3rd Sunday of Advent 2020

3^rd Sunday in Advent 2020.

Gaudete!  Rejoice!

"Have you started the tour around Flax Bourton, looking at the Advent windows yet?  Ruth has set us the title, “What is Christmas to you?”

And Christmas is a lot of things to me; midnight service, Christmas morning; a failed attempt to have our major celebration on Christmas eve so that we were free to visit folks on Christmas morning.  That worked for a while, but we ended by having lunch at about 4.00 pm.  Not so good.

And then there’s the years of what I call “Celebrity Chefism”.  All those years of undercooked, overcooked, forgotten and burnt attempts to follow Deliah or NIgella or whichever chef of the moment. 

Until I discovered grown daughters, pre-lunch sparkling wine and Jamie; St Jamie.  Under his distant tutelage and the girls’ help, I came across the “Two-hour turkey rest”, the time to join the rest of the family and just relax.  Ah!  Christmas.

But what have we put in our window?  What do Ali and I really think Christmas is about?  It’s another piece of Isaiah, this time quoted by Mary,

(in the King James version: )

He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered
          the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
          and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
          and the rich he hath sent empty away.


It’s there not because it’s what our Christmas has been, heaven knows we’ve been almost as consumerist as anyone else, but it’s because it’s what Christmas should be about.

“He hath filled the hungry with good things;
          and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

Vividly, that just isn’t true.  And this year, more than any I can remember, that has been a real preoccupation of mine, and of many others.

Mary felt it; John proclaimed it.  We see an image of John as a strident man, a challenge to the authorities.  I’m afraid I too can do Strident!


And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’  He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’  He answered, ‘No.’  Then they said to him, ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us.  What do you say about yourself?’ He said, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord” ’, as the prophet Isaiah said.

This is John, the last of a long line of prophets before Jesus; self-proclaiming his identity, his authority and his role. 

And John says, “He is here; right among you now.” 

I am so far removed from John Baptist in qualification that I don’t really know how I have the gall to speak today, but I, as so many of us, have become angry during the year.  Really angry.  I have had to turn off the news; I was becoming sickened, physically, by it.  I have endlessly bored dear friends by my preoccupations whenever we have met or been allowed to meet.

The bitterness; the abuse; the manufactured division; the downright lies – so vividly seen in the USA of course - but we are by no means immune.  The deterioration of the standards of our national life; the insults, the blaming.

Enough!  Who will then speak up for us?

In response to the agony of the American summer, we see Lewis Hamilton, carrying his team to change their car livery and their entire track-side uniform in support.  And we see sports folk taking a knee at the beginning of matches, despite haranguing and abuse.

Such nobility, such witness.

But world-wide, we see the eventual, condescending “there, there” of the response to the death of George Floyd in Minnesota; a kind of indulgent side-lining.

So, what’s changed?



John says, “He is here; right among you now.”  And Jesus comes to be baptised, to begin his earthly ministry.  The Kingdom comes, and yet look!  Look!

Where do we see the rich “sent empty away” and the poor filled with good things? 

But the Kingdom IS here; I tell you, we see the Sisters of the Church, and food banks, and secretive individual donors and Marcus Rashford, all saying, “this will not do”; and the people on the street clapping in gratitude for our front-line workers; and a recognition that we are not individuals but community.

But then we see rule-bending, and dissembling apologies for “mistakes” in arranging parties; so much that is just inconsistent with that other, altruistic style.

We are a divided world, more than ever.

But John says, “He is here; right among you now.”

Two thousand years, an astonishing decrease in infant mortality world-wide, a real reduction in defined poverty, and food banks in one of the richest countries on earth.

Isaiah says:

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
   because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
   and the day of vengeance of our God;


But I have tried your patience sorely enough. I’m amongst friends, good, giving friends and this is not the message that you deserve.

But it’s the message that we need.

Pastor Niemőller
          in a post war confessional piece wrote:

          First they came for the Communists
          And I did not speak out
          Because I was not a Communist…..


If I have offended you, annoyed you, disgusted you, turned you away, I’m truly sorry.

But I cannot, I dare not be silent.  John, the last of a long line of prophets before Jesus; self-proclaimed his identity, his authority and his role. 

‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord”

And now we have a prophetic calling of our own. 

We are called to be the prophets of the Kingdom time. 
                   .
Greta Thunberg spoke out; Wilberforce spoke out; Marcus Rashford spoke out; and with his dying breath, George Floyd spoke out, unknowingly declaring yet again, “Let my people go”; his inability to breathe darkly echoing centuries of bitter reality.

But news does not declare itself, does not publish itself.

But how are we to spread this news?  By every means possible; by our lives, by our words, spoken, written, texted, emailed, Skyped.

I have a friend who keeps on writing to the newspaper – it’s always a take on the same issue – but sometimes he gets published and someone reads. 

Folks implore us to write to our MP – and sometimes she or he reads our letter and sometimes you get a specific response. 

People joined peaceful protests and sometimes the powers that be paid attention, or didn’t. 

And if they don’t, if they don’t, we can at least say, “First they came for the Communists, and although I was not a Communist, I spoke out.”
                            
We can speak out, but how do we prophesy?
 
We prophesy as Greta Thunberg did by our standing up and declaring “enough”!

We prophesy as Hosea did by admitting to our own fault, to the church’s fault down the years in the care not lavished on children and vulnerable people. 

We prophesy as Rosa Parks did by our refusal to let public expedience or indifference go unchallenged, or only limply approved of.
         
We prophesy as Nelson Mandela did by confronting violence and bigots who declare "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."   

We prophesy as Tutu did by holding tight to Galatians 5, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."

We prophesy in our turn by not shutting down those awkward conversations with an equally awkward platitude but with a clear statement,

“Well, I’m afraid we shall have to disagree, because that’s not my understanding of my Lord’s purpose.  Sorry.”

We must prophesy; we have been silent for too long.

God has sent us all to bring good news. 
          He has called us all to be prophets.

It is our time. 

 

A received comment:

Dear Peter

Thank you for your thought-provoking sermon. I have been thinking it over.

Did you see the Simon Sharma series The Romantics? They read a poem by William Blake written 170 years ago in which he asks how is it possible that yards from the parliament of the most powerful country on earth children were starving? It was recited with such irony.

However I also thought you might enjoy a book we came across called Factfulness- 10 reasons why you are wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. It’s a bit like the radio 4 show More or Less-but very readable. He shows  how there are now fewer wars than there have ever been, less starvation, more immunisation, better education and more female emancipation than ever. We hear more about the bad stuff because communications are so much better these days and somehow bad news is what gets reported.

Barrack Obama, when asked which era of history he would like to live in, replied “now! Of course now! Life has never been better than today.” He said the arc of history is very long but change does happen. He is the 8^th president to try to reform health care. Each had made a step forward, perhaps he had made a bit more progress than others, but things were definitely if slowly getting better.

Isn’t it amazing that Jesus is only recorded as being angry once? He inspired with love, understanding and kindness. I made a list of all the things various people have done during the pandemic to help each other and it is much, much longer than that of those who have been stupid or selfish.          I know there is so much more to do, and it is frustrating that change is so slow, but cleave to the good!

 
My reply.

You are, as always right.  The world is a far, far better place than I portrayed or allowed for.

In my defence I would make three points.

Firstly.  Today is / was the day in Advent set aside to consider John Baptist’s role in the story of the coming of Christ.  Every year since 2005 I have preached either for the 2^nd Sunday in Advent (the prophets) or the third (John Baptist).  As you can imagine, it’s easy (and tempting) to revisit the same readings every three years and to come up with pretty much the same message.

But that’s not quite how it works.  When I sit down (or get up!) to write, I read and re-read the passage and usually, inevitably, (sometimes at 5.00 am on the Sunday morning after I have printed out the intended sermon on Saturday afternoon), a part or parts of the piece call to me.  It’s the nearest I can get to being told “what” to preach.  Today was indeed the Blake idea of adjacent poverty, and thanks for the reminder, and also the idea of our being “Prophets for the Kingdom”.

Secondly, you are still right, by any standard, Obama speaks truly, “now! Of course now! Life has never been better than today.”.   But that doesn’t mean that “Today” can’t or shouldn’t get any better.  The “arc of history is long”, it’s true, but it is not inevitably bent to a particular end.  Who’s to say that the arc, the bow, cannot be drawn by philosophies, by temperaments, by agencies not our own, or that we cannot, self-evidently, affect its bending ourselves.

For me – and I acknowledge that we are all different in outlook, temperament and personality – simply to trust that History will “have my back” in some way is not enough. History is just that, a record, nothing more.  And even if we were to think it useful to reflect on it, we rather choose to ignore it and make the same mistakes all over again.

Thirdly, Righteous anger.  I said, “but I, as so many of us, have become angry during the year.  Really angry.  I have had to turn off the news;”.  Anger, rage, passion are futile and damaging, unless they purpose good.  I spoke of what had happened to me over the year, what was linking me to John’s words, but I am deeply impressed by a series of quotations attributed to the late John Lewis. 

He spoke of gentleness and love, but he also spoke of “good trouble”, and this: "When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.".

 
By now, you must be feeling that you wish you had never taken the loving time to write to me. But I am so glad that you did.  I’d rather any comments than none at all – and yours are always thoughtful, cheering and supportive.

With love and my very best wishes.