The Church played a considerable part in our lives and the family were members of the Old Meeting House Congregational Church. My parents were married there and my Sister and I were christened by the Rev’d Luther Bouch. From the age of five we were taken to Sunday School each Sunday morning and again in the afternoon. At the end of Sunday school in the morning the children filed into the Church but only stayed for the first half of the service; we came out prior to the sermon. When Mother couldn’t take us in the mornings we were taken by Eva Keen, Ethel and Win Bright or Vera Newport; all lived locally to us. From about seven onward I was able to go alone.

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You might have noticed that something was missing in the life of the church during Lent this year (and I don’t mean some of the chairs).  It has become common practice in many churches in recent years to have a special Lenten appeal for a charitable cause or project.  Such appeals are a natural development of the idea of giving up something for Lent to giving up something so that others can gain something.  In recent years we have supported:

• Christian Aid’s ‘Count your Blessings’ plan, daily bite-size reflections to inspire us to give, act and pray to bring justice to our world and change the lives of people living in poverty across the globe.

• Water Aid’s ‘Jars of Change’ appeal, turning loose change into clean water.

• Practical Action’s ‘Human Waste’ campaign, tackling problems faced by toilet-pit cleaners in Bangladesh.

• And some have followed the ‘40Acts’ programme, encouraging people to give back, do good and live generously.

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I was born in a house in New Windsor Street in October, 1920. The house was one of a terrace and had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The bathroom had no hot water and the bath was so large that to get sufficient hot water for a bath would have meant carrying probably 10 to 15 buckets up the stairs. In any case there was no means of heating such a quantity. A tin bath in the kitchen was therefore used for bathing.

There were two reception rooms, a kitchen and scullery downstairs. The only WC was outside but actually built into the house abutting into the scullery. The weekly rent was ten shillings. Cooking was carried out on a cast-iron cooking range in the kitchen. As a schoolboy my job each Saturday was to black-lead the range and polish the fire irons with emery cloth. There was a brick-built boiler in the scullery which was used for the weekly wash, and outside the kitchen door was a very large wooden-rollered mangle to squeeze most of the water from the clothes.

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Nick asks ‘what is the purpose of the Church?’ As ever, he was thought provoking and so I’ve been thinking! It’s a huge question and I dissent from nothing that Nick preached and has written.

Perhaps the purpose of the Church is to be prophetic? To move ahead of the social climate into accepting the marginalised and the outcast. But, woefully, it is often the Church that lags behind and drags its feet. Its record with LGBT people is poor. It took decades to come to terms with divorce (and the Roman Catholics still haven’t. Methodism for a long time refused its pulpits to divorcees. Its attitude to unmarried mothers has been less than warm. It has been slow to build bridges to those of other faiths and of none. It so often prefers to keep its head down, to be invisible, so as not to be ‘controversial’. Instead it could have outpaced society as it made clear its wish to accept people where they are.

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This month we enter the season of Lent that leads up to Easter.  The 40 fasting days of Lent represent the 40 days we are told in the Gospels that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness; days that were really a time for him to explore his experience at his baptism and the direction he would take in life.

At the end of that time he went home to Nazareth and on the Sabbath went to the synagogue were he was asked to read the scripture and speak. You can read the story in Luke chapter 4.  I preached on this story in January and was asked to summarize my sermon for Look-In, so here goes.

At the heart of the story are the verses Jesus read from the book of the prophet Isaiah.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”    (Luke 4:18-19)

Then he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Most scholars agree that the way Luke tells the story suggests this is a pivotal moment in Jesus life; that the words he read in the synagogue are fundamental to his understanding of his mission, of God’s mission.  But to say this passage describes God’s mission still begs many questions.

Who are the poor and what is good news for them?  A report published by Oxfam in January this year highlights the global inequality of wealth.  According to the report, the richest 62 people in the world have more wealth than the poorest 50% (3.6 billion people) put together, and the richest 1% have more wealth than the remaining 99% (incidentally, anyone whose total assets are worth more than £533,000 is part of that 1%).  But is being poor just about not having money?  What about those who have lost everything, lost hope, lost home, lost family, lost their future, the outsider and the refugee?

In purely financial terms it might be that some kind of redistribution of wealth from the absurdly rich to the abject poor is part of God’s day of favour (or salvation as some versions put it).  But good news for the poor is not just about having more money, it is about having hope and home and future restored.  So, should showing and sharing hospitality to those who have no place to call home be part of that good news?

Who are the captives and what is release for them?  People in Wormwood Scrubs or Broadmoor?  Do we want them to be released before their time?  But what about those held captive in Belmarsh and Harmondsworth detention centres?  Could God’s will be that these people find release?  Then there are those imprisoned by grief, regret, anger, bitterness, etc.  What might release from captivity mean for them?  Surely part of it must be to know they are loved and valued.  Is Jesus saying that to show love is the mission of God and, when love is shown God’s day of salvation is fulfilled?

Who are the blind and what does it mean for them to recover sight?  Does this just refer to those who have some form of visual impairment?  Or does it include those who choose not to see, those whose hearts and minds are closed, those of fixed opinions, and those who have lost the ability to see the humanity of other people?  In which case, what does recovery of sight mean?  Maybe the day of the Lord is a day of challenge and shock to our preconceptions and prejudices, a day that moves us from our mental comfort zones and forces us to see the limitlessness of God’s love.

Who are the oppressed and what does it mean to be set free?  Did Jesus have in mind just those living under a foreign occupying power, as the Jewish people were at that time under Roman rule?  Perhaps we should also include those who live under oppressive ideologies, like that of the so-called Islamic State.  But then there are some pretty oppressive Christian ideologies that scare me, and some oppressive attitudes in wider society that lead some people to think it is acceptable to throw stones and eggs at the homes of asylum seekers, or do worse.  Is the freedom Jesus had in mind a freedom to practice one’s own faith and culture without fear of attack?  I believe God’s day of favour is a day when people live together showing acceptance and tolerance.

The passage Jesus read in the Synagogue challenges us about our understanding of God’s mission and what ‘the day of favour (or salvation)’ means; it reminds us that God’s salvation is not about having a place in heaven, but about having a place for God’s attitude in our minds and in our actions here on earth?

The root of this vision of God’s kingdom lies in the Old Testament laws.  In the book of Leviticus, in a passage headed ‘Laws of Holiness and Justice’, we find the command:

“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.  The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.  Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt”    (Leviticus 19:33-34)

A simple instruction to treat strangers in our land as if they are our own people.

The Old Testament book of Ruth tells the story of a family who twice experienced being refugees.  I highly recommend reading this beautiful short book in one go.  In it we are told how a man called Boaz put the instruction in Leviticus into practice.  Then at the end of the story, when the descendants of Ruth are listed we discover the great King David was her grandson.  From this foreigner, this asylum seeker, came the man most Jews look to as the greatest leader in their history, the man who really made them a great nation.  The point being that by keeping the law to welcome the stranger the nation became stronger.

What is the purpose of the church?  Surely it is to continue the mission of Jesus. To work for freedom for the oppressed and to bring good news to the poor is to continue the mission of Jesus. The problems of the world sometimes seem too large for us to do much about.  But global issues always have a local aspect to them.  We cannot solve the crisis in Syria or do much about the reasons people leave their homes to make a new life in a new country.  But perhaps we can help in some small way by showing and sharing love and acceptance and hospitality and support to the strangers in our midst.

Nick Skelding

This article was first published in the February 2016 issue of Look-In, our monthly church magazine.  To download the full issue, please click here: Look-In Feb 2016