Waiting for dawn to break (Midnight Mass sermon 2013)

[a bit of a rough and ready draft, with deep gratitude to Julian Dobson, whose brilliant blogpost ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html) helped both shape and 'earth' my more disparate thoughts]

The rabbi asked his students: “How can we determine the hour of the dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?” One of the students suggested: “When from a distance you can see the difference between a dog and a sheep?” “No,” answered the rabbi. “Is it when you can tell the difference between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked a second student. “No,” the rabbi said. “Please tell us the answer then,” said the students. “It is dawn,” said the wise teacher, “when you look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”

Two years ago, in the middle of this church, a tent appeared, just before Advent, with a sign over its opening, ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of God’. It was a sign of revolutionary hope, at a time when tents were springing up all over the place, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square, to Wall Street and the City of London – canvas occupations of places the powerful thought they had under control; places where, all of a sudden, the hungry were being fed, all who were sick were being treated, the voiceless were being heard, impossible dreams were being dreamed.

But then, what? What has changed? A question echoing down the years not just from 2011, but from two millennia before. “Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.” What has changed?

In the House of Commons last week, government ministers and their colleagues laughed and jeered, or just didn’t bother turning up, for a debate on the causes of the spiralling increase in foodbank use, and then within days launched vicious attacks on the Trussell Trust, Church Action on Poverty, and others for daring to ask why people are going hungry in one of the richest nations in the world.

Less reported, for the first time this Christmas, people in prison have been banned from receiving parcels from their loved ones, including stationery, books, and clothes – under new rules introduced by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling.

And then are stories which won’t reach the newspapers at all, of men and women, young and old, stripped of even their pittance of jobseeker’s allowance over Christmas, for reasons as arbitrary and as unjust as not being able to attend the JobCentre because of a hospitalising illness.[i]

It is still night, and darkness is still with us. There is not enough light, it seems, to look into the faces of our fellow human beings and recognise them as our sisters and brothers. We are still too immersed in our own ideologies, our own self-interests, our own agendas, to hear the love-song the angels bring.

And yet...

In a Mexican slum there is a destitute old woman who each year puts up an extensive nativity set. The Christ Child is in the centre, of course, and around him she places dozens and dozens of figures of people and animals. This is no matched set! None of the figurines match; and they are not in scale with each other, some only an inch high, some several feet tall. She just clutters the set with whatever figurines she can find. But there is a great truth hidden in this mish-mash of nativity characters. Although the senora cannot read or write, she has seen something that is all too easily missed. In the Bethlehem stable, there is room for all. From the highest to the lowest, from king to shepherd, from old woman to new born baby.

On one level, it is merely a chaotic, mismatching nativity set. An eccentric tradition. A futile gesture. But on another level, it ‘prefigures’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. Just like the alternative spaces that Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London Stock Exchange, and many more, created. However fragile, however temporary, however imperfect. Places in which to practice living differently. Places where we can learn to recognise each other as sisters and brothers.[ii]

The pictures of Rembrandt are striking in many ways, but perhaps most so for the way he uses light and shade. Have a look at his picture of the Nativity. There is a man with a lamp, but the stable is not lit by the lamp. The light comes from the manger, the light from the newborn Jesus lights up the faces of those around him, enabling us to see them, and enabling them to see each other.[iii] This is where night ends, and dawn begins. In the stable. In the manger.

On the day of Nelson Mandela’s funeral, I led a small, quiet Requiem Mass in this church. I was accompanied by five men, as they remembered the uncle of one of them, who had recently died. They came from five different African countries, countries which have, at times, been at war with each other. Congo, Burundi, South Sudan, and others. And as we remembered those who had died, and shared bread and wine together, we recalled the words Archbishop Rowan Williams had used recently to describe Nelson Mandela:

“Most politicians,” he said, “represent an interest group, a community of people who vote for them and whose interests they serve. Nelson Mandela was different; he represented a community that did not yet exist, a community he hoped would come into being.”

‘Prefiguring’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. A place not fully a reality in today’s South Africa, by any means. But a place glimpsed, touched, tasted.

And I was reminded too of the words of another Archbishop, Christoph Munizihirwa, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bukavu, Zaire, who was killed by Rwandan soldiers in the process of surrendering himself, in the hope that two companions might be able to escape in his car:

“One cannot wait for conditions to be easy in order to act,” said Archbishop Munzihirwa, not long before his death. “People of good will must never be disheartened... There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried... In the midst of it all, the seed sown in the soil of our heart slowly germinates. God knows that there is no better way for him to express himself than through the weakness of a child. This is love telling us that it comes unarmed.”

The seed in the soil. The light in the stable. The tent in the city square. The nativity scene in the slum. The prisoner who forgives his enemies. The martyred Archbishop. The child in the manger. These are the small, fragile beginnings of revolution. And those in power do not like them one bit. And so they send armed police in to clear the tents. They attack churches and faith organisations for ‘scaremongering’, and, bizarrely, for creating the demand for food banks in the first place. And a threatened king in Jerusalem orders the massacre of all Bethlehem’s babies.

And what do we do? We keep on beginning the revolution. Returning to the stable. Planting new seeds. Putting up new tents. Forgiving new enemies. Hearing to speech as-yet-unheard voices.

There is a place not far from Reading in Berkshire called ‘Christmas Common’. It is the site, according to the history books, of a Christmas truce in 1643 during the English Civil War. A dangerous, if fleeting, moment of daring to recognise enemies as brothers or sisters, even in the darkness of the battlefield. But Commons like Christmas Common – and perhaps even a Common much closer to home – are also enduring places of shared resource, open to and cared for a whole community, places where ‘commoners’ of all backgrounds and circumstances can meet each other as equals, as neighbours, as sisters and brothers, and work, and play, and eat, and celebrate together.[iv] We have a dream for just such a common in the wasteland we’ve renamed ‘Bromford Meadow’. A seed sown in the soil, slowly germinating.

Our twice-weekly 'Open Door' is another such space where 'what-is-not-yet' breaks in to 'what-is'. It is what it says: an open door. And a warm welcome, a hot cup of tea, some friendly faces, and listening ears. A place where people might come in with 'I need', but discover among friends an 'I can', perhaps for the first time.

We get a taste of ‘what-is-not-yet’, too, every time we share communion together, whether it’s shared in a circle, where we can see the faces of our sisters and brothers; or shared in a moment together, each waiting to eat until all present have food in their hands – our own small ‘prefiguring’ of the time when no one goes hungry.

In 1990, the year that Nelson Mandela made his ‘long walk to freedom’, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (who also died this year) was translating a Greek epic telling the story of the Trojan War. It gave him some of his most well-quoted words. They are words for a night like this, as we celebrate once again the Word-made-flesh, and as we wait for dawn to break:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme” 

---

[i] I’m deeply grateful to Julian Dobson for highlighting these 3 examples in his brilliant blog post, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html)

[ii] See e.g. reflections on Occupy’s politics of ‘mutual recognition’ http://www.opendemocracy.net/participation-now/rc-smith-richard-gunn-adrian-wilding/alternative-horizons-understanding-occupys-po

[iii] E.g. http://my.opera.com/Anvui/albums/showpic.dml?album=5055882&picture=76437382

[iv] Julian Dobson, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’

The Good Samaritan & the FoodBank: it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'

I was recently privileged, along with my sister and brother clergy from Birmingham Diocese, to listen to the Director of Christian Aid, Loretta Minghella, talk to us on 'Grace and Justice', on the very morning that the G8 leaders were drafting their communique on global tax justice. It was a privilege, particularly, to hear someone in such a vital public role 'think in public' through the complexity of responding to a political agreement which would always, inevitably, be a compromise between global justice and vested interests, an 'attempt' which would always also be a 'falling short'. How to respond with 'grace', but also with an undiminished longing for justice?

But Loretta's talk begin in much more intimate territory - with the death of her brother. Anthony Minghella is known to many as an accomplished film director - 'The English Patient' among his most well-known works. But for Loretta, Anthony was first and foremost her brother. His death, 'premature' if that word means anything, left her, as the death of a loved one leaves any of us, with a deep sense of the loss of a unique, irreplaceable human being. But in that realisation, for Loretta, emerged the more universal insight that each person, whoever and wherever they are in the world, is similarly unique, irreplaceable. And it was in that insight, borne out of intimate love and loss, that her passionate commitment to global justice came to life.

This morning, we heard one of the most over-familiar stories of the Christian Scriptures: the Good Samaritan. Its familiarity has bred in us something even worse than contempt: indifference. But we should try to return to it with fresh eyes, to rediscover its shock value, to let it challenge us afresh. The lawyer comes to Jesus to 'test' him: "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks. He knows the law, and he knows it well: "Love the Lord your God with everything that you are, and Love your neighbour as yourself." Simple to say, demanding, impossible even, to achieve. So he asks a supplementary question: "Ah yes," we hear him saying, "but who is my neighbour?" He is after clarification, definition, boundaries, limits.

And Jesus tells him that story. The one about the priest and the Levite, the good, holy Jews - who pass by on the other side of the road from the man dying in the ditch. And the Samaritan who stops and helps. The 'good Samaritan', we call him - a synonym for kindness, neighbourliness, responsible, active citizenship - the epitome, perhaps, of the 'Big Society'.

The perennial danger with the story is that we take from it only Jesus' final words: "Go, and do likewise." The trouble is, of course, that that's really not the most important thing. The story's not about 'do' - it's about 'who?' It's about a Samaritan: the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' (putting ourselves in the shoes of the good Jews hearing the story for the first time) are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid. This is 'my neighbour' for that good Jewish lawyer: the one he can't even bring himself to name.

There is renewed excitement, in some quarters, at the moment, about the possibilities for "the Church" (which is often unquestioningly translated as "the Church of England", and that in itself is an issue) to take on the 'provision' of some vital 'services' from the State, as the State withdraws under the cover of 'austerity', or 'localism', or some other guise of neoliberal ideology. One of the latest sparks of excitement came with the launch, at Lambeth Palace last week, of a new report from ResPublica, 'Holistic Mission: Social Action and the Church of England'. The good old CofE, the report argues, with its army of (largely middle-class) volunteers, can provide services and meet needs in ways more holistic, more local, and more personal, than any institution of the State.

This is dangerous, seductive stuff. The seduction is in the possibility not just of being 'useful', but of being 'special', being 'effective', being 'needed'. Many in the CofE mourn the loss of such epithets, and would jump at the chance to recover them. It is much of the attraction (as I've argued here before) of the FoodBank franchise, celebrated by David Cameron as 'the Big Society in action'. We can be society's 'Good Samaritans' once again.

But that is to completely misread the story. Because it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'. It is a challenge to recognise the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid... as our neighbour. And not just as one who presents to us with 'needs' to be met - but as one who we need, because it is us, it turns out, who are lying half-dead in the ditch.

And that is the truly dangerous message of the gospel. Because it destroys all our carefully-constructed 'professional boundaries', class divisions, 'meritocratic hierarchies', gated communities and financially-entangled 'securities'. It reveals for the dehumanising heresy it is the project of creating our society as a 'hostile environment' for outsiders, and for insiders too who don't fit the current economic model of the 'good' (meaning financially productive) citizen. It refuses our attempts at putting 'pragmatic' limits on who we count as our neighbours, and instead throws us into the limitless ocean of impossible neighbour-love, in which every single unique, irreplaceable human being is swimming. This truly dangerous message is the real 'holistic mission' of the church, if only it would dare to embrace it. And it's not going to make any government happy if it does.



[I'm indebted to Ivan Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan for much of the thinking behind this piece. You can hear him talking about it here, and there's also an excellent introduction to it here. I'm grateful, as ever, to Cormac Russell of ABCD Europe for pointing me in the direction of Illich.]

'Social Inclusion', 'squeezed' and 'broken' middles

Partly for the PhD, and partly because life and research are flowing into each other a lot at the moment, I've been doing a bit of thinking around the language we use to describe 'poverty' and 'inequality'.

I found a fascinating paper which helped to shape the international anti-poverty campaign 'The Rules', which explores the pros and cons of some of our most familiar metaphors for inequality:

• inequality as horizontal distance ('spread', 'gap', 'divide', etc.) - it's 'tangible', they suggest, helping us make sense of an otherwise abstract concept, but the problem is that 'gaps are about end-states', as a metaphor 'it remains silent about how we arrived at this divided place'
• inequality as vertical difference ('top' and 'bottom') - the big plus is that it gives us some sense of causality and connection: 'People are on top because others are below them.' But the problem is the flip-side of this: it 'introduces a hierarchy with a sense of superiority and deservedness for those on top', and it allows the pervasive idea of "trickle down" economics 'to make sense'.
• inequality as imbalance (e.g. the image of the weighing scales - 'when one side goes up, the other goes down') - again, it brings 'interconnection' to the foreground, but it triggers 'zero-sum thinking', encouraging 'those on top' in their determination 'to stop any attempt to alter the status quo.'

What the paper proposes, instead, is to describe inequality as a barrier. If we see 'life as a journey', then 'when things go well, we often say they are moving forward and when they're not we're stuck in a rut.' A barrier, they suggest, is something that denies people access: 'Access means you are no longer bound. This affords individuals the freedom to give their talents to the economy, and the nation, in turn, to benefit from what every individual offers.' It's an image that enables connections to be made between rich and poor, and encourages us to see reducing inequality as a co-operative exercise of 'removing barriers'. The objective for 'The Rules', they suggest, is 'to replace [the zero-sum, winner-takes-all] game with another one that reframes the priorities and outcomes of the system into a team-oriented game where success is measured by the increasing quality of life for all people.'

So far, so good? And familiar, in many ways. The language of 'barrier' sounds remarkably like the language - common in UK policy-speak since Tony Blair - of 'social exclusion'. Surely it's all about working for a more 'inclusive' society - just as, in Birmingham at the moment, we're committing ourselves to become a more 'inclusive' city?

But there is still a problem - a big problem - with this language of 'social exclusion / inclusion'. I came across another paper, from that quirky academic field called 'discourse analysis', which punches a big hole in our desire for 'inclusion'. Analysing policy documents and speeches from the last Labour government, Veronika Koller and Paul Davidson argue that:

• 'social exclusion / inclusion' paints a picture of society as 'a bounded space with a normative [i.e. 'good'] centre and a problematic periphery,' with the aim of policy and practice being to move people 'towards the centre'
• those who claim to be addressing 'social exclusion' cast themselves in a positive light, 'addressing our visceral need to be protected / sheltered / on the inside'
• by using 'social exclusion' as a noun, rather than a verb, we are distracted from the vital question of 'who is responsible for the excluding?' (which may well, in reality, be precisely those 'on the inside') and how the 'excluded' came to be so
• those who find themselves 'on the outside' (who are often further segregated when described as being 'hard to reach') therefore, apparently, have no one responsible for that state, 'apart from themselves perhaps' - it also deprives them of any sense of positive agency or life 'on the outside' (because positive agency and life are defined precisely by being 'on the inside')
• rather than addressing the causes of 'exclusion' (i.e. inequality), policies focus instead on short-time ways of 'bringing the excluded in', particularly through getting people into paid work
• 'social exclusion' as a noun becomes a 'malleable object', an object which can be 'addressed', 'measured', 'reduced', which in turn makes 'voluntary and community groups' enlisted in the 'social inclusion' agenda 'accountable to government, aligned with its models of society and bound to its agenda'
• by deflecting attention from 'the interconnections within society and how action within one sphere directly impacts upon another', policy-makers are therefore enabled to present themselves as 'problem-solvers', while at the same time 'pursuing policies that may work toward perpetuating inequality'

It's a dense argument to follow, but a powerful one. What we need, when describing poverty and inequality, are language and images which highlight the connections - relational and causal - between rich and poor, which foreground the normally-hidden negative agency (i.e. self-interested perpetuation of inequality) of the rich and positive agency (i.e. lives that are far from the 'subnormal' that the Daily Mail would have us believe) of the poor.

We also need, to go back to 'The Rules', a 'creation story' for poverty. How did it come to be? This might be one way of telling it:

"Poverty arose recently in human history. For tens of thousands of years, it simply did not exist on anything like the scale we live with today. When everyone lived in small tribes and shared the spoils of hunting and gathering, it was normal for everyone to have enough to eat when food was available. These tribes persisted across time by cooperating with one another and being sure everyone was taken care of. When bullies and cheaters tried to assert power and take more than their share, they were kept in place by the collective sanctions of the group. Then everything changed. Agriculture was invented and the tribes could settle in one place, forming great city states as their populations grew. As these city states became larger and more complex, forms of aggressive competition became normalized and then institutionalized. Domineering elites formed from the funneling of wealth from the working masses to islands of privilege. This overriding of social sanctions eventually led to the wholesale capture of many essential rule making structures by elites, and a world in which the prioritization and protection of their own privilege over the welfare of the many became the norm. Thus was poverty born in the shadow of imperial thinking and it has been with us in one form or another ever since." (The Rules)

An alternative way of telling the 'story', and just as powerful, I discovered in the work of Scotland's 'Poverty Truth Commission':

I emerged from these two papers, and Alastair McIntosh's reflection above, with a couple of thoughts.

The first was a renewed concern for Labour's recent favourite phrase, 'the squeezed middle'. Targeted at what they think are their 'swing voters', it no doubt has power. But it is morally dangerous. Whether we imagine it as a 'horizontal' or a 'vertical' metaphor, to be 'squeezed' you have to be put under pressure from both sides. The metaphor therefore legitimises attacks on the poor as somehow responsible for 'the middle' being 'squeezed' - when it is clear the significant agency comes yet again from the rich and powerful elite.

My second thought is that there is another kind of 'middle' that we need to bring into view. It's what Gillian Rose called 'the broken middle' - and while her thought is mostly beyond me, drawing on a really helpful and brief summary of her thinking, I'll attempt an even briefer brief sketch here...

• We all want to feel innocent, in the right - which means 'others' are in the wrong, guilty
• Most utopian movements have based themselves on this 'solidarity of the innocent' - against a 'guilty other' - or have sought to escape completely from the messy reality of the world
• Rose proposes an ethics of engagement in 'the broken middle': the messy, complex, compromising reality of the world
• This requires us to sacrifice our innocence and our desire to be right, and instead discover ourselves as part of a 'solidarity of the shaken' - part of communities bound together by their shared acknowledgement not of innocence but of compromise and guilt
• To live in the middle is to experience the impossibility of reconciling different positions, and to be 'torn apart' - but this is where the sacred is
• The key virtue of the broken middle is 'anxiety' - allowing ourselves to be unsettled, uncertain, insecure - within a community of people who have very different and deeply held ideas

I think I'm suggesting we start renouncing any images of society where we, conveniently, find ourselves 'in the middle' - 'socially included', 'squeezed' or otherwise 'innocent'. With 'The Rules', I reckon there is some value in that metaphor of 'life as a journey' and inequality as the actions of some placing 'barriers' in the way of many others. With Koller and Davidson, we need to foreground the agency of all involved - we are 'all in it together' - but we need to recognise much more clearly and honestly the effects of our actions and inactions on each other. With McIntosh, we need to acknowledge the violence at the heart of it, and that finding a way forward from such violence is going to be anything but quick and painless. And with Gillian Rose, we need to invite all to meet somewhere in 'the broken middle' - where our stories, our lives, our truths, can be told and heard, not from a position of innocence, but of 'shakenness'.

The thing is, many of my neighbours are already living in 'the broken middle'. They know all too well what 'the messy, complex, compromising reality of the world' feels like. I suspect it's the richest in our society that will have the  most trouble getting there - getting over their presumed 'innocence' and the barriers of their own making, to find themselves 'included' in the 'solidarity of the shaken'...

Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?

Yes. That’s the catchy headline of a discussion piece on the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11674864) that caught my eye yesterday. “The row over housing benefit has led to warnings of ‘social cleansing’,” it begins. “But can those on low incomes really have an entitlement to stay in expensive localities?”

Enter Shaun Bailey – a youth worker (curiously), and the unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith: "You can talk about your right to live in the community where you grew up, but where do you get the right to spend other people's money? I'd love to live in Buckingham Palace but I can't afford it," he adds. "The flipside of having a right to stay somewhere is that people aren't prepared to move around. The middle class have always been prepared to go all over the country to find work."

And then there’s Lynsey Hanley, author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’, which ain’t half bad as books go, chronicling, as the article puts it, “the ghettoisation, social breakdown and increased pressure on services that resulted from moving the working class to peripheral housing schemes… Gentrification,” she argues, “has caused many low-income households to suffer pricing them out of communities that they once called their own.”

But look closely at her contra-argument to Bailey’s… “[Hanley] argues the poor have every right to live in wealthy areas - because the wealthy rely on them more than they admit: ‘We need these people to do many of the minimum-wage jobs on which we depend - cleaning, catering, retail and so on… If you take away housing benefit and shift them out, this country's high transport costs mean they'll have no incentive to come into our cities to work. What I'd say to David Cameron is: come back to me when the minimum wage is £12 an hour.’"

My first reaction was to cheer Hanley’s last sentence. And then the cheer got stuck in my throat. It was the “we need these people” that did it. But let’s first wind back a bit, to the premise of the article in Bailey’s comments…

1. ‘Rights’ and the housing market

‘Do the poor have a right to live in expensive areas?’ the article asks. But why should ‘place’, let alone ‘home’, be defined first and foremost by the capricious and pernicious whims of the housing market? Why should the fact that ‘the market’ has sent house prices through the roof in a particular area mean that people who have called that place ‘home’ no longer have a right to do so?

When Article 17 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”, did it imagine an exception clause to allow for ‘the housing market’? Or perhaps those who rent have no such rights?

2. Mobility vs. Stability

For Bailey, though, there is also a societal duty to remember: we should “[be] prepared to go all over the country to find work”, apparently. And work that can pay for, not the house you might want to call ‘home’, but simply the house you can afford, presumably (I don’t think the circular logic’s mine, here).

But more than that, it seems that being prepared to move to ‘find work’ (read: being a productive cog in the economic machine) trumps any value there might be in “staying somewhere” – like, rootedness in identity, stability in relationships, trust between neighbours, any kind of depth to a sense of community, commitment to a particular piece of earth, for example. All things that should be in the bloodstream of Christians, for whom the Benedictine vow of ‘stability’ – the commitment to finding God among these unlikely people in this unpromising place – sums up much of the incarnational gospel.

3. “We need these people”

But lastly, back to Lynsey Hanley’s throat-sticking phrase. “We” – the middle-classes, obviously. “These people” – that section of society whose purpose in life, apparently, is to do the minimum-wage jobs on which “we” depend. So we need them living close by, says Hanley, or they won’t bother coming to sell us sandwiches and suits and clean our offices.

I’m not going to labour (sic) here over the whole system of assumptions that assigns ridiculously different ‘wage values’ to different forms of work, although that surely needs questioning more than ever, in the world of sky-high salaries for footballers and (even failed) bankers.

What I want to pull apart here is the assumption that some people (“these people”) should be defined – in both their ‘purpose’ and their capacity to call some place ‘home’ – solely in terms of the ‘needs’ of some other people (Hanley’s “we”) – while the latter group apparently get away with defining their own ‘purpose’ and place called ‘home’.

I want to say to Lynsey Hanley: “these people” are not means to my middle-class ends, they are my next-door neighbours, they are my co-workers in our neighbourhood, they are among my friends. “Their” purpose, just as mine, is to grow into our identities as beloved children of God, who has chosen to move into our neighbourhood and call it ‘home’. And our homes (the places where we learn to ‘dwell in love’) and our neighbourhoods (our schools for loving others) must always trump the so-called ‘needs’ and whims of ‘the market’.

So I’ll concede this to Hanley: “we” middle-class professionals might “need these people” – but not as a definition of their identity, but of ours – “we” need “them”, because they are the neighbours that we need to learn to love. While they remain strangers, and not friends, we are failing to love. And while they remain at a distance, rather than next-door or around the corner, our opportunities to learn to love them are pretty slim.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (recently author of The Wisdom of Stability, among other things) suggests that Hanley’s “we”, the world’s rich, should get serious about “loving our enemies”, the poor. It’s shocking, at first listen. But let’s get real about this. What do you call people you do your best to avoid and distance yourself from? What do you call people you don’t look on as equals? What do you call people you implicitly blame for any misfortunes you perceive yourself to suffer? What do you call people you talk about ‘getting tough on’, or ‘cracking down on’? What do you call people you see as competition for scarce resources that you would rather have to yourself?

“Love your neighbour” is in danger of fitting in all-too-cosily with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ rhetoric – at least while the middle-classes sit comfortably with a narrow view of their neighbours as the nice family who live in the equally-nice house next-door.

“Love your enemy” is much more dangerous. It dares to highlight the relationships we would rather ignore, or define in distanced, economic terms – rather than in real, mutually vulnerable, face-to-face encounter. The relationships where power is seriously unequal, where mutual suspicion reigns. ‘Love’ here becomes anything but cosy and comfortable. It cries out for a courage that overcomes distance, a humility that re-balances power, a vulnerability that seeks to nurture reconciliation and mutual trust.

The good news of the gospel is that it is just possible for enemies to become friends. The one who made his home among the poorest invites us all into a kingdom – a common wealth – where, beyond anxiety, we discover there is more than enough for all, and where we can delight in making our homes together, enjoying the company of a glorious array of strange and wonderful, God-created neighbours. The invitation is also a challenge to us all: if we dare, we can choose to move in right now.