in heaven’. She will be a fruitful Church: a Church like that will value the gifts and dignity of each person who makes up the Body of Christ; she will be a Church celebrating God’s Kingdom breaking through in justice, mercy and compassion; she will be a Church that doesn’t seek a false purity but will be in Archbishop Justin’s word, untidy; she will be Church that bears rich fruit, finding her unity in gazing upon the face of Jesus Christ; she will be a Church where we, and Christians who don’t look or act or sound like us, stand patiently together at the foot of the cross and by an empty tomb ‘speaking the truth in love’; she will be a Church that reveals the Kingdom: fruitful, attractive and a blessing to society and the world.

‘Your kingdom come!’