This is the text of a sermon preached by the minister on 1st February 2009 - 'Homelessness Sunday'.
My text for today is our Old Testament Lesson, Deuteronomy 18:15-20. This is a passage that is part of a larger narrative where Moses is presented as explaining the function of the main actors and players in Hebrew society. He explains the role and function of the judges, the king, the priests, and the prophets.
Of particular concern to us today is the short section that focuses on the prophets - men who were given the task of preaching, teaching, and communicating God’s word to the faithful. Prophets were, in simple terms, ‘spokesmen’ for God. Their vocation consisted of receiving a message from God and proclaiming it in the manner and form prescribed by him; each prophet functioned and behaved in a different way; their personalities were all unique; the message they proclaimed and their core concerns varied. A survey of their activities would show that God used them to rebuke, to encourage or to reveal to the people a key truth or concept. He also used them as a call to action, to authenticate divinely appointed leaders, or to articulate Messianic predictions. For example, in the New Testament, this promise of the "prophet like you from among their own people" was regarded as a Messianic prediction relating to the figure of Jesus Christ (John 1:21; 6:14; 7:40; Acts 3:22-23).
Our passage for today reminded Israel that God was in the business of providing prophets…and it was Israel’s duty to listen to them and to act accordingly. When God speaks, we must listen.
Understandably, the people were often wary of prophets. I say ‘understandably’, because there were those who appeared from time-to-time who were not authentic; they were ‘false prophets’. They were ‘false’ either because they set out to deliberately deceive, or they were simply deluded.
Not only were the people wary of prophets, they could often be downright hostile towards them. Consider Jeremiah, and Ezekiel – two prophets who were called to the difficult task of articulating God’s message to people who simply didn’t want to hear it.
Consider Ezekiel – he lived amongst people who were living in exile; they were angry with God for what they regarded as his disinterest in them and their plight; they felt abandoned. And here was this man Ezekiel, a powerful preacher, but with a message that jarred with the prevailing attitudes of the times and the circumstances the people found themselves in. He was deeply religious and he used allegory, vivid word pictures and symbolism to articulate his message. And his message often concerned personal responsibility for sin – it was something that didn’t go down too well with a group of people who felt let down by God.
What about Jeremiah? This man found himself called to be a prophet in the midst of turmoil and widespread dissatisfaction – the nation was in decline and the nationalistic fervour of the people was intense. Jeremiah was called by God to articulate a message of judgement and condemnation; it was an almost impossible task. Given the conditions he found himself in, it’s perhaps not surprising that Jeremiah met with wholesale rejection. His message was rejected and so was he. He was regarded as a traitor and many tried to have him put to death; he wasn’t allowed to live what we would regard as a ‘normal’ life – he was barred from marrying. He suffered acutely under the strain of his divinely ordained role. Jeremiah was a sensitive individual; he was a man that, at first glance, might seem completely unsuited to the task that God had given him.
Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah took the years of rejection, ridicule and persecution and they ploughed on; they clung tenaciously to the task God had set them and they didn’t give up; they were determined. They were lifted and sustained by the grace of God, without which their tasks would surely have been impossible.
We can rightly consider Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and many others in the Hebrew Scriptures, as true prophets. In many ways they were 'voices from the edge', often ignored and frequently persecuted. They didn’t fit in to the prevailing culture and attitudes of the time; their message made for uncomfortable listening because they challenged complacency, not just for the sake of it, rather they did it in the name of God.
When we reflect on the prophets, God wants us to revisit their message and to imbibe their passion for truth and justice. He wants us to think of our contemporary society and the problems we face; he wants us to listen to the ‘voices from the edge’ in our own time; he wants us to remember that his ways and his message are found not in the powerful and the grand, but in the weak and the marginalized. So let us on this day – Homelessness Sunday – listen to a voice from the edge. I want to read to you the words of Elanah, a young homeless woman from Cornwall. Her words are taken from the ‘No Home’ web page on the BBC website:
“I never planned for any of this to happen, to become homeless or anything. I never thought it would happen to me. I always thought I'd find the right job that I'd want, I'd have enough money to support myself, my dog and my housing. But then at the end of the day, it doesn't always happen like that.
I started to have some problems with losing my job. My landlord was unable to accept housing benefit. I came to a mutual agreement with my landlord, basically the day that I was leaving, to pack up my stuff and put it into storage.
Pretty much the day I that moved out I realised I had to move out onto the street. I was very distressed about it and very concerned of what would happen to me and Tom next (note – Tom is Alanah’s Pet Dog).
Tom is my absolute world. He wakes up with me every morning. He goes to bed with me every night. He is such a comfort to have around, it makes me feel happy.
Sleeping in a tent was my only option, to get out of the cold and to use a sleeping bag as well and to try and keep my dog, Tom, warm as well. I talked to a few friends and they suggested that the best place to go was the quietest place to go in the evenings, which was the grave yard. It was very, very eerie and scary at night, but it was also very cold. I thought well, seeing it was so quiet, I felt safer being there rather than being in another place where I would be attacked, like town.
I got woken up early when I was sleeping in a tent by dog walkers. I almost felt ashamed to be in the position I was in. I felt really tired, also, and worn out. I don't think it was just from the stress, I think it was from the cold as well.
When I realised that I was not going to be happy by what I was doing, I was advised by a friend to go to St. Petroc's and apply to move into one of the hostels. My interview at St. Petroc's, I remember taking a friend with me and I was very disoriented at the time, there were a lot of questions. I had a phone call from St. Petroc's, saying there was a place available. I arranged to meet the manager of the hostel at the head office in St Petroc's. We met there and walked to the hostel, which I didn't realise was right next to the graveyard that I was sleeping in.
The hostel, from the outside, just looks like a normal, average, terraced house. My room, at first, in the hostel, was very untidy, like I usually am. It felt very nice to feel very comfortable and to feel warm again and have a roof over my head.
My hopes for the future are to get back into society, be a member of society again, be in employment which I feel stable and secure. Also, to secure a home for myself and my dog. I really wouldn't like to move into accommodation without my dog. I cannot live without him. I'm doing everything I can at the moment to look for accommodation and my future is definitely, at the moment, uncertain.”
Alanah’s story is one of many. Depressingly it’s not unique. We have a picture of someone who is vulnerable, lonely, isolated from family and living from day-to-day on the very periphery of society. Homelessness, if we’re honest, is not something that is particularly high up on our collective agenda. We’re more prone to make judgements on the homeless than we are to reach out and help them. We’re more likely to brush the issue under the carpet or to get involved in pointless debates about the ‘undeserving’ versus the ‘deserving’ poor. But as we do this we should remember that homelessness and poverty is de-humanising for both the sufferer and those who look on. And we should also remember the lives and the circumstances of the Old Testament prophets, and indeed that of Jesus Christ himself - a cacophony of voices from the edge. God speaks to us through the marginalized, the dispossessed and the outsider, his voice resonates through the ones whom society would rather ignore than engage with.
So on this ‘Homelessness Sunday’, we are drawn to look inwards and ask ourselves a number of pertinent questions. For example, are we free to ignore the suffering of the ‘voices from the edge’ in our society? Is our nation and community damaged by the widest gap between rich and poor for generations? How do we affirm and include the diversity of people in our community, and perhaps also in our church? How do we as individual Christians and as a church make sure that the vulnerable and the marginalized are not forgotten, but rather affirmed and cared for? All of these questions, and a myriad more, may come to our minds on this day; they come to mind for a reason and it’s our duty to engage with them.
St. Augustine, as he always did, makes the call to genuine Christian living very eloquently and profoundly in a piece he wrote entitled ‘Your Brother is Hungry’:
He, your brother, was redeemed as you were by the blood of Christ; he is hungry, in need, perhaps pressed by a creditor, and you have plenty of this world’s goods. You say, ‘That’s no affair of mine. Am I expected to rescue him from distress with my money?’
If that is your attitude, your heart is empty of God’s love; you are not a child of God.
You glory in being a Christian – yes, that is what you are called, but not what your deeds answer to. If you don’t live like a Christian, what is the point of being called one?
And so St. Augustine, very fittingly, has the last word. Let us now bow our heads in prayer and reflection:
Just and merciful God,
you listen with compassion to the voices of those with burdens of poverty and homelessness.
Open our ears to the voices from the edge, and in them may we hear your voice. Guide us with your Spirit to act justly, that poverty and homelessness will be ended for all your children.
In Jesus' name,
AMEN.
(A Prayer from Church Action on Poverty)
