In Princelet Street, close to Brick Lane, there stands a tall, terraced house, now somewhat derelict, where Huguenot weavers took refuge after Louis XIV drove them out of France by withdrawing the freedom of worship which they had enjoyed under the Edict of Nantes. Over the following centuries the same house sheltered Irish, Jewish and Bangladeshi refugees, as each successive wave of migration broke on our shores. The Jews built a synagogue in the back garden, now long since abandoned as the community moved out to more prosperous suburbs. But the house itself, with all its diverse memories, is now being developed as a museum of refugees, and among the artefacts on display there, are some of the cheap, battered suitcases in which they brought all that they could carry on their journey. When school parties visit, the children are sometimes asked to write down what they would take with them if they could carry only one small case. If you or I had to leave our home to-morrow, I wonder what we would take with us, apart from a few necessary clothes, to remind us of all that we were leaving behind. It might be a piece of jewellery, it might be a precious photograph, it might be a cuddly toy. If you know the answer to that question, it will tell you quite a lot about your identity, who you are, and what matters in your life.
Paul can’t have taken very much with him when he was sent to Rome as a prisoner, and presumably anything he did have with him will have been lost when he was shipwrecked on the island of Malta, but the short extract from 2 Timothy that formed our second reading is like one of those battered suitcases in the sense that it contains in just a few words a statement of what really mattered to him. ‘Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David – that is my gospel’. Keep it simple. Here in just a few words is the heart of the message for which Paul was prepared to go to prison, and ultimately to his death. Remember Jesus Christ, whose humanity as a son of David, together with his life and death and glorious resurrection had transformed Paul’s life, and could transform the life of all who would not just hear what he said, but grasp the truth of his gospel message, allowing the spirit of the risen Christ to enter their lives, just as he had entered and transformed Paul’s own life.
When Paul has occasion to wrestle with the application of the gospel to the moral and spiritual issues that presented themselves to the Christian communities he had founded, his language and his reasoning can become undeniably complex, but above and beyond all the debate about circumcision and uncircumcision, about justification by faith, about what it means to be in Christ, about the place of women and slaves in the Christian community, about appropriate conduct in church, about the relationship of the Christian to the pagan culture all around, and so on and so forth, there shines out from all his letters a fundamentally simple message of faith and hope and love that is firmly and unequivocally grounded in his proclamation of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised from the dead.
The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him. (2 Tim 2.11-12).
On a recent Sunday and Monday Anne and I had to attend the memorial service of one old friend and the funeral of another. They could hardly have been more dissimilar. Elizabeth was a big extrovert woman, a great-hearted unabashed Evangelist who could call out to a crowd: I have a message for you from Jesus – Jesus loves you. Hers was a simple radiant faith. Stephen by contrast, more at home in a church of beautifully ordered and thoughtfully presented tractarian liturgy, was a quiet man who rarely raised his voice, a scholar of vast erudition who would happily examine any proposition thoroughly and sympathetically from several different points of view, leaving no stone unturned, no argument unweighed, but it was rightly said of him too, that all that rich intellectual complexity was undergirded by a very simple uncomplicated faith. Here in this church, and not least from this pulpit, we are not afraid to wrestle with the complex issues which have to be addressed as we seek to explore what our faith means in a contemporary context. But we do so from a standpoint of faith in the loving purposes of God which is in itself very simple.
We encountered in our first reading another example of such faith, in the young girl whose compassion had been aroused by Naaman’s sad plight. Blissfully unaware of the complex diplomacy involved in sending the commander-in-chief to be healed by the chief prophet of his enemies, she made the connection which nobody else would have dared to make. Here was Naaman, a good man who needed help, and there was Elisha, a man of God with the power to help and heal. Clearly Naaman should seek Elisha’s help. And of course she was right. The innocent simplicity of the child had latched on to the one thing that really mattered – that God cared about Naaman, and would find a way to heal him if he would put his trust in Elisha and Elisha’s god. Perhaps this little cameo of a story can help us to understand that there is no necessary conflict between the child’s simple faith and the complexity of the adult world in which the miracle of healing has to take place. The diplomatic obstacles do have to be overcome. Naaman has to learn how to deal with the pride which so nearly gets in the way of his being healed. But the simple faith of the young girl provides the impetus which enables these obstacles to be overcome. Isn’t this what Jesus had in mind when he taught that whoever does not receive the kingdom of god like a little child will never enter it? We are not expected to live for ever in the nursery. We have put away childish things, as Paul acknowledges elsewhere. But all through our lives we should listen to the child within us, when that child speaks in our hearts with the simple faith that operates on a different plane from all the complexities that may still have to be addressed.
So perhaps we should ask ourselves is not what would I take with me in one small suit-case if I had to leave home in a hurry, but what in just a few words is the good news that I would cling to if everything in my life was falling apart. The earliest such statement of belief was probably no more than three words; Jesus is Lord. For Paul it was ‘Jesus Christ, raised from the dead’; for our friend Elizabeth it was the even simpler conviction that Jesus loves us. Having something like that to cling to won’t of itself resolve any of the complex issues that we have to address, or the tangles in our relationships that we may have to unravel, but it will give us a patch of firm ground on which to stand as we do so.
One last word since this is stewardship month. Working out what to do with the time and the talents and the money we have – be it little or much – is not easy. Where are we supposed to find the right balance in applying our limited resources to the seemingly unlimited demands that come at us from every direction? On one level these calculations are indeed quite complex, we have to weigh them carefully and prayerfully. But on another level we have so much to be thankful for, so much that comes from the healing power of Jesus our Lord, freely given and mediated to us in no small measure by the church. Surely we would want to come back like the one grateful leper to thank and praise the Lord from whom we have received so much, and then to give as freely as we have received. In this context, as in so much else, I believe we shall find that the answers will fall into place so much more easily if we start by asking ourselves what really matters, or in Paul’s words – what is our gospel.
Jesus is Lord? Jesus loves me?. Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead? Whatever stripped-down glimpse of the truth each of us clings to when the lights go out, let us live by that light, and let us give by that light.