Originally delivered as a sermon by Hilary Willmer for Churches Together on Sunday 17 Jauary at 18:30.

Readings: Matthew 5 v 43 – 48 & Romans 12 v 9 – 21 Matthew 18 v 21 – 22

Introduction
I understand that I have been asked to talk with you this evening because Churches Together in Moor Allerton and Shadwell have been seeking to engage with the city of Leeds through the One City Project. I think that one group undertook the programme last year and more of you are planning to do so this year? A group of us from Moortown Baptist church have also been involved in the past – with quite significant results for our community engagement. Just out of interest – how many of you have or are planning to be involved? For those of you who may have no idea what it is, the One City programme, with roots back to the Faith in Leeds project of the 1980s, the time of Faith in the City and all that, is a series of weekly meetings and visits over a 6 week period which looks at trends and issues in social justice in the city, and reflects on the theological questions these might raise. Last year this included asylum seekers, drugs and debt; this year, from the end of February to the end of March it will among other things look at homelessness, prostitution and learning disabilities. This seems to me a really good example of an outworking of Christian Unity.

Main Part
I have been privileged over many years to have been involved with some of the projects that are featured in One City programmes– such as Nightstop, working with homeless young people; LASSN, Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network, which supports asylum seekers through a befriending scheme, teaching English at Home and through Shortstop which provides emergency accommodation in people’s homes for destitute asylum seekers. Now there is a long Christian tradition, certainly rooted both in the Old Testament and in the gospels themselves, which points to what in the 1980s was called God’s preferential option for the poor. Amos and Isaiah, for instance as we have heard, are full of demands to the children of Israel that they do not just offer meaningless sacrifices, but they actually confront the corruption in the legal system which benefits the rich; they also challenge the powerful to make sure they look after the widows and orphans; that they do not behave like greedy capitalists and get every little bit out of the system but leave enough at the edges of their fields for the poor to glean their own harvest. Contemporary parallels spring to mind all too easily! Jesus sought out those whom polite society had rejected – the Samaritan woman at the well, Mary Magdalene, blind Bartimaeus, the lepers, and those with mental illness such as the man looking after the Gerasene swine.

So it is really good that in a society where consumerism, greed and the terrible cult of celebrities seem to hit the headlines every day, Christians – and thankfully many others – at least try to adopt another approach which seeks to work for and with those who so often find it hard to find any place in our society. And of course globally with those many millions who would think that even the poorest in our society are wealthy beyond their dreams. And those trying to bring help to the suffering people of Haiti.

But what I want us to spend a little time thinking about tonight is a calling that goes even beyond this good and necessary concern for those who are obviously marginalised. What it actually is will become clear, I hope, a little later, but I would like you to be ready to think about it in the light of what I am about to describe. This will be already known to a few of you here, but I suspect there will be many to whom it is not.
So I want to illustrate this issue through a project with which I am most closely involved – because it is through that that I have had to wrestle with this additional Christian imperative. I will be brief about the project because I could easily spend the next hour talking about it – but I don’t think that would be very welcome. CROP, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping, support parents of children in this country who have been targeted and groomed into sexual exploitation by pimps or more often by sophisticated organised criminal pimping networks, which operate in much the same way as international trafficking gangs about which we hear much more. It was founded in 1996 by a woman whose own daughter was so targeted and groomed and at the age of 17 put on the streets by her pimp and then murdered by a man buying sex from her; money which would have had to be handed over to the pimp. Her mother heard of her death on the radio when it was reported that the body of a young girl had been found in a Doncaster car park. After the funeral, Irene was contacted by many other parents who said that their daughters too had been coerced into sexual exploitation – but until then they had thought they were the only people to whom this had happened. The man who had actually murdered Fiona was arrested and given a life sentence; but Irene always said that there was a second man responsible for Fiona’s death – the pimp who had groomed Fiona and then was able to live off the money which she – and other young girls ‘earned’. As far as we know, he still plies his trade freely on the streets of Sheffield.

In the last 7 years CROP has supported well over 400 families which range across the social spectrum and all parts of the country. Many of them tell the same story; of happy cheerful children, who suddenly at the age of about 12 or 13, changed into someone quite different. Very briefly what happens is that well organised sophisticated pimping networks skilfully befriend children, mainly girls, at the time they begin high school and when they have just a little more freedom. They may meet their friends in the park or in a shopping mall; young boys whom they may know from school are in that group; after a while these boys introduce them to a slightly older man, their brother or cousin. It could all seem quite innocent. This older boy probably has a car and showers the girl with gifts – jewellery, mobile phone etc. It is all very exciting to have such a ‘boyfriend’. But then it all goes horribly wrong. It becomes payback time; she is told she owes money; she cannot pay it back. ‘Well, there is a way’. She is taken to room full of men and told that if she is ‘nice’ to them her boyfriend will forget about the debt. And if she really loves him, how can she refuse to help him out when he has done so much for her? She is in effect gang raped. Feeling bewildered guilty and alone, she then changes into an anti social child, truanting, involved in drugs and petty crime, antagonistic and abusive to everyone – particularly her parents; she can be taken from city to city, forced to perform sexual acts with many men for her ‘boyfriend’ who is able to live in a comfortable life style on the proceeds. All this time her parents are trying to understand what is happening as their daughter comes and goes, and to provide a ‘normal’ home for their other children.

I have told that in some detail because I believe it is a stark illustration of the issue that I want us to think about tonight. It is that we are called to love and to pray for those who despitefully use us. When listening to parents who are ‘losing’ their precious daughter, all it seems possible to feel is extreme anger at the men who exploit these children; who are ruining their lives often for the long term; who take away all chance of their growing up to a normal adult life. And of course the anger is quite appropriate. But what is the appropriate thing for Christians to do with this anger? At CROP parent network days, when affected parents come together, people use very violent language, almost wanting these men to be hung drawn and quartered; and it is all too easy to understand why.

That is often the underlying sentiment too in anti-trafficking groups or others dealing with child sexual exploitation. But there came a real challenge for many of us at a European Baptist Federation anti trafficking conference in Copenhagen in 2007. While we were there we were singing a hymn which started off all very conventionally;

God of the moon and stars, God of the near and far
God of the fragile hearts we are, I come to you.

But later we all were shocked into something else
God of the rich and poor, God of the princess and whore – we didn’t like the language but had no difficulty in knowing that God was with the women and children with whom we were working. But then the last line of that verse was:

God of the pimp and paedophile, I come to you.

Initially many of us could not sing that; much discussion followed. What was being asked here? Was God really the God of the pimp? Did he really love them? What did that mean, as God is the Judge of all the earth who does right? Did love mean what it all to often means today – being nice to people and on their side? Were we actually being asked to pray for these men? How could we, after all that they did?

I have used this example because I think it puts the question which all of us have to face in one way or another; how can we love and pray for those ‘who despitefully use us’? What does it actually mean? We may not have to face extreme situations like the parents with whom CROP is working. We are not trying to live in the West Bank where if we are Palestinians, our land is being taken from us and we cannot use the only good highways because they are reserved for the Israelis; we are not in Dafur or in Afghanistan where our children might be blown up or die of starvation because of internecine wars. You may however have suffered some injustices – either large or small. Or you may be involved in some of the One City type projects as a worker or a volunteer – I don’t know. But merely by being human we can see that there always have been and are exploiters – and many seem to ‘get away with it’.

So – what does it mean – and how as Christians can we help one another to respond to this hard call of Jesus? Clearly it is not a soft or sentimental call. Jesus was never, I think, soft or sentimental. He did not say that the evil did not matter. He did not for ever seek to excuse people through dubious explanations of difficult childhoods. Time and time again he confronted exploitation wherever he saw it – maybe most notably in the turning of the tables of the money lenders in the temple who trampled on the poor. He spoke amazingly harshly to the Pharisees who twisted the letter of the law to their own advantage rather than living a life of humility and real service. He named evil, exploitation for what it was. And yet in all this there was something more – something that almost goes against all our natural sense of justice when all that we want is for the exploiter to ‘cop it’. As Jonah did as he sulked under the gourd. So what would it mean to ‘love’ the pimp – the men who organise and trap young girls into violent destructive sexual exploitation and wreak havoc on the lives of their parents and siblings? What would it mean for us in many other situations?

In the first place, I believe that we should name the evil for what it is and that these men should be prosecuted and imprisoned; that happens too rarely. But we should work for this not out of a vindictive fury, not out of a vindictive fury but because we have to believe there is some hope even for them. When Jesus came his message was that he was inaugurating the kingdom of God; in this topsy-turvy kingdom, the lepers and outcasts would have special place – but there could be justice and joy for all. Confronting the evil was part of his work because there was no place for that in his kingdom. And the evil that we have been thinking about tonight goes much deeper than just the work of the pimps; we are part of a society that is all too often complicit in what they do. Sexualisation of children from an early age; failure to recognise and confront what is going on; acceptance too often of media portrayal of this particular issue as ‘choices’ of children who have somehow freely entered into this life; blame of families for allowing it to happen. ‘It could never happen in my family’ Oh yes it could!

But in the second place we have to come back to the hope of the kingdom of God, the hope for all people that is based on forgiveness. Not a cheap and meaningless forgiveness, but one which can really want to seek the good even of the exploiters, even of our ‘enemies’.

So – what does this mean for us as we go about our every day ordinary yet extraordinary lives. How do we begin to have this mind which is the mind of Christ Jesus?. Not just to do good, to love those that love us; but, said Jesus, I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. So how do we love them? We do what we can to work for justice, but we pray that evil doers may somehow come to face what they have done and yet in that to know the love of God; that the power of His Spirit may break into their lives; that they may be freed from their bondage to evil. And that ultimately we have to entrust all this to God. ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay’ says the Lord.

So as some of you engage in the One City Project, as we live our lives in Moor Allerton and Shadwell, can we together encourage one another to reflect seriously and act upon this really hard call; to be realistic about and confront injustice, but to pray for grace to love in a way that really wants God’s will to be done in redeeming the lives even of those that we find most difficult or who have done great harm in our lives or the lives of exploited people. Can we begin to pray, as Jesus did when he had suffered torture and injustice, when on the cross He was confronting evil in a way that we can never really understand ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Can we really pray for the coming of this kingdom?

Hilary Willmer