Passionate about the City [Luke 13.31—35]Sermon preached at All Hallows by Kathy Galloway on 7 March 2004
Jesus was passionate about Jerusalem. It drew him and yet it frightened him too; he was angry with it with all the heartfelt anguish of a lover, and yet it evoked his tenderest maternal feelings. In the end, he wept for it. Jerusalem was not the place of his birth or upbringing, and yet in a sense it was for him, as a Jew, and still remains today for observant Jews, a place of enormous spiritual and psychological power. To a people for whom the land was all, who believed that God had promised them the land, as we heard in today’s reading from Genesis, and brought them out of captivity in Egypt into it, Jerusalem was the paramount symbol of that promise. It was a concrete representation of their identity. And more, it was the place where God was to be found and worshipped in the temple. God lived above all in the temple. So it is not surprising that it evoked such strong feelings in him. It was his history, his community, his religion. I think it is not fanciful to say that this moment, on the road to Jerusalem, was a liminal one for Jesus, for here he stands on the edge of transformation, of something new coming into being. With deep prophetic insight, he sees at one and the same time what it, and what is to come, and is weeping for a moment that contains within it both birth and death. History, community, religion, are taking a new turn. God will no longer be found and accessible only in Jerusalem. This is a moment between the no-longer and the not-yet. Jerusalem is still a city of huge symbolic significance, not only for Jews but for Christians and Moslems also, a city still wept over, a city in which the way that leads to peace is all too often ignored and blocked. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem today. And yet for most of us, it is not the city which claims our love. For us, the most important question is, what does it mean to love our city? What does it mean to pray for it, as Jesus did? I am passionate about my city, though it is not the place of my birth or upbringing. I live in the West End of Glasgow, in a friendly environment. A few years ago, I heard an ecologist make a very good case for it as a paradigm of green urban living-tenement houses, solidly built and energy-efficient, good public transport, excellent small local shops, schools, services, parks entertainments, sports facilities, hospitals — a neighbourhood where places of work, living, service and recreation are integrated in a multi-cultural and extremely socially mixed environment. And indeed, it is a good place to live. In such a place, community responsibility and ecological concern are very high. People are always cleaning up the river Kelvin, campaigning about the use of the parks, and the maintenance of the public spaces; every street has its residents association. People value their environment, so they take care of it. And find it takes care of them. They experience it as friendly. It meets their needs. We take care of what we value. why do we value what we value? To a great extent, we value what in turn values us — what meets our needs, what affirms us in our life and aspirations, what gives us enjoyment and delight. This is a kind of symbiotic process — we know it with our friends, with our children; if we are fortunate, we know it with our work. It’s not usually easy to tell, and probably it doesn’t matter too much anyway, which came first, the valuing or the being valued. They reinforce one another. I think one can make a very good case for people in the West End of Glasgow living in a symbiotic relationship with their environment. The environment is friendly to them, so they are friendly back. They take care of it. They invest time and energy and talents, and often money, in it — all of which makes the environment even more friendly. But even a community such as the West End, which is essentially one which still works, you don’t have to look far too find pain and anger underneath the surface; the pain of the young people leaving care who live in the house next door to me, or of those living in the many homeless hostels and DSS hotels in the area, or of the survivors of domestic abuse in the refuges; the anger of students struggling to survive in an area where three of them have been burned to death in three separate incidents, whose flats were unsafe because unscrupulous landlords did not maintain them properly; the anger of asylum seekers treated with contempt by those who do not understand anything of their experience, the anger of disaffected, unemployed young men in a city with a sectarian history. For them, the environment is not friendly; and I have lived in other parts of the city where the environment is even more hostile. People’s lives are lived in the context of their environment, and to probe the roots of their pain and anger is a process that inevitably leads to the need for change — change that will involve both healing and justice if it is to be any kind of good news for those who live in our cities. The pain of a city is complex. The suffering that cripples our inner cities is often the pain of lifetimes and generations. The pain of individuals is bound up with the pain of the whole community. An abused child is sometimes the child of parents who were, in their turn, abused by their parents. When a child is killed on a busy road that runs through a housing estate, or an old person dies of hypothermia because they cannot afford to heat an all-electric flat, the whole community suffers. The community suffers because all their children and all their pensioners are at risk, and will continue to be at risk until there is change. And how do I pray for healing for this community? When I begin to pray for the individuals I meet, I find myself praying and acting for the whole community. I cannot pray for an old person with bronchitis if I do not also put pressure on a council or a landlord who is responsible for the damp and substandard housing that is the root cause of the illness. How can I pray for those who are lonely, old and disabled if I do not take time to visit them, and, at the same time, ask why there is so little funding to provide sheltered accommodation and to staff daycentres? I cannot pray for families living in tower-blocks, whose relationships are at breaking-point, and whose children are distressed, if I do not raise questions about the way that government and local authorities allocate housing stock and fund play space and nursery provision. I cannot pray for a young person in prison if I do not look for ways to relieve the boredom of unemployment, the pressure of advertising, the board and lodgings legislation that keeps him on the move, and the lure of drugs, that have combined to destroy his liberty. I cannot pray for poor people in my community, for refugees and asylum-seekers or for that matter for hungry, oppressed and poor people anywhere else in the world, if I do not challenge the way that my country’s government spends its resources and the way its popular media engages in relentless poor-bashing and racism. I say I cannot pray. What I mean is that I cannot pray for the healing of others with integrity without also acting on my prayers. If I am blind to the sources of injustice around me, and divorce the needs of an individual from the pain of a whole community, my prayers for healing are nonsense and bear no resemblance to the good news of the gospel. Has prayer any validity in the context of the cities’ pain? Is it not rather naïve to spend time in prayer when what is needed is action? What good can prayer do? Most of the people I pray for have no idea that I am praying for them, so what is the point? I find it much easier to ask these questions than to answer them. When I prayed in the midst of the city, I discovered that my prayer changed me. When I prayed, I let God’s love into my life, and the healing and forgiveness that that love brought made it far more possible for me to live out the gospel than if I had not prayed. Prayer made me open to change. It was not a substitute for action; rather the source of action’s motivation. Prayer made me aware of God’s love for me and for the people around me, and that brought a sense of healing amidst the anger and pain. But the pain within me and the pain around me did not go away, and the injustice continued and at times overwhelmed me and the community, filling us with rage and frustration and fear.
Weeping for cities and working for justice is rarely dramatic or sensational. It is not an activity that brings instantaneous results. The suffering of a dispossessed community, in Britain or anywhere else in the world, has no easy solutions. For healing and justice to occur there needs to be change — change in values and attitudes; change in political policies and social conditions. And change for those in need means change for everyone, and none of us change easily. Perhaps it is easier to pray for the peace of Jerusalem than for the peace of our own cities. When we pray for the peace of those around us, are we willing to live out the implications of our prayers?
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