Have discovered II aorist verbs. 

*sobs quietly and wishes she could use the Vulgate*

Homilette for Christ the King

I was preaching at the college Eucharist on Sunday; it was bashed out in a bit of a hurry, due to pressure of work, and it's not the greatest sermon I've ever written.  It also illustrates my tendency to resort to the Middle Ages when looking for inspiration... But Elisabeth of Thuringia is a Good Thing, so I am less apologetic than I might be!

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Today is Christ the King, when we celebrate… yes, you guessed it, Christ’s kingship.  But what does that actually mean?  Well, the Gospel focuses on the idea of Jesus as king, and how that’s understood – or misunderstood – by those around him, and I’ll come back to those in a moment.  But I want to start somewhere slightly different.

Last Thursday, the church calendar commemorated Elisabeth of Thuringia, or of Hungary, as she’s sometimes called, a thirteenth century German noblewoman.  It struck me that it’s appropriate that she’s usually celebrated round about Christ the King, because Elisabeth’s an interesting figure to help us think about the idea of what royalty means in terms of God’s kingdom.  Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary, but was sent at a young age to Thuringia, to marry the heir to the dukedom.  And she was very pious, and very charitable – and so far, she doesn’t sound very different from any number of interchangeable mediaeval women saints.  But there are a couple of things that make Elizabeth different.  One thing is that she had an unusually strong sense of justice and awareness of the wider ramifications of political power.  She refused to eat any food which had been produced by unfairly exploiting the poor – I suppose you could call her the patron saint of Fair Trade. 

But the other is that she simply didn’t have any patience with the strict rules of precedence and proper behaviour of the power structures of her day if it conflicted with the loving thing to do.  You can see it in the stories about her spending her dress allowance on food for the poor – which is a fairly standard thing for a mediaeval female saint to do – but you can also see it in less clichéd ways, like the way she disturbed the members of court by actually insisting on sitting next to her husband at dinner, so that they could talk.  And it’s shown, above all, by what happened after her husband died.  Royal widows often went off to found monasteries in the middle ages – it was a respectable retirement job, I suppose, but Elizabeth, to the disgust of her family, and in the face of very considerable opposition, went off to found a hospital.  And she disconcerted everyone by joining in with all the nursing and the chores.  The evidence available, incidentally, suggests her cooking was really dreadful…

Elizabeth’s life turned the conventions of what royalty was supposed to do on its head, and she did this because she was trying to live the life of Christ.  Elizaebth’s ‘royalty’, her power and influence, was only significant to her because she could give it away, and in doing this she was following the example of Jesus, who though, as Paul put it ‘the image of the invisible God’ emptied himself of all his power, to the point of painful and humiliating death, so that there would be nothing in human life, however broken and horrible, where God was not present.  “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”

The gospel reading does some interesting things with this concept of Jesus as king.  The people mock Jesus for claiming kingship, when he’s powerless, betrayed, and abandoned.  Yet the joke is really on them.  Jesus is the king, the lord of all, the only person who can rightfully be called a king.  But the kind of king he is is not what humanity – who think that power exists to be held on to and used over people – expects.  He is a king who gives up his power for the sake of others.  In a final irony, the only person who manages to recognise this is the ‘good thief’.  Luke leaves it totally unclear what prompts him to ask to be remembered ‘when you come into your kingdom.’  Dorothy L Sayers, who as well as writing detective stories wrote a very good series of radio plays based on the gospels, actually suggests that the thief was just being kind and humouring a harmless lunatic – which might explain why he’s the only person in the gospels to call Jesus by his first name, without any sort of title.  But that act of kindness is enough for Jesus, who with the generosity of God, responds to all our attempts at goodness, however inadequate they are.  Jesus’ kingship is about self-giving love, and one of the forms that self-giving takes is God’s willingness to treat us as better than we are – and thus make us into the better people God wants us to be.

It’s hard for us to grasp the sheer goodness of God, of the depths of the love of God which makes him become a human being, and live and die to bring us from death to life.  The world couldn’t cope with Jesus – they couldn’t stand the challenge to the structures of power and authority we all build up in an attempt to protect ourselves.  It’s why they killed him.  And we, too, find it hard to cope with God’s love.  We’re a bit like Elizabeth’s courtiers, unable to grasp why she couldn’t just stick to the rules of proper behaviour.  But she didn’t because it was the loving thing to do; it wasn’t proper behaviour for a mediaeval noblewoman, but it fitted the kingdom of God.

Josephine Butler, Christian Feminist.

One of the courses we do specifically as part of our formation for ministry (as distinct from the university theology degree) is a course of lectures on the history of Anglicanism, and they've asked us to do group presentations on an Anglican woman of our choice.  My group picked Josephine Butler, and while the presentation will include a number of different angles, I went for Butler and women's issues.  I'm posting it here, because she's one of my heroes...

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Josephine Butler’s probably most famous for her campaigning on prostitution – an act which many of her contemporaries considered shocking.  Her activities among and on behalf of marginalized women only make sense if we look at them in the context both of her faith and her take on the question of women, which is part of her wider views on how Christians ought to behave, and what a Christian society ought to look like.

Butler first became conscious of the problems of women when listening to the colleagues her husband brought home.  She sat, silent and angry, as men criticized Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth, which deals with a young woman who is seduced and abandoned, as indecent. They maintained a blatant double standard.  Women who sinned were evil and lost; men who sinned had just slipped up.  Butler only found her voice later.

There are two strands that can’t really be separated.  Firstly, after her daughter’s death, Butler sought to cope by finding ways to live out her faith among the poor and destitute.  Working in the ‘casual ward’ of the Liverpool poorhouse and in the jails, she attempted to show these rejected, vulnerable, criminalized women that they still had value in God’s eyes, and to teach them to pray.

But secondly, Butler realized that this suffering was the result of wider injustice, and that the problem could only be solved by social change.  She became involved in wider campaigns.  In the 1860s she was signing petitions for votes for women, petitioned Cambridge University for the right for women to take examinations, and became involved in running campaigns for the married women’s property act.  She published 90 pamphlets and books campaigning for women to be allowed to work freely and without restriction.  This was directly connected to her concern for the poor and marginalized.  When she received a letter defending the restrictions on women’s work on the grounds that ‘a women’s place was in the home’, Butler responded by calling such views ‘satanic’, providing detailed statistical evidence for how the restrictions on poorer women in particular led, not to a happy domestic life caring for children, but to struggling on starvation wages.  Should anything go wrong, they were left with little alternative but prostitution, and ‘the destruction of bodies, of consciences, of souls.’  As she sharply pointed out, men were not caught in the same trap.  Better-off women still had their dignity and self-respect destroyed by the necessity of marrying for mercenary reasons. 

Even when, later in her life, she campaigned for the raising of the age of consent for girls, she kept her distance from the ‘purity’ campaigners, not because she disagreed that promiscuity was morally wrong, but because they put all the blame on individuals.  For Butler, helping people to live as Christ called them meant helping them directly, and she recognized “fallen women” as victims of injustice who had very little choice.  Showing Christ’s love meant giving them a choice.  She criticized those who 'were ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.'  Instead, she argued, 'Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.'

Butler’s radical commitment to social action in the name of Christ, even at the price of public disapproval, comes out most clearly in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act.  This legislation, initially affecting ports and garrison towns, took no action against men who bought sex, but mandated forcible medical and police inspection of women suspected of prostitution.  There was no right to refuse these very intrusive gynaecological exams; if you did not consent, you were imprisoned.  Butler became one of a coalition of middle-class feminists, radical working men, and non-conformists who spoke out.  The campaign was described at the time as ‘the revolt of the women’; press and public were astonished to see ‘respectable’ women talking about venereal disease.  Butler, recognizing that this law was just another instance of more powerful men blaming and exploiting vulnerable women, bluntly used the term ‘surgical rape’, which treated women as ‘foul sewers’ rather than moral agents.  Butler risked insult and injury – during one by-election, she had to escape from a barn which had been set alight by her opponents, while the police looked on – but stuck to her guns, trusting that God called her, like all Christians, to uphold the oppressed. 

When we were talking about Butler earlier, there was some resistance to calling her a feminist – but I think she only makes sense in the context of first wave feminism (although the term ‘feminism’ only came into use in the 1890s, it had a precursor from the 1860s on in ‘womanism’).  Yes, her life was dominated by a wish to serve the poorest and most marginalized of Christ’s people – but the concrete form that took was an authentic and distinctively Christian feminism, which proceeded from the recognition that the Kingdom of Heaven has no second class citizens, however much the world may degrade and misuse them.