What does it mean to be a pleb? The word came recently to our attention at the gates of Downing Street and it reminded me of a famous purple passage in a book about liturgy by Dom Gregory Dix. After a long list of places and situations in which the Eucharist has been celebrated down the ages, we read, ’And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta dei – the holy common people of God. So if you go to church you are a pleb and proud of it.
The Latin word ‘plebs’ originates in Roman society originally perhaps to designate a heterogeneous body of poor, weak and vulnerable men of diverse origins and background, the kind of people who in the Roman province of Judea were the first to hear the preaching of Jesus. They enter the history of the Roman republic as an organized movement of freedmen, shopkeepers, crafts people, skilled or unskilled workers and farmers. Members of the plebs were distinct from the higher order of the patricians. A member of the plebs was known as a plebeian, and in Rome plebeians could become wealthy and influential.
How then did the word ‘plebian’ or ‘pleb’ become a word of abuse? The earliest use in English of ‘pleb’ to mean a member of the lower classes, given in the OED, comes form 1865. Sir Philip Sydney uses the word ‘plebeian’ in the same way in his Arcadia of 1586. And down the ages since then it seems to have been used equally as descriptive of someone’s place in society and as a derogatory term used by people of a higher class.
In the Latin translation of Scripture the word ‘populus’ is used more often than ‘plebs’ as a word for ‘the people’ so there is nothing obvious in the Bible to help us ponder the use of this word in greater depth, other than to reflect on what it might mean for us to be the holy common people of God brought together by holy communion.
I have been reading recently a book called provocatively, ‘God is Back’ by J. Micklethwait and A.Wooldridge, which tells the story of the re-emergence of religion as a significant social force in modern society. The book contains a detailed survey of the role of the churches in America and particularly the way in which the churches grow through a combination of powerful preaching appealing to the emotional needs of the congregation, and the social provision of community life in an atomised world. Such churches help people deal with problems of alcoholism and divorce, juvenile delinquency, violence, drug taking and hopelessness. In deprived inner cities the church provides the kind of welfare which the state is failing to provide. In the 19th century the Church of England in this country used to provide the same kind of support until the welfare state took over much of the church’s role in education, health care, and community support. In a curious way our state church can now almost be seen as another part of the welfare state, providing for people’s spiritual needs as the state provides for our material needs. Does this mean we are in danger of taking the church for granted as we have until recently taking the National Health Service for granted? And might this mean that if the Church of England was disestablished and was no longer seen as the state church, we would begin to take more seriously our part in sustaining such a church? In America there is, in a way which may seem rather distasteful to us, a religious market place, where new churches can spring up with ease depending on the charismatic and organizational skills of their founders. Such churches are dependent on the generosity of those who give their time and money to sustain them. Of course the Episcopalian Church (the representative of Anglicanism in America) is part of this market place and it too only survives on the same kind of generosity which means that fundraising and volunteering are much more a part of the lives of Episcopalians than they are perhaps in our own Anglican Church.
October is our Stewardship Month at St John’s. It is the month of the year in which we thank everyone for the contribution of time and money they already make to the church; and it is also a time for challenging everyone to think about what they should be giving to the church in time and money. During the past year the PCC has been thinking about our needs as a church, and about the challenges in maintaining and developing our present community and about growing as a community both in the depth of our faith and the size of our membership. We have been thinking about our building and our need for extra space for our work with children and for adult meetings of different kinds. We have been thinking about our staffing needs, and the way in which the clergy need help in responding to pastoral need, and in getting to know everyone so as to strengthen our sense of community. Do we focus on bricks and mortar in order to become the kind of space that more people want to inhabit more often and so grow together in faith and mutual awareness? Or do we focus on people making do with our building for the time being, but finding ways of getting to know everyone better; might we in this way encourage more people to give their time and money; might we in this way help people to find out more about their faith, and so experience their faith as an ever growing part of their lives? Of course this is not really an either/or question; there are some pastoral needs which need urgent attention and there are also some pressing needs for extra space for our Sunday School children. The debate goes on, but Stewardship Month is an important time for focussing on these issues just as it is an important time for people to consider what they give to this church.
What does it mean to be a member of the plebs sancta dei, the holy common people of God? It means being a part of a community committed to holding all things in common, a community where all our differences are subsumed in common worship? It means that we should all give proportionately to our available means, so that the more affluent among us make as much of a sacrifice as the less well off and vice versa? It means making our talents available to the church, not waiting to be asked, but letting the clergy and churchwardens know what skills you could offer, whether they be in financial matters, communication, buildings, fund raising, organization, hospitality etc? To be a member of the holy common people of God means discovering that there is a fundamental connection between what you give and what you receive. The miracle of Christian community life is that new life comes through giving yourself away. That is the true meaning of the Christian plebeian, the one who gives him- or her- self away.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker