Category: sermons

Midnight

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A sermon for midnight mass.

Last night, with still six sermons left to write, I found myself remembering that whatever I do or fail to do, whatever I say or don’t say from the pulpit, Christmas will still happen. Christ is still come among us. God is still with us. Christmas itself does not happen because of me. In fact, at this rate, it is more likely to happen despite me.

I’d be the first person to point out that the whole of the Christmas story depends on the compliance of the key players: Mary has to say yes, Joseph has to support her; the Shepherds have to listen to the angels and summon the enthusiasm to leave their flocks and visit the new baby; the magi have to notice the star and then take the risk of following it….

But to turn that around, isn’t the miracle that it all happened at all?  If God’s son was to be born on earth, there would have been far easier ways.  A different place, a different time. A less ad hoc plan. In fact, it almost seems as if the Christmas story happened despite all the things that could have, or did, go wrong.

Christ was born:

Despite Mary and Joseph not being married yet,  and the risk that both of them took to go along with the plan…

Despite the fact that they had to travel miles to go and register themselves for tax…

Despite the fact that with the Romans in charge, being born a Jew was a serious disadvantage in the first place…

Despite all the inns being full and the new parents and child having to sleep in a stable…

Despite Herod’s unspeakable act of rage and fear and jealousy as he tried to root out and kill the baby Jesus…

Despite all this, the incarnation happened. Christ was born. God came into his own world, became subject to its dangers, and ‘pitched his tent among our own’.

The Christmas story is a remarkable tale of how the purposes of God triumph over circumstance, over sin, over inconvenience, over hardship, over sheer improbability…  It was time for the Saviour of the World to come. And come he did, despite everything.

It’s a story that delicately balances the overwhelming loving purposes of God for the world, and the way that he draws us into that loving plan, giving his people crucial parts to play, and directing the action, but allowing and encouraging them to improvise and rewriting the script to take account of each twist and turn, and to allow for the weakness of those he has chosen for his starring roles.

Perhaps the key (at least a key, for me) in all these ‘despites’ is that perfection is not the aim. There is one thing that absolutely has to happen in the story: Jesus has to be born. Everything else was window dressing.  Yes, a house would have been nice rather than a stable, and yes, it would have been nice to do without the long journey. These things would have made the whole thing more comfortable.  But despite most things going wrong, Jesus was born. Christ came into the world. Emmanuel – God with us.

Seeing the story in that light made me question again my own priorities this Christmas. Was I, in fact, worrying about the window dressing, the things that would make everything feel good, and forgetting the one thing that mattered above all else? Where was the real presence of Jesus Christ in all that I am doing at Christmas, or had it got a bit lost in all the photocopying of service sheets, last-minute writing of sermons, singing of descants, guilt at not having done a great deal on the domestic front recently, and everything else.  You may all, of course, be paragons of organisation and domestic bless, everything ordered and precise, and all relationship healthy and happy, nothing at all to mar a perfect day.  If that’s you, that’s great, well done!  But I suspect you’re in the minority!

So that’s what I want to share with you tonight. You can have a Christmas in which everything goes wrong. And yet that same Christmas can be everything it needs to be if the one thing that really matters is in place. I’ve had to work out all over again – as I do every Christmas – what that one thing is, or it’ll get lost under all my attempts to get everything right, and then under all my flapping and worrying about having got so many things wrong or failed to do them at all. Christmas has such a lead-up and so much expectation that anything short of perfection can feel like failure.

God knew that the world he had made was – and still is – in a mess, and he knew that he was coming into one of the messiest, most difficult, and most imperfect times and places in that world. That’s where and when he chose to come, because the light shines most brightly in the dark.

So tonight, I invite you to work out what’s most important. Find your answer in a reading: it might be, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ or ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’; find it in a carol: it might be ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight’ or ‘be bear me Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay’; find it in a moment’s silence; find it in seeing a loved one you’ve not seen for ages, or in the greeting of a stranger; or find it in a prayer, in a sigh…. Whatever else you do, and however hard to decide to try to make everything perfect this Christmas, remember that the Christmas story is one in which almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and yet it changed the world, because it was the moment that God came to us and stayed with us, and he is with us still – and that depends not on us, but on God.

Advent 2 (Isaiah 11.1-10 & Matt 3.1-12)

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Today’s readings treat us to some wonderfully resonant words about what, or rather who, is to come.

It is likely that Isaiah spoke, or wrote his words over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, while John the Baptist spoke his in the months immediate lead-up to Jesus’ own ministry; Isaiah speaks of hope, reconciliation and renewal, John’s words emphasize  repentance and judgement, but these are just two sides of the same coin. The ‘Day of the Lord’ that many of the prophets promise inspires both hope and fear; the promise of judgement brings both hope of justice and restoration, and fear of condemnation.  As a friend of mine once put it, The Wrath of God is what the Love of God looks like from Sin’s point of view.  Thus, John stands as the last in the long and honourable (though rarely honoured) line of prophets who, each in their own way, ‘prepared the way of the Lord and made his paths straight’.

As Christians, we hear their words and we think of the person of Jesus as the promised Messiah, the shoot from the stock of Jesse (as we can read in the gospel genealogies), the one whose sandals John was unworthy to carry.  We see in Jesus’ life and ministry, his death and resurrection, and his promised second coming, the fulfillment of the prophets’ dreams, the culmination of everything they hoped for and promised.  During Advemt we re-live that ancient hope, fulfilled for us in the Christ-child, and we re-kindle our present and future hope, for the renewal of the earth the the purging away of all that is broken and polluted and destructive in God’s world.

But for me it always comes down to this: what is our own place in the hope that we cherish, what is our own role in creating the future that we long for?  I have preached many times about the need not only to long for the kingdom of God, but also to work for the kingdom of God. And it appears that John the Baptist agrees: ‘bear fruits worthy of repentance’, he tells the Pharisees. In other words, when you place your hope for renewal in God, do not forget your own part in making that hope come alive; for repentance to have any integrity, and indeed any lasting effect, it must be lived out in a life that is transformed and renewed, and John doubts whether the Pharisees are ready for this level of engagement with what he is offering.

It would have been easy, too, for the first hearers of Isaiah’s words to sit back and say, ‘One day God will send such a person, a Messiah, who will be all these things – full of wisdom and understanding and full of the Spirit of God – and our job is simply sit here and wait for that day’.  But Isaiah, and all the prophets with him, were at pains to point out that the justice that the Messiah would bring, and the peace, are also the work of every single one of God people. The prophets are constantly pointing out the inequalities that pervade even the chosen people, urging both the leaders and the people themselves to act with justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. Undoubtedly, the living out of the covenant in the Old Testament and the building of the Kingdom of God in the New Testament, are two sides of the same coin as well.

Working hard to establish the values of God’s Kingdom on earth, as well as praying for that end, does not in any way undermine the centrality of God’s free grace; rather it is about allowing that grace to work through us to bring about God’s purposes in this broken world.

This week we have been celebrating the life of a man whose who life’s meaning could be expressed in the words of Isaiah.  Nelson Mandela has been acknowledged as a man upon whom the Spirit of God rested, a man full of wisdom and understanding, a man who did not judge by appearance, but who strove his entire life for justice, for equity, and who, ultimately witnessed the reality of the miracle that he had prayed and worked for: a South Africa in which equality was possible, and in which the lion could lie down with the lamb. A man who, like John the Baptist, preached repentance, but who, even more remarkably, preached forgiveness.

He was also a man who embodied the wideness of God’s mercy for humanity. John talks of bringing forth children of Abraham from the very stones underfoot, and Isaiah speaks of a radical peace between diverse and conflicting creatures.  The sheer scope and generosity of God’s desire for the earth’s renewal is astounding, and we have heard again this week of the many ways in which Mandela’s legacy has had a profound impact not only on South Africa but on the whole world.

Nelson Mandela strove to be what Isaiah promised.  And if we find ourselves uncomfortable with anything that looks like a comparison between Jesus Christ and an ordinary human being, then we can remind ourselves both that Jesus came to earth as an ordinary human being at least partly to show us what true humanity looks like when it is lived out as God intended; and also that we, as the body of Christ, are called (both individually and communally) to be Christ-like, to continue the work of Jesus in the world.  If Isaiah describes our Messiah, then he also describes us, and every community that models itself on Jesus.

Thank God for those who show us that hope is not just an idea for the future, but a present possibility, something worth working for. Thank God for those whose lives mirror that of Christ: risking everything, giving everything, forgiving, bearing, enduring so much.  Thank God for the million and one small opportunities (and perhaps some big ones) that we have in our own lives to be all that Isaiah promised, and all that John asked for as fruits of our repentance. Thank God that he still uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things in his name.  And as we pray for the coming of the Kingdom – God’s kingdom of justice and joy – let us also pray that we may be the means by which that Kingdom comes and play our part in drawing heaven and earth that bit closer this Advent and Christmas and beyond.

 

 

 

The thing about Advent is….

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Jesus is coming - look busy

The thing about Advent is…

…that the readings tend to make it feel rather more about the second coming of Jesus than the first coming; there is more apocalypse than incarnation.  Great! At least all the judgement and warnings are a useful antidote to the Christmas Cheer that seems to begin as soon as Remembrance is over.  But how many of us are sufficiently self-controlled and self-motivated that we can do without any kind of oversight and accountability? Many of us need the promise of reward or the threat of punishment if we are give of our best, and I know that I’m among those who have signed off from twitter for a couple of hours in order to get something important done, by telling all my twitter followers to check up on me and ask me when I come back online whether I actually finished what I was supposed to have done.  The Holman Hunt painting of Jesus, standing at the door and knocking, can feel like both a promise and a threat, and the caption that many have added (as I have) may be more of a realistic statement about our own inability to motivate ourselves than we’d like to think.  The question, ‘if Jesus were to come again right now, would he be delighted with how I am spending my time and energy and gifts?’ will always be an interesting and challenging one. What we do during Advent, and Christmas that matter, although it may be different from usual, must still keep the integrity of who we are and not be at odds with what we do the rest of the time.

The thing about Advent is…

…that we still live in a state of longing and yearning; the old access card adverts encouraged us to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’ and countless sermons since have encouraged us to put it back again. But the truth is that the world is very, very aware of the fact that we are waiting, and yearning and wanting in so very many ways.  Those who sit in darkness long for light, those who are hungry long to be fed, many who are struggling financially long for the security of paid employment.  And those who are in debt long for a day – which must seem as if it will never come – when their debts will be cleared, when all payments have been made, when they finally own the things they’ve bought.  There is a lot of waiting and a lot of wanting, and a lot of yearning around. And that’s even before you factor in the years of faithful prayer for peace, for justice, for our common humanity and accountability to one another to win in the eternal battle with greed, self-centredness, and fear.  We are living in a world that longs for things to be renewed, healed, and transformed, and no amount of credit and quick fixes replace the hard work of striving, praying, urging, speaking out, and doing the work of renewal that God desires for us.

The thing about Advent is…

…that at the start of the church’s year we look back as well as forward. We remember with thanksgiving, with repentance, with awe and respect, with questions and doubt and with diligence on all the time before the incarnation: the prophets, the kings and queens, and the patriarchs and matriarchs all have their own place within the huge, overarching story of salvation, and our own place in that story is but a tiny  moment: our own stories are part-written, part-unknown, just as the world’s story is part-written, part-unknown.  We can look at the stories of the past and see in them – even the awful bits and the ugly bits – the patient purposes of God unfolding. We may look at our own lives and see no such pattern, yet we must continue to grasp the truth that we are part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world just as are any of the people we celebrate and revere from our faith’s heritage.

The thing about Advent is…

…that it only makes sense as a season of preparation for something more. Advent is always under threat from an early Christmas, but it is also under threat from a Christmas that has become less than it should be.  The momentous prophetic words that we’ll hear over the next few weeks only make sense if we celebrate Christmas in a way that honours their hope for the breadth and depth and height and scope of God’s love in Christ – and that’s whether we’re anticipating the annual celebration of his incarnation or the promise of his final coming among us to renew the earth at the end of all things.

 

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A homily for 3 before Advent on Luke 20.27-38

The notion of heaven as a place where we are reunited with our loved ones is a powerfully hopeful one. And this may well be an aspect of the life of heaven. I hope so. But it’s not all that heaven is.

The religious experts of Jesus’s day had a habit of making everything too small, too exact, too limiting.  Here, they want to undermine the abundant love of heaven and limit it merely to what human beings are able to give and receive in this life.  Now, earthly love is a wonderful thing: it can change the world, it can transform individuals, it can make the impossible feel possible.  In fact, the human experience of love is one of the most persuasive arguments for the reality of heaven: our hearts tell us that real love transcends death so logically there must be somewhere for that love to go.

And that’s only earthly love.  But the love that exists in heaven, free from the polluting effects of jealousy, self-centredness, laziness, and more?  That love is beyond my imagining. It certainly can’t be reduced to an argument about the extent to which marriage is still valid after we die.  The very fact that the life of heaven will be free of conflict and division, hurt and regret, means that it must be a very different kind of life from that we experience now.

It’s always going to be tempting to define heaven in terms of earth because earth is pretty much all we have to go on – it is our only real frame of reference. But heaven is so much more.  As my young son put it when he was five: “Heaven isn’t up in space, it’s all around us but differently real… God is outside time and space, so he could even look at everything backwards if he wanted to.”

So while my heart tells me that I can look forward to a heaven in which I am reunited with those of my loved ones who have died, my head tells me that this cannot be all it’s about. If it were only about me and my loved ones, then heaven would have been reduced to a sort of private preservation and perpetuation of my earthly existence, but without all the bad bits, and my looking forward to it would in fact be looking backwards.  Can this really be all it is?

The fact that this reading falls on Remembrance Sunday brings the biggest challenge to this ‘reduced’ and ‘private’ heaven.  For today our hearts tell us that heaven must be about reconciliation, genuine peace, the healing of old conflicts.  It cannot be a merely private matter.  And because heaven is communal and not private, it follows that we will be reunited not only with our loved ones but also with those we found it extraordinarily hard to love in this life.  Those against whom we fought in battles real or metaphorical.  Those against whom we competed, those who characterised some of the hardest times in our lives.  Because we don’t get to choose which of our enemies makes it into heaven, we have to have a vision of heaven that allows for a much deeper unity than the reuniting of those who managed to love each other even on earth.

But that again is good evidence for the inextricable link between heaven and love.  Heaven must be that place where love is perfected, or else the unlikely unity of past enemies could never be part of it.

This time of year in the church, what we call the ‘Kingdom season’, we reflect on the relationship between heaven and earth.  And on this very day we remember those whose entry into the life hereafter came through a complex mix of duty and conflict, cruelty and desperation, peacemaking and destruction.  We remember the circumstances in which their lives ended. And we try and hold together the hope for a heaven in which there simply is no place for conflict, with the reality of an earth that has been at war, somewhere or other, pretty much continuously for centuries.

So by all means let us look forward to being reunited with our loved ones.  But let us even more look forward to being united with those for whom earthly unity proved elusive or downright impossible. For with the Love of God, all things are possible.

Remembrance Sunday sermon

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For many of you here today, you are here because of a promise: the silent agreement that those who come back will remember those who do not. You’re here out of solidarity with all who share in the fellowship of arms, those alongside whom you have fought, at the very brink of life and death, with the certainty that you would die for them, as they for you:  greater love have no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends. You’re here because as long as you live it’s your responsibility to be here, to remember, to ensure that the act of remembering continues.

You’re here, perhaps, because you fear that if you don’t do this, nobody will. There are fewer and fewer people who have any first hand memories of the first world war, and in another generation there will be nobody left who remembers world war two. Every year the number of first hand witnesses dwindles, and every year there is concern that the will to remember may dwindle with them.

Yet, the remembering goes on. Churches up and down the country are packed this morning.  Every year another generation of young people from our uniformed organisations turn out to pay their respects.  In our schools children and adults alike – the vast majority of whom have no personal experience of serving their country – all engage in an act of remembering.   It seems that the will and desire to remember is as strong here as it has ever been.

I guess that like me, many of us here also have no direct memories of conflict to bring to mind today. We may have the stories of spouses, parents, grandparents, friends, and we may have our own imaginings of what reality lies behind the news reports from Afghanistan and other conflicts; but we come here not because we have our own memories to process, nor because of a promise to fallen friends and comrades, but because we recognise a collective need and desire to remember, for everyone’s sake.

For remembering is more than recalling. Today is a chance to re-member, to reaffirm that even if we have not seen action, we stand in solidarity with those of you who have, knowing that you have stood for us. Look around you now. If you, like me, have no direct experience of war, know that you share this space today with those who have risked everything in the service of their country and in the pursuit of peace.  If you are among those who have seen active duty, whether in current conflict or in years past, look around you now and see that your risks, your courage, your sacrifices, are honoured today by so many.

All of us are called today to re-member. To reaffirm that we are members one of another, united in our common humanity, members of one body, and that when one part of that body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. You are here to pray for all those who are in the midst of that suffering at this very moment – to pray for our service men and women who are risking life and limb this very day in the quest for peace and stability.

And so we come because we know that the world needs to be reminded that peace is not easy, and it is not cheap.  A few years ago a friend of mine, who is an army chaplain and now approaching retirement, was preaching at a civic Remembrance service, his 5 medals pinned to his preaching scarf.  The dean of the local cathedral asked him about them. “For a man of my age this is a lot” he replied.  “But look at young soldiers today – within a very short time they have 5,6,7 medals. You have to look back to WWII veterans to see lads wearing as many – and that speaks volumes about the state of the world.”

Behind those medals is the human cost: the lives lost, the injuries sustained, the mental scars from experiences beyond most of our imaginings, the marriages lived hundreds of miles apart, the constant nagging fear that mummy or daddy may not come home this time.  These cannot be quantified, and peace is neither easy nor cheap.  Every day the news reports can only hint at the truth that war is ugly, and complicated, and that, in the words of Mahatma Ghandi, “peace is not something that we can wish for, but is something that we make, that we do, something that we are, something that we give away”.

Among those who have ever put on a uniform and known what it is to fight, there are very few indeed that would ever glory in war itself.  All of us here, I think, long for a time when the sword might be beaten to a ploughshare.

But in the mean time, the reading from the letter to the Romans, is honest about the present reality – a reality of hardship, distress, persecution, famine, sword; a reality in which people are ‘being killed all day long’.

And yet this same reading tells us again a well-rehearsed but still startling truth: nothing – not even all these horrors – can separate us from the love of God.

If we want to find God, of course we can find him here in church today.  But he is not only here.  He was in the trenches in the two world wars, and at the Somme.  He was there when telegrams bearing news of tragedy and loss were opened and read back at home.  He was there in the hospitals and there in the silent poppy fields.

And today he is also on the dusty, pot-holed roads of Afganistan, and in the smoke-filled air, in the complexity and raw suffering in Syria, and in every place in which there is a struggle between what is right and what is easy, every place where the eternal battle between good and evil is played out in people’s lives…

However dark the world seems to be, the light of God is stronger.  When hatred seems to be taking over, the love of God is stronger.  And when all around is destruction and death, the life of God is stronger. For there is nothing that can separate us, or our brothers and sisters in the field, from God’ love – not in this world, and not in the world to come.

We know that there is nothing that cannot be transformed by God…and as we wait for the ultimate transformation of our battered world, there are smaller transformations going on…each of them a sign of hope.

I heard about a project in Mozambique, in which former rebels could bring their Kalashnikovs to a church-based charity, and swap them for a plough, or a sewing machine, the means to make a living and start again – the weapons themselves are melted down to make tools, furniture and even works of art.

The big picture often seems to be one in which world peace is a far-off dream, a political and practical impossibility.  And yet, even in the most dire situations, there will be such small signs of peace breaking out.  Sacrifices made, risks taken, second chances offered, humanity and yes, love, triumphing in tiny ways, against all the odds.  I have heard about such fragile signs of hope from those returning from deployments overseas, and I hope and pray that those serving in conflict zones today are seeing their own glimmers of light, their own sparks of hope.  We must continue to pray for all those whose duty and service it is to fan those sparks into a flame that will bring light to many, in the most unpromising conditions.

Our focus today is quite rightly on those whose lives have been given and taken away, and those who today still risk life and limb in the service of their country, and in the pursuit of peace.  But we must not do is fall into the trap of thinking that peacemaking and peacekeeping can be left solely to the professionals: the army, the navy, the air force, the marines, the politicians, the decision makers of the world, as if the pursuit of peace were a specialist activity that can safely be left to others.  It is our duty – all of us – as children of God to be peacemakers, to work to break the continual spiral of violence and aggression which causes so much destruction and death and grieves the heart of God.

Peace does not begin and end in Afghanistan or Syria.  In the conflicts of our lives here, in this village, in our workplaces and schools and homes and neighbourhoods, these are also places in which we are called to be bringers and forgers of God’s peace.

So let us commit ourselves to work as hard as we can for it, both here and throughout God’s beautiful but broken world, and as we do, let us remember again all those who pay the price.  Amen.