St. Luke's Church, Tittensor

In a week of a UK financial crash and of more threats and land grabs by a dictator, we could be back in the 1930s. People worried about heating their homes or being able to cook what food they can afford suddenly had the added concern of whether they might even lose their home.

There is a human habit of harking back to a 'golden age' when everything was wonderful and we had no worries. The British have been like that for many years, with frequent references in the press to the 'spirit of the Blitz', the days when everybody helped one another. Many a political campaign has been fought on this basis, offering voters the comfort blanket of those days of yesterday, when a pound could buy a week's food and no one had to lock their doors at night.

Unfortunately, the reality was different. As my late grandad, who worked as an overhead crane driver in a steel mill for almost his entire working life, said to me, 'Those who speak of the good old days have just got bad memories.' He knew what it was to stand outside a factory gate, hoping to be chosen by a foreman for a day's work. He knew what it was to carry on working whilst that steel mill, sat in the biggest industrial site in Western Europe, was targeted by Nazi bombers. He knew what it was to spend the majority of his life before the National Health Service, unable to be able to afford to see a doctor, buy any prescriptions or take a day off work ill, since all pay would be lost.

Those were harsh times but even they were better than had been experienced by his previous generation, ruthlessly exploited by factory owners who built huge mansions either in the countryside or just yards away from where their workers lived in two-up, two-down hovels, with outside toilets and one cold water tap, if they were lucky. In fact, my grandad lived in such a house until the day he died, never having had an inside toilet; I remember staying there many times and making the dark trip to that outside toilet whilst clutching the small torch he gave me (no electric light in there!). Yet only yards away were magnificent houses in which the wealthy lived.

Prior to those times, the earlier generations worked on the land, not owning any but devoting long hours to their labours.

These were the 'good old days', reflected somewhat dishonestly in pictures such as Constable's The Hay Wain and more realistically in Lowry's 'matchstick men' art. We might remember too that Lowry earned his living as a rent collector among those two-up, two-down hovels, since not many owned their homes.

The 'good old days' were really best for those with power and wealth, and it's always amusing that people love to watch 'Downton Abbey', 'The Crown' and their many predecessors, thinking of themselves as being party to that privileged lifestyle when the reality is that almost certainly their ancestors were in the hovels of those times, worried sick about how to feed their family that day or indeed just sick with the many usually fatal diseases that were endemic.

What those times and ours today shared, though, is one factor: hope.

It is astonishing how much people can survive through if they have hope and how tiny their resistance is when hope is lost. Hope for better times ahead, hope that one's children can have a better life than you can, hope for freedom after imprisonment, hope for peace instead of war, the list is endless. Hope is what drives people on, from stories such as the Shackleton expedition's astonishing feat in escaping the loss of their ship in the Antarctic, to Terry Waite's long imprisonment after being kidnapped in the Middle East and to the rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts from what must have seemed certain death after the explosion on their spacecraft on its way to the Moon.

Hope is what Jesus offered when he spoke to his disciples, to those who came to hear him and to those who attacked him. The hope that he offered was of the forgiveness of God and that of living forever with God after physical death. Those times in the Middle East were harsh, with political, military and economic oppression everywhere, in a world where the sick or disabled had to beg for their lives every day and where, in Israel, the rich crops were being transported off to Rome as a matter of course. When one reads of 'bread and circuses' in Rome, we need to remember that the bread was coming from cereals basically pillaged from places like Israel, the 'bread basket' of the region in much the same way the Ukraine has become for us.

Jesus's words will have resonated with his listeners. Here was a man who spoke to their hearts, who valued every one of them, no matter her or his place in society. He spoke with and listened to everyone and gave each of them the opportunity to be saved, offering each of them that hope. He taught that approach to his disciples and encouraged them to look beyond traditional religious and social boundaries. Who would have thought that Simon the fisherman would, three years or so after being called by Jesus, be travelling to see a Roman centurion, meeting with his entire household and, as Simon Peter, 'the rock', be baptising them all? Who would have thought that the pharisee Saul, arch-enemy of Jesus and all his followers, the man who probably participated in the stoning to death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, would spend the rest of his life as Paul, seeking to bring hope to Jews and Gentiles all around the eastern Mediterranean?

That hope still burns bright. It has been seen across South America, where peoples that have been oppressed by governments for decades have seen, in the words of Jesus, hope for their futures. Those words brought about the ideas of Liberation Theology, the view that the way forward was to read the Bible alongside the life that you were experiencing, to explain how you were being oppressed and to understand what you should do about it. Those ideas, at first opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, eventually produced fundamental change, with a realisation of the oppression of the poor and the development of opposition. The hope was not without cost; many people, including priests and bishops, died in their opposition to that oppression, killed for their beliefs, for their words and their leadership. Yet the hope marched on in the hearts of the people.

Which brings us to today. We are in the age of the consumer, when 'to have' is sold to us as being vital to our existence and when we are told that those who are poor or suffering should 'get on their bike', should 'work harder' or should 'get a better job and get off benefits'. Yet even in these times, people need hope and it is not only those who 'have not' that want that hope. It is also those who already 'have'. Even in a world where selfishness is being sold as a virtue, where climbing over the backs of others to acquire more is praised, where making vast sums from financial dealings is seen as the pinnacle of success, people want hope. They also have a fundamental sense of fairness that has not been destroyed, no matter how hard the attempt. Two thousand years of Christianity has fed that hope, allied to similar views from other faiths, but in the UK it is mainly Christianity that has led us to this point. In a country where many people now say 'no faith' when asked, there is a fundamental, cultural view that without hope, life is worthless. That hope remains a rock that cannot be shaken, no matter how hard the forces of greed, of selfishness, of oppression, let us say it clearly, the forces of evil, might try.

As we look out at the world this week, let us read and remember Jesus's words again; let us read the stories of him and think about the parables that he told a people desperate for hope. Let us reflect on what he was asking then, and is asking of us now. Let us think about what he meant when he said that how we treated the poor and the oppressed was how we treated him, and that he would remember that when he looked on us at the time when he judged us.

He gave some clear clues on how he would judge us at that time. In our here and now, we have the chance to do the right thing, to stand with the poor and the oppressed, to defend the persecuted and the reviled and to oppose the forces of evil. May God give each one of us the wisdom to listen and the strength to do as he said. Amen.

St. Luke's Church, Tittensor

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