Sermons
2nd December 2007 - Advent 1
I hope that as I have now rigged up this very high-tech microphone stand (known in the hi-fi industry by the technical phrase as a half-coat-hanger-plus-sellotape apparatus) that more of you will be able to hear the sermon each week. There is of course the danger that a section of the congregation will now leave, having heard me for the first time, saying things like ‘I had no idea he was saying that sort of thing!’. There is one famous story about clergy and microphones which I should really share on this occasion. At a conference on the liturgy a clergyman approached the stand to deliver his speech but realized that the microphone was broken, so announced loudly, ‘There appears to be something wrong with this microphone’, to which the assembled liturgists responded as a man ‘And also with you’.
Now to advent. You may know that Spike Milligan is said to have wanted the words ‘I told you I was ill’ on his gravestone. Prophecies of doom always have to fight against apathy until it is too late. Whether it is people telling us they are ill, or people telling us we are about to bombed to pieces by thousands of terrorists, or people telling us that the oceans are going to rise up and swallow us because of climate change, the voices that prophesy doom always battle against a sort of in-built apathy, a lack of perspective or willingness to see the big picture. The end of the world is nigh, but not quite so nigh that we don’t need to do the dishes tonight or go to work tomorrow. And the difficulty with prophecies that don’t come true speedily enough is that they begin to attract ridicule or indifference; scepticism is the natural response to the unfulfilled warnings of the boy who cries wolf.
How awkward then for the first Christian communities that Jesus’ apparent promise to return promptly wasn’t fulfilled. Because, for the first communities of Christians, ‘when?’ was the biggest question they faced. They lived with the certain knowledge of return of their Messiah in judgement and they lived in a constant state of expectation and anxiety about the end of all things that he would set in train on his return. The end of the world was all the rage, but then it had been for quite a while. The prophetic writings of the Old Testament, and many parts of the writings of the New Testament, are shot through both with desire for, and dread of, the coming fulfillment of God’s judgement on the world. Calculating the apocalyptic timetable has often been a popular pastime and it was particularly so in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Daniel sets out several estimates of when everything was going to kick-off. And Paul writing to the Christians in Rome reminds them that salvation is near, that it is time to wake up from the sleep of apathy and sin, to disregard the desires and needs of the flesh. He tells them ‘you know what time it is’! The words of our collect echo this thought ‘give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light now in the time of this mortal life’. And the early Christian communities even had Jesus’ own words to go on ‘Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’ No wonder they were worried.
And then what? Nothing happened. No apocalypse; no Son of the Man coming on the clouds. And that big question ‘when?’ started to be asked in derision by those outside the Christian fold and, perhaps, by doubters within. ‘Where is this Messiah then?’ The Jewish religious leaders in particular would have wanted to ask ‘Well, where is he, this Son of Man whom you have intruded into our familiar apocalyptic scenarios?’. And in the community in which Matthew’s gospel came into its final form, perhaps there had to be some quenching of eschatological enthusiasm, some deep reassessment of what Jesus’ words could have meant.
And the beginnings of that reassessment mark the starting point on the journey towards mature Christian apocalyptic thinking through a return to Jesus’ words which recommend an attitude of watchfulness and vigilance, but not one of frantic enthusiasm for the end or of dread at the approaching judgement. Christian watchfulness, which we celebrate and try to bring to the fore in Advent is properly characterized by patience and by prayerfulness and by persistence. Christian watchfulness is about living a spiritual life that is constantly alive to the work of God in the world. We should take seriously Jesus’ words about our ignorance of the future, about how quickly we can individually or globally be overtaken by events which we cannot foresee or which are highlighted only by the prophets we like to treat with distain or indifference. But as Christians, we allow ourselves to exist within that uncertainty by maintaining our faith in God’s providential actions and by the hope that in the fullness of time as Saint Julian says ‘all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. We cannot predict either our individual or our collective future with certainty but we have something to be about in the meantime. Our task in the meantime consists (joyfully) of showing faith in God and love for our neighbor. It consists in offering worship to the one and compassion to the other and both with joy in our hearts. Martin Luther was once asked what he would do if he knew that Christ would be coming back tomorrow. He replied that he would get on with today’s work as normal. And so long as your day’s work is centred on trusting God and loving your neighbor, so long as you can spend some time in each day worshipping God and some time in each day loving your fellow human beings, and you can do that with joy, then you will indeed be ready. The end is indeed nigh, but that is good news not a prophecy of doom. The tasks of the Christian life of watchfulness can be carried out not in fear of the end, but in joyful anticipation. The end is nigh so enjoy it while you can.