What I want to use the sermon for this morning is to think about Laurence’s attitude to the poor, and what we might learn from his attitude in our own situation.
The story of Laurence is well known here at Christ Church. In the third century in Rome, before the conversion of the Empire, Laurence was appointed chief among the seven deacons in the Roman church. In that capacity, he looked after the assets of the church, and oversaw the distribution of alms to the poor. In 258, the Emperor Valerian attempted to wipe out the church altogether, by decreeing the summary execution of all bishops, priests and deacons. (Apparently the persecution eight years earlier under the Emperor Decius, which produced hundreds of martyrs and then controversy about how Christians should deal with repentant apostates, had not been successful enough.) Before Laurence was executed, the prefect of Rome ordered him to assemble the riches of the church, for confiscation by the Empire. Laurence negotiated to be given three days to do this, and in that time managed to distribute much of the church’s wealth to the poor. [Apart from anything else, the story is told that he passed the holy chalice of the Last Supper to Proselius, a Christian soldier, for protection, with the instruction to take it to Spain, and there it remains in the Cathedral of the Assumption of our Lady in Valencia, a simple polished agate cup, adorned much later, in medieval times, with gold and pearls. We are perhaps inclined to be sceptical about such claims, but who knows! - maybe our scepticism is unnecessarily developed. ] On the third day, when the prefect asked Laurence where the treasures were which he had promised, he pointed to the poor, the blind, the sick and the
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suffering, saying: “These are the treasures of the Church.” His cheekiness earned him a torturous death by burning on a gridiron, rather than the more rapid beheading that his bishop had been given.
We applaud Laurence’s courage and wit in responding to persecution and the prefect in this way, but his identification of the poor and suffering as the church’s treasure is worthy of further thought. Why does Laurence say that the poor are the church’s treasure? He could have said something like we should care for the poor, or being poor doesn’t make someone less worthy, or even Make Poverty History. All those things are true and valuable, and in a way, Laurence embodies them by contriving to distribute the material wealth of the church to the poor in the three days before his death. He could also just have said something more inclusive, like these people here are the church’s treasure. Even that would have been quite subversive, overturning the paradigm that the Roman prefect was operating under, that wealth is all about property and objects. Laurence affirms that it is people who are the real resources of the church. And such a truth is obvious in a place like this church, where although there is much that is beautiful, and valuable, it is clearly the commitment of a cast of thousands that enables what happens here to happen. But Laurence doesn’t merely say ‘the church’s treasure is people’, it is the poor. Why??? What is it about the poor that we can value.
How awkward it is talking about the poor and the suffering as a ‘category’, rather than as a set of individual stories, each of which we would benefit from hearing. Obviously no generalization is adequate. Nonetheless, can we imagine what
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Laurence had in mind? We might consider three aspects of the treasureness of the poor and suffering: first, the shape of the kingdom of God – that is, that God’s way of ruling so often reverses the status quo; second, coming from Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, the face of the poor in Jesus; third, the reminder that the present is not all there is, rather we are on a ship voyaging into the future. (Shape, sheep and ship – something of a stretch, but I’m trying to provide some memory hooks!).
The poor and suffering being treasures of the church belongs so much, to the way that the rule of God turns things upside down. We don’t typically see the poor as treasures. But Jesus constantly challenges the thinking of his disciples with words about the shape of God’s rule. The last shall be first, and the first last. He has filled the hungry with good things but the rich he has sent empty away. And as we heard in the gospel reading, apparent death is the necessary ingredient for new life. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it does not bear fruit.” “Those who love their life will lose it, but those who lose it for the sake of Christ will find it.” Here is the paradox of life God’s way: that when we hold on to something of our own, afraid that if we loosen our grip we will lose it, we might as well be holding on to water. But if we let go of what we cannot bear to lose, we discover that we are retaining something that is perhaps a bit different from what we thought we had, but something that is of eternal value. Hear the gospel word again: those who love their life will lose it, but those who lose it for the sake of Christ will find it.” It is why Paul’s metaphor of sowing is apt, as we heard from 2 Corinthians 9. If the farmer were to hold on to most of his seed, and perhaps only sow sparingly, with a small portion of it, there would
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be guaranteed flour and therefore bread, for a while. But in the end it would be used up. On the other hand, by taking the risk and sowing the seed abundantly, by ‘letting go’ rather than holding on, an abundant harvest is enabled.
The poor can be great models of what lies at the very heart of the Christian life because (if I may resort to rhetoric rather than being accurate in reality), they are not held down by the weight of hanging on to things, they are demonstrating that as we let go, we enable ourselves to experience what only God can provide.
In this way, the poor act out the process of salvation – that actually it is only by letting go that we can receive, only by being empty handed can we grasp grace. One of the lovely things about the way the sacrament is practised here at CCSL, which has now become so unusual in many of the neighbouring churches, is that the Eucharistic bread is given into our empty hands, rather than us reaching out and taking it.
So the poor may be treasures because they show the shape of God’s rule.
A second reason for seeing the poor as the church’s treasures comes from the way Jesus identifies with them in his parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. St Ambrose of Milan, in the century after Laurence, made the link between Laurence’s practice and this parable. The sheep are those who minister to Jesus, the goats are those who fail to. What Jesus says is that you feed him when you feed his little brothers and sisters who are hungry, you clothe him when you clothe the least of his family who are naked, you visit him when you
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visit his brothers and sisters who are sick or in prison. The poor and suffering are treasures because, in that sense, Jesus identifies with them; they embody Jesus. The most famous exponent of this practice in our times was Mother Teresa – who made a habit of seeing Christ in the face of every poor person she came across. The Anglican Bishop of Zanzibar early in the 20th century made the same point when he said at the Ango-catholic Congress in London in 1923: “If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out in the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you did not pity Jesus in the slum.” The poor are the church’s treasure to those who are the sheep at Jesus’ right hand.
A third reason that the poor are the church’s treasures is that they remind us that the world is not as it should be – there is a remaking yet to happen. We are on a ship voyaging into the future. When Jesus says ‘the poor you will always have with you’, he is talking about the present age. But when God’s rule comes in all its fullness, poverty will be history; the OT picture of everyone sitting under their own vine and figtree will be cashed out; the injustice that is such a major factor in causing the world’s poverty will be dealt with. My wife and I happen to be staying at Watsons Bay on this visit to Sydney, and there seems to be little difference between it and Paradise. More than ever in circumstances like that, we need a reality check on how the world is. The poor are a living reminder – and we should treasure it - that we live in a messed up world that is waiting for its
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final rescuer – we would only have to live in Watsons Bay permanently to know that there is mess there too!, and part of our task as God’s people is to point forward to that world, to illustrate it and enact it. Part of that illustrating is showing what the rule of God looks like, in breaking down distinctions between people on the basis of their socio-economic status. I think of how CCSL did that some years ago when a poor man called John Vears often used to hang around – as he did at the cathedral, and St Barnabas Broadway and perhaps elsewhere. With all the difficulties of caring for somebody like that, there is the blessing of knowing that it is pointing to the future full reign of God. What a good name for an Anglican charity organization ‘the Brotherhood of St Laurence’ is.
Is it easy to regard the poor as treasures? Of course not! It is much easier to regard them either as a nuisance or, worse still, as a project. For us, I think it takes discipline, and often enough, imagination. Was it any easier in Laurence’s time? Who knows? But whether it was or not, the opportunity we have is to sculpt our thinking to follow Laurence’s example and try on his perspective.
When I talk about ‘the poor’ it’s such a sweeping statement that it might almost become meaningless. Can we be more specific in our current world. If we were Laurence, whom might we assemble as the church’s treasures?
Perhaps I could suggest two particular groups for your consideration, alongside the more obvious examples that are more familiar when you hang around Railway Square.
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1) Indigenous people in the remote parts of Australia, and particularly in the Northern Territory. The Northern Territory intervention of 2007 was only the latest in a series of social experiments designed to change the lives of these people. Culturally and linguistically, they are vastly different from mainstream Australia, and so they are marginalized. They are poor in many ways – monetarily, in health, in education, in employment, in incarceration; and that poverty has impact on the church, in many more ways than just economically. You might pray that non-Aboriginal Anglicans in the NT will keep seeing these people as the church’s treasures. I will be saying a little more about one of the projects we have going in the Territory that I hope will demonstrate how treasured these people should be. 2) Asylum seekers. One thing in common between Darwin and Sydney is that both places have detention centres for asylum seekers. In Darwin, Annette and I have been finding out more about what daily life is like for these people; and as you will know from recent media reports it is not happy. If we see people like this as treasures, that must surely shape our prayers and responses.
Laurence followed the example of his Lord and Master in being a seed that falls into the ground and dies. That seed bears fruit as we learn from what Laurence said as he identified the poor and outcast as the church’s treasures. What would it look like for us to sow abundantly with regard to these treasures – to invest in them, to hope for, and expect, an abundant harvest among us through them, as much as among them through us?
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