Sunday 23rd January 2022
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
Really? It doesn’t exactly support the Government’s levelling-up agenda, does it? Thankfully, we usually leave this verse of All things bright and beautiful out when we sing it.
And so to Levelling Up. The Government still hasn’t published its White Paper on Levelling Up. But I think the general intentions are fairly clear. The plan, as I understand it, is to provide much more delegation to local authorities, and to provide the resources to improve livelihoods, living standards and opportunities across all parts of the country, including levelling up between north and south. Inflation, energy prices, and poorer families will no doubt be in mind. As always, the devil will be in the detail. But overall, these are noble ends.
However, it sounds as if Levelling up might not be something St Paul would have supported. As we have heard this afternoon, he wrote this to the Christians in Corinth:
Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. . . . In whatever condition you were called . . . there remain with God.
It doesn’t sound good. But let’s look more closely. Paul was addressing new Christians who happened to be slaves, and he was explaining that, in the context of the Christian faith and the Christian community, being a slave was neither here nor there; it was almost irrelevant. Listen again as, in the same passage, he says:
For whoever is called in the Lord as a slave is a freed person belonging to the Lord, just as whoever was free when called is a slave of Christ.
Of course, Paul and the Christians of Corinth were living in a very different world from ours, with very different social expectations. Even Jesus never came out against the practice of slavery, though there are clues in both the Old and New Testaments about treating slaves fairly and generously.
The Government’s Levelling Up agenda, even though we don’t know the detail yet, sounds promising. Any steps that can be taken to reduce the present patent inequalities in the country are surely right. It would be good to hope that Levelling Up might extend to overseas aid as well. Let’s hope the reduction of 0.7% of GDP being reduced to 0.5% will prove to be genuinely temporary. After all, even 0.7% is hardly overwhelming for a country like ours.
But the question remains as to whether any levelling up can ever be complete or universal. Even pure socialism in the communist sense has never achieved it. Human nature and human variety militate against total equality. So perhaps St Paul was more in tune with reality than we thought. Perhaps he recognised that some sort of manager-worker relationships were bound to continue, but that in the light of Christian values, everyone could have a sense of freedom if all parties behaved caringly to each other. I hope that all political parties might subscribe to that, along with responsible businesses and the trade unions.
We haven’t considered the earlier part of the St Paul reading, all about circumcision. Effectively what Paul is saying to new converts to Christianity is ‘Stay as you are’. If you’re a Gentile, you don’t have to go through Jewish rites like circumcision, if you’re a Jew, you don’t have to try and disguise your circumcision. All of you, just stay as you are, because, in Paul’s words, ‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing’. It’s the same as over slavery. In the context of Christian faith, we’re all equal children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ. These things don’t matter anymore, or at least are of much less importance.
But now I’d like to suggest another context for all of this. This is from the Old Testament reading from the book Numbers. This book, like the book Exodus, recounts events after the Jews escaped from Egypt with Moses. Wherever the Jews travelled during the years before they began to settle in their new homeland, there was a cloud accompanying them, settling whenever they stopped to camp, and moving whenever they moved on. At night, in some accounts, there was a fire. We can speculate about the origins of the story, lost in the mists of time. Was the cloud perhaps a cloud of smoke from incense burning?
This is possible, because the cloud always settled over a special tent called the Tabernacle. The Hebrew word means, literally, the Dwelling or Presence – the presence, that is, of God, no less. And inside the Tabernacle or Presence was kept the Ark of the Covenant, with the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments inside.
What’s important for us is the symbolism of all this, with Presence the all-important word. Wherever the Jews travelled, however long they stopped and camped somewhere, whenever they moved to new pastures, they knew that the Lord was present with them. They were totally in awe of this, but totally familiar at the same time. God was, as we would say now, wholly transcendent and wholly immanent, beyond comprehension and at the same time part of their lives.
How wonderful is that? The God who is beyond us and beyond all things, but close to us and close to all things. Incomprehensible, and yet for us comprehensible through the person of Jesus. What we are looking for, sometimes finding, sometimes seeming to lose, then hopefully finding again, and so on. Mysterious yet intimate.
With a wide enough concept of God, with a wide enough non-understanding of God, with a wide enough understanding of God – with this, life takes on a new hue, a new perspective.
A friend has just introduced me to a symbolic novel by the French author, Jean-Gabriel Causse, called Les Crayons de Couleur, ‘The Coloured Pencils’. It’s the story of the world slowly losing all its colour in favour of universal grey, rather like poor Tonga under volcanic ash, but in the story simply through lack of appreciation of all the wonderful colours of the world. There’s a factory that’s made coloured pencils, but the pencils have ceased to sell, and the factory is closing. One man there, a manager, furious at being made redundant, piles all the last batches of colour into a single set of pencils, which have the capacity to produce the most vivid colours imaginable. Eventually, he gives one pencil, a pink one, to a friend’s daughter, who begins to change things to pink. There’s a massive search for all the other coloured pencils he made at the end of his last shift. They turn up, and everyone begins to colour all the things they can find. And the world’s population rediscovers and now appreciates all the vivid colours found in the world.
The novel is subtitled Le Roman qui va Colorier votre Vie, ‘The Novel that’s going to Bring Colour to your Life’. And I think that’s right.
And I think that’s right because it seems to me to symbolise the potential for life to take on a new hue, for us to see things in a new light. It’s rather like the new brightness enjoyed by those of us who’ve had cataracts removed.
The Jews in their wilderness wandering had a vivid awareness of God dwelling with them, sharing their lives, their stopping and starting, their false moves and their moves forward, their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. They had the cloud of the Presence to comfort and challenge them. We have Jesus our Lord, no longer physically present, but spiritually so in all our moves, our ups and downs and level places. I don’t want to minimise the problems and pains we all have to bear. But, despite everything, the world and life itself are wonderful.
And with this new perspective, this brilliant new coloration, some things begin to count less than they did before, and some of the things that we count dear become less important. Of course levelling up is important, nationally and across the world. And of course modern slavery is an inexcusable curse to be eliminated. But some degrees of inequality will inevitably remain, because human nature is as it is. Differences are here to stay: civil differences, social differences, commercial differences and so on. Christian faith could rise above slavery, so it can rise above over all the other human differences.
And it is that faith to which we belong, with the coloured vision before our eyes: the glories of nature and human kind, and the glories of the Kingdom of God, the potential for all humanity.
