Sermons
16th Sept 2007 - Trinity 15
At various periods of his extraordinary political career, the four-times Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone made it his duty and care to pursue fallen women through the streets of London. Often very late at night, having perhaps spoken for several hours in the House he would wander the streets of Westminster in the hope of encountering a prostitute and assuring her that God’s love wished to draw her away from her profession. He would often go with the woman to her own lodgings and offer practical and moral advice and guidance. He felt it to be his Christian duty. And of course his political opponents seized upon his apparent lack of prudence as a subject of gossip and potential scandal, and his political friends time and again tried and failed to persuade Gladstone of the dangers of his activities. Gladstone was a much stronger figure than his friends and opponents and he successfully brushed aside their advice. It is difficult to imagine any recent Prime Minister engaged in similar activity. Mr Blair? Mrs Thatcher? Perhaps Mr Brown?
Gladstone’s great strength in this and many other activities was rooted in a deep sense of his unworthiness. He was not unaware of the dangers of his nocturnal peregrinations, he was not unaware that there was some justification in the criticism that the fallen women he seemed most intent on saving tended to be young and tended to be beautiful, and he was not unaware that he experienced an illicit pleasure from keeping company with the women of the streets, but his driving motivation was certainly his concern for the physical and religious well-being of these outcasts of society. Outcasts no doubt visited by many of his parliamentary colleagues for other purposes. Gladstone probably had contact with several hundred women through his career and he estimated that he had been successful in reforming perhaps a handful in total. Had his exposure to ridicule and possible disgrace been therefore a lavish waste of his time and boundless energy? Our gospel today suggests that on the contrary, he was acting from a Christian imperative laid upon us through the actions and teaching of Our Lord.
Gossip is nothing new…the ‘Pharisees and scribes were grumbling and saying “this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”’. The word used here for grumbling in Greek is a tremendously onomatopoeic word, diagonguzo, the Pharisees grumble at Jesus, accusing him of encouraging loose morals by associating freely and without preconditions with the social and religious outcasts described as ‘tax-collectors and sinners’. The Pharisees are scandalised that Jesus’ sanctity will be contaminated and they can’t understand his disregard of their spiritual security policy.
And as his actions are not understood Jesus tells some stories to reinforce the message that God’s love and engagement with people does not wait for their penitence and purity, but is already active and deliberately pursuing those who are regarded as lost. His searching for them is persistent like a woman who has lost a precious coin, like a shepherd who goes after the lost sheep and lays it on his shoulders to bring it home safely. This is what so riled the Pharisees. Jesus in his actions and teaching shows that God doesn’t wait for conversion and repentance before joining people, he does not demand or expect immediate perfection, indeed he has a special desire to search out those who have quite lost the way, those who have wandered off into dangerous territory.
And in great contrast to those grumbling Pharisees, when the lost one is found there is great rejoicing, the shepherd calls his friends around to celebrate with him, the woman who has found her coin gathers her neighbours to rejoice with her. Likewise, Jesus says, when God’s searching out of the lost and the outcast bears fruit there is rejoicing in Heaven.
The searching out of the lost is of course also our calling. When Mr Gladstone paced the streets of London searching for the women lost to the slavery of prostitution he did so with great bravery, not with any illusions about his own sinful nature, but with perseverance in his Christian duty. What a tremendous image it is, the political leader of the nation coming from the House of Commons out on to the streets of the capital city to take the Christian message of God’s unreasonable love to those whose lives were lived beyond the pale of society’s limits, lives nearly always cut short through poverty, disease, or violence. What that we had a politician in our own day who could match his example.