Tag: Pope Francis

Are the rich fit for the kingdom of God? Here’s the test.

David HerbertLeave a comment

A sermon for September 28th 2025 – the 15th Sunday after Trinity (Proper 21C)

All three readings, (Amos 6:1a, 4-7, 1 Timothy 6:6-19, Luke 16: 19-end) address the issue of wealth. (There is far more in the Bible about wealth and riches than about sexual morality, though that is hard to believe when we listen to the politics of the church).

Amos condemns those who are at ease in Zion, those who feel secure in Samaria – the notables of the first nations.
He condemns those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, who drink wine from bowls and massage themselves with the finest oils, but who don’t give a fig about those whose lives are ruined.
For Amos, they will be the first to be exiled.
The revelry of the loungers shall pass away – and we will be all the better for that.
Now, there’s a phrase to conjure with. “They shall pass away” –
dead, no more, nada – thank God –
and those who are the victims of their indifference will breathe a sigh of relief.
What use are the loungers to the world?

The kingdom of God does not belong to the comfortable and secure,
but to the last, the least, and the lost.

Then Paul, in his letter to Timothy talks about the great gain in godliness combined with contentment.
He doesn’t condemn people for having things but warns against wanting more and more.
True wealth is “godliness with contentment”.
That’s the way to be happy.
Paul warns Timothy about the dangers of desire.
“Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”
The danger of desire is that it makes us restless, blind to our neighbour, and forgetful of God. When we chase being first we often step over those who are last.
When we crave more, we forget those with less.
When we seek security in wealth, we leave others lost.

Paul warns that desire blinds us to our neighbour.
And Jesus shows us the tragic result – a rich man so blinded by wealth that he couldn’t see Lazarus at his own gate.

Isn’t it interesting that nobody knows the name of the rich man?
But we all know Lazarus.
The rich man has been forgotten.
That phrase again – he is passed away. He is no more. He is dead.
He is in torment for the torment that Lazarus went through at the rich man’s gate.
He was covered with sores,
and was so hungry he’d have gladly eat the crumbs from the floor of the rich man’s table.
See how the dogs came and licked his sores.
The compassion of the dogs is such a contrast to the indifference of the rich man.

The rich man was at his gate, on his doorstep.
Compassion was surely in his reach.
But he’d made wealth his wall,
and when death came, that wall turned into an unbridgeable chasm.
He passed away into torment, dead to the kingdom of God.
Whereas Lazarus is carried by all the angels to be with Abraham – carried as one of the people of God.
“The loungers shall pass away” says Amos.
And in this parable, the rich man – nameless, forgotten – has passed away.
Dead to God’s kingdom, dead to compassion, dead to life.

We are a rich nation.
And yet, how often we choose not to see the plight of the poor.
The men, women and children arriving in small boats —
are they not Lazarus at our gate?
They lie at the threshold of our common life, in need of compassion.

And here’s the Gospel twist:
Lazarus means “helped by God.”
God helps the poor, the overlooked, the forgotten.
They are not abandoned.
And in God’s strange mercy, they are also sent to help us.
Lazarus is not just a man to be pitied — he is a gods­end.

How the rich man needed Lazarus.
At the end of the parable, he begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his brothers.
But Abraham replies:
They already have Moses and the prophets — they should listen to them.
He could also have said:
They already had Lazarus — lying at their gate.
That was their opportunity. How many more chances do they need?

Lazarus is the examiner of compassion,
who stands at the door and knocks to see if any love of God lives in this household.
This is where the kingdom of God begins: in the last, the least and the lost whom God helps.

The rich man failed the test.
He failed the test to help the ones God helps.
He was like those condemned by Amos – a reveller, a lounger,
and he becomes one of the first in the gospel to go into exile, into torment, into unending death.

Can a rich man ever enter the kingdom of God?
Yes, but only if they help the ones God helps.

The tragedy for the rich man was that he never recognised Lazarus as the gift God had sent him. Wealth had become his wall against him.
When death came, that wall turned into an unbridgeable chasm.
The rich man passed away nameless, forgotten, as Amos warned.
“The revelry of the loungers shall pass away.”

But Lazarus —
helped by God, sent by God —
was lifted up and carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham.

Pope Francis reminded us that the poor are our evangelisers.
They proclaim the gospel to us.
They show us the face of Christ.
They test our compassion
and teach us where the kingdom of God begins (and where it ends).

So the question is this:
will we see these godsends at our gate,
within our reach, and open the bridge of compassion?
Or, will we, like the rich man, turn away and pass away?

Love comes home – picking up Lydia’s purple thread

David HerbertLeave a comment

A reflection for the 6th Sunday of Easter based on the readings for the day, Acts 16:9-15 and John 14:23-29.

I love preaching that brings Scripture to life—and that brings Scripture back to life, and I hope you do too. I say this every time as a reminder that when we open scripture together we are bringing it back to life. What matters today is that love comes home. In both our readings today, love comes home.

Hear the promise in John 14:23-29 as Jesus promises that both the Father and himself as Son will make their home with anyone who loves Jesus and obeys his teaching. Love comes home and makes a resurrection appearance.

In our reading from Acts (16:9-15) we begin to understand from Lydia how the Spirit of God opens our hearts for us to open our homes. Our heart is our home, our hearth is our home.

Paul and Silas met Lydia at Philippi. When he set out Paul was expecting to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he meets a bunch of women.

Philippi was a Roman colony. She wasn’t from Philippi but was from a city called Thyatira. She wasn’t at home in Philippi. Her name emphasizes that. Lydia wouldn’t have been her real name. She was called Lydia because that’s where she was from, where her home far from Philippi was. She was from Thyatira which is in the Turkish province of Lydia. Hence Lydia.

Perhaps Lydia was on a business trip. She was a dealer in purple cloth. Purple cloth would have been in demand in a Roman city.

It was Cleopatra that made purple popular. Julius Caesar travelled to Egypt in 48BC and met Cleopatra. He saw how she loved purple, and embraced it himself, decreeing that only Caesars could wear togas dyed completely purple. It became the colour of imperial power for both the Roman and Byzantine empires. (I got that from the Jamaica Observer – something I’ve never referenced before!) So we begin to build a picture of Lydia as a successful businesswoman who would probably have been dealing with the court representatives of Caesar’s empire. Purple was reserved for royalty, priests and nobles. These are the people Lydia would have been dealing with.

Paul and his group met Lydia at a place of prayer by the river. The storyteller tells us it was outside the city gate. These are details to underline the fact that none of these people, Paul, Silas, Lydia (and perhaps her household), none of them were at home. This is wild praying. They were all travellers.

We don’t know whether Lydia was a Jew or a Gentile. And we don’t know whether that place by the river was a recognised place of prayer, or whether it became a place of prayer because people prayed there. What we do know is that Lydia puts herself in the place of listening Israel as she listened to Paul. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptised, she invited Paul and Silas to her home. She persuaded them to come and stay at her house. She was insistently hospitable. But she doesn’t just host the missionaries, she hosts the mission of God by taking love home.

When love comes home she turns our homes inside out. Lydia is a powerful woman, a successful woman. Instead of building her business empire she puts everything at the disposal of God’s mission for the sake of the world.

The Light of the World by Holman Hunt

Holman Hunt paints the picture for us of love coming home, making a resurrection appearance.
It’s Jesus standing at the door and knocking (cf Revelation 3:20).
It is said that one of the reasons the Conclave elected Francis Pope in 2013 was because of a reflection on that passage when he suggested that when Jesus stands at the door and knocks, he’s not only wanting to come in and join us, he’s wanting us to come out to join him.
He calls us out of our comfort zones to embrace the “peripheries” of society in the world he is already loving and calling home.
When love comes home, she casts out fear, knocks down walls and rearranges the furniture of our minds.
Love turns our home inside out.

Holman Hunt’s image fits Lydia’s story perfectly. Her heart opens, and her home follows suit.

Scripture doesn’t usually give us the details of the jobs women did, but we’re told that Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth, the colour of empire, power and status.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed but purple is the Church of England has adopted.
The signage and letterheads are all purple. The shirts our bishops wear are purple.
What does it mean when the church wears purple?
Are we signalling prestige? Or is it Lydia we recall?

Our new Pope, Leo XIV seems to suggest that the church should be more like a home than a palace.
Addressing those who no longer believe, no longer hope and no longer pray, and including those who are fed up with scandals, with misused power, with the silence of a Church that seems more like a palace than a home, he committed the church to being a home for the homeless where the weary find rest and refreshment.

He said that God doesn’t need soldiers. He needs brothers and sisters. We all know that it’s brothers and sisters that make a home.

Following that purple thread, are we then, when we wear purple, reminding ourselves that our calling, like Lydia’s, is to put everything – status, power, influence -at the service of love, to make love feel at home in our world? Purple was the colour Lydia laid down on the table of hospitality to welcome  love home. She dealt in purple and traded it for the gospel.

In a recent speech on immigration Sir Keir Starmer suggested that we are “becoming a nation of strangers”. He’s got himself into a lot of trouble. But what if there is a grain of truth in what he says? It doesn’t mean we should pull up the drawbridge and tighten our controls. Our scriptures tell us that love will come home to those who love Jesus and love often comes in the form of a stranger. Paul thought he was going to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he met someone stranger, Lydia, a dealer in purple, a worshipper, a listener. She opened her home to him and love came home to her.

Love comes home, and when it does, it never leaves things as they are but turns us inside out. It opens hearts, it opens homes, it opens the Church. It rearranges our priorities, flips our ideas of power and calls us to join Jesus outside the gate – by the river, in the wild places, wherever people are listening.

Coin sides and the shape of peacemaking processes

David Herbert1 Comment

How many sides has a coin? When we toss a coin we call “heads” or “tails” because we assume that a coin just has the two sides. On the toss of a coin we are divided into winners and losers. The winners are able to claim that they won fairly (even though only by chance) and the losers have to suck it up. There are two sides now and both know whether they are on the side with greater chance or lesser chance. The losers’ last chance is to overturn privilege – and the odds are always stacked against them.

The 12 sided thrupenny bit was first minted in 1937

But there aren’t just two sides to a coin. There is another smaller side which nobody calls because it so disproportionately small that the chance of it landing on its edge are virtually zero. But then, who hasn’t spent time standing coins on their edge, and who of us of a certain age hasn’t enjoyed making the old thrupenny bit take its stand on one of its twelve sides (as opposed to its two large sides).

Just imagine twelve sides. That is precisely what our scriptures imagine – with the twelve tribes of the twelve sons of Jacob finding and founding society in the land they were caused to occupy. The early church shared that imagination, counting twelve apostles and replenishing that number when one fell out. The thrupenny bit represents a design to facilitate concelebration, conversation and dialogue – remembering that there are rarely only two sides to any question and that to resolve conflict many sides have to be considered. Sitting round a circular table is to adopt this design. Each person has their point of view, their side, in a facilitative process which intends to iron out the abuses of positional power.

Polyhedron 20 from yellow

Pope Francis, in Fratelli Tutti (2020), suggests the image of the polyhedron as the shape of better things to come. Promoting a “culture of encounter” he writes:

“The image of the polyhedron can represent a society where differences coexist, complementing, enriching and reciprocally illuminating one another, even amid disagreements and reservations. Each of us can learn something from others. No one is useless and no one is expendable. This also means finding ways to include those on the peripheries of life. For they have another way of looking at things; they see aspects of reality that are invisible to the centres of power where weighty decisions are made.”

Fratelli Tutti 2020

Colum McCann underlines how tricky it is to get beyond binary thinking about winners and losers and right and wrong in his novel Apeirogon. The title is a mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides” – a shape that reflects that conflict can never be reduced to simple opposed positions. Apeirogon is based on the real life friendship between Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two fathers (one Israeli, the other Palestinian) united in their grief for their daughters – both killed in conflict. They both join the Parents Circle Families Forum – a group of people similarly bereaved who unite in their sorrow to press for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time

from The Apeirogon

And there’s another shape – the circle. The shape of things to come if ever we come to the time of resolution – when there are no sides to join or oppose, when the corners we tend to cling to are rounded off by our encounter with the various truths of any situation. The earth is well rounded as if prepared for peace making.

How far are we from Rotherham?

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Gaby Hinsliff has suggested that the newly appointed chair of the inquiry into historic child abuse looks at Louise Casey’s inspection report on the Rotherham child abuse scandal. Louise Casey points out the failings of council, police, childrens’ services suggesting that people and agencies were far more concerned about their reputations than about the victims. For Hinsliff the tragedy in Rotherham was made possible by the most ordinary of things. By this, she means that it is ordinary organisation that makes for such tragedies: “Ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs, ordinarily badly”. She writes, “what leaps out from the report isn’t the influence of politics with a big P so much as office politics; all the surprisingly humdrum, niggling things about status and hierarchy and process that determine who counts in an organisation and who is heard.”

The Rotherham Council who presided over the whole very sorry affair have been accused of being over-sensitive in a politically correct sort of way. They were, in fact, not sensitive enough. They were dismissive of uncomfortable truth and bullied disagreeable voices into silence and hundreds of girls and families have suffered as result of these ordinary people doing ordinary jobs ordinarily badly.

But how far are we from Rotherham? Uncomfortable truth and disagreeable voices are hard to hear and easy to ignore. We like the sound of our own voice, and we like the ones who are like us and form them into our company. So, how far removed is our ordinary organising (intrapersonal and interpersonal) from the folly of Rotherham?

Louise Carey’s report focusses on Rotherham, but is more than Rotherham. It’s about all ordinary organisation that doesn’t listen to the “wrong” people and that is insensitive to the plight of the wronged people. It’s about government, institutional life, the office, family and my own self-ish ways. It’s about intentional and unintentional victims and how we listen to them and how we listen to each other.

The church also, and perhaps particularly, is not a million miles from Rotherham in doing an ordinarily bad job of not listening to uncomfortable truth and allowing abuse to flourish unchecked. Pope Francis, in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel (just reading) is conscious of this background. He encourages a better sort of organisation in which the right and wronged people are heard, in which the poor are the evangelisers and in which the church and pastoral workers continue to be evangelised and changed. He yearns for a a church which is poor (not so bothered by its own reputation?) and for the poor (198) and he begs the Lord “to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor”. Hinsliff’s appeal rings the same bells: “all institutions need faintly oddball, stubborn, counter-cultural people who may well be irritating to work with but ask the questions others don’t.”

Rotherham is our own backyard. Rotherham is in our mind. Rotherham is only extraordinary in the scale of its terrible consequences. A lot of our organisation is ordinarily bad, lacking sensitivity, intelligence and curiosity.

Francis reports: a Maundy Thursday sermon

David Herbert3 Comments

Picture1

Today, Pope Francis has been celebrating Mass at Casal de Marmo, a juvenile detention center on the outskirts of Rome, and washing the feet of the prisoners there.

This is one of the many gestures that has captured the imagination of people around the world, along with his willingness to get out of his car to shake hands with people without the fear of getting shot, wanting to pay off his hotel bill, and choosing to live in a simpler apartment. I don’t know about you, but I find all of this very exciting. In recent years the Roman Catholic Church has had problems with its PR (rightly so, because of the ways in which it has covered up abuse scandals). But with the white smoke has come a whiff of excitement. Maybe, the church in its impoverished state, can become the church of the poor, for the poor. And, without doubt, what the world needs is, according to Pope Francis, a wounded church that goes out onto the streets, rather than a sick church that is withdrawn into its own world.

There has been far too much inspiration and charity from within the Roman Catholic Church for it to be hidden behind a smokescreen of scandal.

The juvenile detention centre has 48 prisoners. The majority of them are Muslims. Pope Francis will wash the feet of 12 of the prisoners.

I wonder how they will feel. I wonder what will go through their minds. I wonder what sensations will travel from their feet and from the ground of their being. Will they know, through this action, that God loves them? Will they know that they are dear to him? Will they know that they are forgiven for the wrong paths those feet have taken them?

I wonder what Pope Francis will feel through his hands, in his mind and at his heart. Will he feel the journey those feet have made? Those feet of young people. Will he feel inside their shoes, their trainers, their boots, their bootees to the life they have led? Will he understand their running away from their homes, rival gangs, the police? Will he feel the cramping of life in those shoes and why they have kicked off?

This is what Maundy Thursday is about, that we love one another. It is a new commandment which is fleshed out in Jesus example of foot washing, and which is reenacted across the world this evening, including prisons and a detention centre in Rome. This is a love which is prepared to lovingly tend the other, whatever the state of the other’s feet may be, wherever those feet have been. This is a love which feels for the other, and which forms the foundation for a community of vulnerability, compassion and love with the least, the last and the lost.

It is a transformative act. The two parties will never feel the same about each other again. He felt for me. He understood me. He held me dear. He loved me.

Another Francis has hit the news this week. The Francis Report is the independent inquiry into what has gone wrong with the NHS in the light of the Mid Staffs Hospital. The important thing highlighted is the question of how to restore compassion to the National Health Service, and how safe care can be given to every patient every time. The publication of the report had nurses ringing in to Radio 5’s phone in, frustrated that they are unable to provide the level of care that they should be providing. Their hearts were going out to those who have been neglected, but their hands were tied up in so much other work.

I looked for a response to the Francis Report on Twitter from nurses. Mara Carlyle, now singer, but was a NHS nursing assistant for 7/8 years, mostly on wards so understaffed, tweeted:

If you give nurses enough resources and time to do their jobs properly, guess what? They will and they do. Because there weren’t enough staff for everyone’s basic needs to be attended to which inevitably led to some poor standards of care, that we often had to choose between attending to patients who were (variously) crying, dying, hungry, thristy, dirty, fallen out of bed …

Alison Leary, a registered nurse and macmillan lecturer in oncology writes of the work of a nurse (work described by Florence Nightingale as “women’s work which should be done quietly and in private”) and she asks:

How would you feel about dealing with a stranger in such an intimate way? A stranger who is so humiliated at his or her inability to control their own bodily functions that they weep? Then imagine having to care for him or her and 29 other patients with only two colleagues to help you.

So we have the juxtaposition of the Francis Report and its admissions about compassion, and Pope Francis and his expression of compassion, feeling for the other, loving the other.

Nurses want to alleviate suffering – physical, psychological, social and spiritual.

The dilemma for nurses is how they can show compassion in a system which expects so much from them.

If that is the dilemma of the nursing profession, it is perhaps the dilemma of our society. Don’t we want to be the answer to the problem of suffering, however that is experienced?

But how?

How does the NHS recover its capacity for compassion? How do we become compassionate? How do we feel for one another? How do we love one another?

The answer is repeated in story after story – from the story of the care of the Good Samaritan, to the story of the nurse most likely referred to as an angel. All of them are touching stories.

The answer is hinted at in tonight’s liturgy, and in Jesus own example of footwashing and his encouragement (“should”- is that command or encouragement?) for us to do just the same. This is the practice of loving one another, just as Jesus loves us.

It is taking one step at a time, one gesture at a time.

If the time has come for you to be asking where compassion has gone from our dealings with one another, if society has become so complicated that you don’t know where to start, I can tell you the place to start is HERE. It always has been. The first step is in the here and now, in truly local initiatives like Jesus washing the feet of his dearest friends, like Francis washing the feet of the prisoners in a Rome detention centre, like the nurse holding the hand of a patient who is afraid – who through that touch reaches beyond the physical condition of the patient to her heart of hearts.

In chaotic times

David HerbertLeave a comment

TU ES PETRUS!!!

I know that leaders today are faced with enormous challenges, most of them not of their own doing. As times grow more chaotic, as people question the meaning (and meaninglessness) of this life, people are clamouring for their leaders to save and rescue them…. People press their leaders to do anything to end the uncertainty, to make things better, to create stability. Even leaders who would never want to become dictators, those devoted to servant leadership, walk into this trap. They want to help, so they exert more control over the disorder. They try to create safety, to insulate people from the realities of change. They try to give answers to dilemnas that have no answers.

Today is the inauguration of Pope Francis’s papacy. We pray for him. This quote on the temptations and spirituality of leadership in times of chaos (all times) is from Meg Wheatley’s Finding our Way. It struck me as helpful on a day when many will be thinking through issues of leadership.