Tag: sermon

The Baptism of Christ (Luke 3.15-17,21-22)

sermons

John the baptist’s job – his entire vocation – was to prepare people for Jesus’ arrival, to sow the seeds about baptism, about repentance, and about the coming kingdom.  I read the verses 15-17, and think, on Jesus’ behalf, “So, no pressure then?”

Four verses later, Jesus is there, and his first act is to submit to John’s baptism. Not because he has sinned, but because it’s the right way to start his ministry.  All that pressure, all that expectation. All that taking on the identity of the Messiah, but knowing that you’re not going to be quite what everyone’s hoping for.  All that promise. All that that work to do. No wonder Jesus needs to be baptised before he starts doing it all.

And he would be glad that he did.  Because when Jesus left the water, he heard the most wonderful words:

“You are my son, my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.”

If you’re the Messiah, if you’re confronted by all that pressure, all that expectation, all that promise, all that work to do, what you need most in the whole world is to know that you are loved, not because of what you have achieved, nor even because of what you will go on to achieve, but simply because you exist.

Every child needs to hear those words. And I tell every parent that as they bring their children for baptism.

And Jesus needed them too.

In the strength of those words, he faced temptation in the wilderness, beating the Devil hands down.

In the strength of those words, he emerged from his ordinary family to embrace Isaiah’s prophecy and announce the manifesto for his mission – to bring release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favour.

In the strength of those words, he went three years of ceaseless ministry, healing, teaching, embracing, arguing, challenging, and bringing life and love to those who needed it most.

In the strength of those words he walked the Way of the Cross, and accepted the suffering that was God’s love for the world, written in blood.

If anyone needed to hear those words, it was Jesus.

You are my son, I love you, and I am pleased with you.

But those words were not just for him. They are for all of us. We are not the Messiah. We do not have to face the Devil in person, we do not have to work miracles, we do not have to bring the dead to life.  But whatever we do face today, this week, over these next months, we need a safe place to stand, something to hang on to that is utterly reliable.

Today, we can put our own name on the front of God’s affirmation.  Because, like Jesus, we’ve lived half a lifetime or more, but today is the first day of the rest of our life. And we have God’s affirmation not because of what we have done, nor because of what we will do, but as a free gift, in the strength of which we can face whatever life will bring us.

 

Quiet Christmas 2012

sermons

Our Quiet Christmas service is for all those who find the festive spirit hard to come by. This is my talk/reflection for it.

It’s good that we’re here tonight.

Because tonight is about us, about you. Each of us has our own burdens that we carry on our hearts: for some it is physical pain, of illness or injury; for others it is grief, as we miss the presence of someone dear to us who has died; for others it is anxiety at what the future may bring for us, and for those we love and for the world. For still others, it may be a sense of disconnection with the festivities of the season, and we may not even know why; or an urge to get back to the heart of things, without the tinsel.

Whatever burden you bring tonight – and we will have each brought something – this service is for us, this service is for you.

But this is one of those services that we’d still do even if nobody came.

But it’s also about everyone who isn’t here: those who were too tired, or too sad, or too shy, to come.  Those stuck in hospitals and hospices and prisons and at home.  Those afraid to come out in the dark, those who don’t feel that church is for them.  Those for whom some hurt or grief is so recent or so painful that they daren’t re-open the wound. Some of those people you may know, and think ‘if only so-and-so had thought to come to this’.  For some, their burdens are known only to God. We bring their burdens too.

Every candle we light, every note we sing, every prayer we say, every silence spent in reflection, is for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the countless multitudes who know their need but feel that they have nobody to care or pray for them.

So it can seem as if this service is more about absence than anything else: the people who could be here but did not come; the people who we are separated from by distance, by conflict and disagreement, or by death. And in a way, it is.

But tonight is more about presence.

Not our presence here, coming to find God, but his presence in the world, already coming to find us. When we feel lost or alone, remember that God is the great seeker after souls.  He is the one who came to us, and who chose to come into what is still one of the earth’s darkest most difficult places, because when you are the light of the world, the darkness is where you are needed most.

Into all our emptinesses, all our absences, all our lostness, may the presence of God come and dwell and settle.  The hopes and fears of all the years, and our own hopes and fears, can indeed be met in him tonight.

Advent 4: duty and joy

sermons

Some thoughts on Advent 4 and the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth (Luke 1.39-45)

God asks a great deal of Mary.

He asks her to turn her life upside down for him. And he had presumably selected her because she had the faith to be obedient even to this most demanding of vocations. Either that, or he had already tried many, many other young women and had been turned down because he asked too much…

Mary has obedience in abundance. Her question is not ‘why me?’ but ‘how me?’ ‘How can such a thing be possible?’ And when the angel reassures her that with God, indeed all things are possible, she readily assents. God will make it happen. And she is his vessel, his means to come into the world.  An honour, a privilege.

But our gospel reading today picks up where the obedience leaves off, and tells us what happens next.  Mary visits her cousin, Elizabeth – the angel had already told her that Elizabeth, too, was pregnant, against all the odds, and unsurprisingly, Mary seeks her out – the older, wiser, woman in the family, someone she can trust to understand what has happened, and to confide in.  After all, it’s not as if she can talk to just anyone about this pregnancy.

But Mary’s visit to Elizabeth gives her much more than that. In fact, it gives both women much more. The moment when they greet each other – and the babies that they are carrying inside them also greet each other – that is a moment of heaven touching earth.  That is the moment for Mary when duty turns to joy. That is the moment when Mary realises that God has not just asked a great thing of her, he has also given her a great thing.

Through the gift of solidarity with her cousin, through the sharing of a common vocation, a common journey, God has given Mary and Elizabeth real, profound joy, as well as responsibility.

God asks a great deal of us. But he also gives us a great deal.

Our burdens are ours, but none of us is entirely alone in bearing them, even when it seems as though we are. One of the greatest gifts that God gives to us is each other. And it is so often the case that we can only truly find joy, or at least, fulfillment, in our responsibilities when we share those burdens that weigh heavily on us.

‘Take my yoke upon you,’ offers Christ, ‘for my yoke is easy and my burden is light’.  ‘And he shareth in our gladdness, and he feeleth for out sadness’ we are reassured in the enduringly popular Christmas carol, and again, ‘Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me for ever’.

The incarnation is the ultimate coming-alongside of God with his people. What we see here today in Mary and Elizabeth’s joyful meeting is a microcosm of what happens with the coming of Jesus into the world.  Our own solidarity with one another, our own sharing of burdens, and sharing of journeys, our own meeting with one another for worship, is likewise a microcosm of the incarnation.  In this way, our relationship with God does not have to be only about obedience, but can turn to joy.

Mary’s life was turned upside down, because she said yes to God. From the start she accepted that her life would never be the same again. But it was not until she came to Elizabeth that she truly embraced and enjoyed what God had given her – so much so that right after our reading finishes, she bursts into the song that we know as the Magnificat, the ultimate celebration of God’s promise to turn everything upside down and then make us question whether in fact things were really the right way up in the first place.

May the incarnation of Jesus be real this Christmas, in our lives.  May we, in turn, by our solidarity, our common journeys, our care for one another bring the reality of Christ’s presence to those we meet, turning duty into joy, turning ordinary into extraordinary, and turning back the right way up all those things that have been too long topsy turvey in our lives and in the life of the world.

 

 

 

Advent 3: this really is good news…

random thoughts, sermons

Since I wasn’t preaching today, this is just two random thoughts about today’s gospel (Luke 3.7-18).

Here’s the first:

At first glance it’s all rather grim, especially if one postulates that life-long anglicans are the nearest modern equivalent to those that John criticised for treating salvation like a birthright.

But John’s retort, rather than filling me with dread, fills me with hope. “God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones,” he says.

Praise the Lord for that. Because I don’t want my salvation to be dependent on my track record, or my pedigree.  I want it to be dependent on the grace of God.  Because, frankly, I trust the grace of God more than I trust my own past.  And, yes, I trust the grace of God more than I trust the church and the illusion of solid reliability that is increasingly showing signs of wear and tear.

Here’s the second:

Although I don’t much like justification by works either (see above – I prefer grace), I love the fact that John takes seriously the questions posed to him by the tax collectors and the soldiers.

“Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John tells them. They hear the words, and they want to live them out, they really do. So do I, I really do.  They ask him, “What do your words look like in real life?  What do they look like in my life?”

And the answers John gives are answers that can last a lifetime.  They’re practical answers that honour the situations in which these people find themselves, and show them, gently but firmly, how to make good choices in difficult times.

This gospel reading prompts me to ask my own question: What do the fruits of repentance look like my life?  And how will God help me, a mere stone on the ground, become a child of Abraham?  I give thanks today, because although John’s words are challenging, with God, everything is possible.

Judgement and Salvation

church resources, sermons

Some thoughts on the readings for Advent 2 (Malachi 3.1-4 and Luke 3.1-6)

Judgement and salvation – two sides of the same coin.

Throughout the Old Testament prophetic tradition is the notion of ‘The Day of the Lord’ – in today’s first reading, it’s ‘The Day of his Coming’ (and I imagine we’re all hearing those words to Handel’s music, just as we do the words from Isaiah quoted in today’s gospel).  The Day of the Lord was both a message of hope – that there would come a time when God would intervene and save his chosen people from the various nations and races that had persecuted them – and a warning – that when the Day came, everyone would be judged, and that included God’s people themselves. Their birth-right, their national identity, their history, would not protect them if their own behaviour was just as worthy of judgement, condemnation and punishment as the behaviour of their oppressors.

Equally, within the tradition of the Day of the Lord is contained the possibility that God’s love and care can be extended far beyond the confines of the chosen people.  Isaiah, in particular, contains many oracles that hint at the eventual ingathering of the nations, drawn by the love and power of God, and converging on the ‘Holy Mountain’.

But our two readings today are about more than judgement and salvation. They are about transformation. We may look on the image of the refiners’ fire and equate it to the fires of hell; we may think of it as a means of punishment, of destruction. But the fire here is not one of punishment, but of purification, it is the purging of everything that is unworthy of God, and unworthy of who we really are, created in his image. It is the liberation of all that is good in us, it is our transformation from unwieldy lumps of rock to pure and precious gold. And God, the master-refiner, is the only one who can truly see within us, through all the stuff that gets in the way, and help us to become who we were always meant to be.

This is God’s judgement.  It’s devastating, but it’s life-giving. At present we are people of dross and gold, but God longs to burn away all our impurities and enable us to shine.  We are fields of wheat and weeds, and God longs for the time when he can pull up and destroy everything about us that will never be fruitful.  This is his judgement.  And this is his salvation.  Perhaps they are not two sides of the same coin, but in fact one in the same thing.  Judgement and salvation together are the transformation that only God can achieve.

Who can stand the day of his coming?  Well, plainly nobody can.  The idea of standing tall and proud while we are transformed so wonderfully is absurd.  We may kneel, or fall, we may be tossed about and overwhelmed, but if we try to stand on our own two feet, resilient and strong, self-reliant and in control, then we cannot possibly embrace the judgement, salvation and transformation that God longs to achieve in us.  We cannot stand in the face of this process. And it’s OK that we can’t.

In the Isaiah passage quoted in Luke’s gospel we also see transformation at work, but it is no longer the personal transformation of our souls, it is the transformation of the whole of creation, it’s almost a re-creation of the whole earth, a re-alignment of tectonic plates, with mountains sinking into the earth’s crust and valleys rising up in response, so that the winding roads which previously picked their way through the rise and fall of the landscape can now run straight.

It’s a metaphor, of course it is. There is nothing wrong with hills, or valleys, or indeed of roads with corners. But the transformation of the landscape is a global picture of the transformative power of God, the power to re-create, to re-form a world in which nothing can get in the way of God’s self-communication to his world. There are no barriers, nothing blocking our view of God, nothing that can stand in the way of God coming to us.  His path is straight, and his purpose is absolute.

We live in a complex world. Our life’s journeys are full of twists and turns, of uphill struggles, and descents, often into the valley of the shadow of death.  Even as we look out over the flat fenland fields (and that passage always makes me think of the road between Earith and Sutton, on the way of Ely), we may wish, sometimes, that our journey of life were a little more like that.  Few distractions, few gear changes, few challenges, nothing unexpected, because we can see for miles. A journey in which we can clearly see our destination and head towards it, just as we can see the Cathedral at Ely on the horizon when we are still miles away from it.

But there is a great deal of transforming to be done before that time.  There is much in us, as well as in the metaphorical landscape, that blocks our view of God, or that blocks other people’s view of God.  There is much twisting and turning in our own journey of faith, and there is much dross mingled with our gold.  We are in dire need of transformation, all of us, and this is a time of year when we’re encouraged to admit that.

But rather than write off this transformation as merely a future moment, promised long ago but yet to be fulfilled, and pinning our hopes on this future ‘Day of the Lord’, however painful it may be fore us, might we instead look for the signs that just like the days of creation, the day of the Lord is a long, long, process, and the judgement and transformation are not just for the future, but are happening right now, if we are willing to submit to them? Every time we meet together as God’s people we bring before him our sins, and we ask him to purify our hearts and lives.  We bring before him the complexity of our lives and ask him to show us a path through it all.

God is at work transforming us, and transforming this world right now.  All around us there are hints and glimpses of this process. Even as we look towards its ultimate completion, we can give thanks for the fact that God’s work of judgement and salvation is well under way, and that we are very much part of it – just as much as Malachi, as Isaiah, as Luke, and as John the Baptist were in their own day and in their own way.