Sermons
Advent 3C
There’s often quite a sharp contrast between Christian hope and the Biblical picture of judgement, there’s a particularly alarming example of this contrast in today’s gospel. I quote ‘He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire…and with many other words John preached the good news’. It doesn’t sound like very good news. But then John the Baptist was not an easy-going preacher like your vicar who lets you off very lightly with a warm picture of the loving God. John’s God is much more than warm he is coming with fire, he also has an axe in his hand ready to cut out the dead wood, he is ready with his winnowing fork to sift the chaff from the grain, John’s God is a terrifying angry deity who is going to establish his kingdom, come what may, he is a God that we better run away from, or slither away from like a brood of vipers fleeing from a grass fire, unless we can turn and face straight into his purifying judgement. What hope for us Fulham Fielders then?
Over the four weeks I am preaching on the Advent theme of the coming kingdom of God and trying to relate it to our actual experience and needs here at St Andrew’s. I want to encourage a sense of renewed vocation, of calling by God to each of us to ministry, to roles of leadership in one form or another; the Christian community has to be a place where ministry is shared, each taking a leading role at different times, each moving the whole flock forwards, all going the same direction, interconnected working almost as one organism, sharing a common purpose, supporting each other. God calls each of us to ministerial roles within the community and our purpose together is the building of the kingdom, the nurturing of the signs of the kingdom here among us.
In the first week of advent I talked about shared leadership, last week about hearing and attending to the voice of prophecy, and both times this was from within a Biblical context of dramatic warnings of the coming kingdom.
So what are we to make of today’s gospel account of the austere religion of John the Baptist, the final prophet of the coming kingdom?
John was no doubt a man of high moral and religious earnestness, the last of the prophets of the coming Messiah, accepting his vocation to raise up an immense wave of Messianic expectation in the people, the last in a long line of prophets who warned the people to return to God, to repent of their foolish ways, for the coming Messiah was bringing judgement with the unfolding of the kingdom. He warns the people that it won’t be enough that they have been born into the racial and religious historical continuity of the Hebrews, it won’t be enough to be part of the club without a real turning back to God, a repentance, a metanoia, a complete turn around in their lives as individuals. His warning is against complacency and spiritual inactivity, of accidie, spiritual sloth; it won’t be good enough to claim membership of the chosen race, because God can raise up children from where he wills, the axe is ready at the root of the tree because it is from the fruit not from the roots that a tree is judged of worth.
And in this there lies a profound lesson for members of the church. Just as the Hebrew people are called by John not to rely on their heritage to see them right, to gain them a free pass into the kingdom, so we as members of the church are called to a continual repentance and turning back towards God. It will not be enough to be a card carrying member of the Church, not enough to imagine that we form here some sort of club for those lucky enough to have been saved by belonging. We are saved, John says, by turning back to God and it won’t do for us to make excuses and look the other way. Because when that kingdom comes what would we say? I didn’t hear the message, I thought perhaps it was just for an hour on Sunday, I was too busy doing other things, I didn’t realise it was urgent, I thought I was going to have more time…John says this is going to be no defence and if we think it might be we should slither away like those snakes and hide in the grass from the inevitable fire.
But despite this fiery warning, John reveals something of an understanding as well that life is lived in the reality of the world we know. A world in which we need money, and need clothing, and need employment; and he offers sensible advice to the enquirers in today’s gospel. If you have too much, you should share it (and isn’t that an easy thing to say but an almost impossible thing to achieve?). Two tunics? give one away to someone who hasn’t got one. And to the tax-collectors he says if you have to take in the money for tax, don’t become an extortioner, and to the soldiers, don’t abuse your power. These are practical lessons in Christian virtue, practical lessons that we need to learn again and again. For John these lessons are learnt through the path of repentence, they are the fruit of turning back to God and each answer he offers to the enquirers focuses on the temptation closest at hand, so with wealth avarice lurks nearby, with power the possibilities of its misuse. And the repentance John calls for is of course simply a preparation, a making way for the one who will come, the one whose shoes John is not worthy to untie. And for us, living between the paradise of Eden and the paradise of eternity but after the incarnation, John’s call is not ‘look busy Jesus is coming’ it is ‘repent of your sins, Jesus is here’.
So now in the third week of this series of sermons, along with theme of a shared ministry, a ministry in which every member plays a role over time whilst the whole flock moves inexorably towards the building of the kingdom. And alongside the remembrance that the flock will be affected in its chosen direction by the prophetic voices in its midst, today we add the need for the individual members to take seriously this call which comes to each of us to repentance, to turning back to God, realising that it is urgent, that we are not simply a club where belonging will see us through, that actually it is going to depend on each of us making a commitment at a very deep level of our lives to God, and to trying in our stumbling ways to put right our relationship with him.
This ministry of building the kingdom to which each one of you is called will be marked by a paradoxical relationship. The flock moves forward almost as one organism, yet it responds to the prophetic voices within, and it depends on an individual answering of the call to repentance. And when this paradoxical relationship within a community starts to become apparent, when there are signs that people are preparing for the kingdom, then change and new life can follow, new life not just for new people but throughout the flock, and maybe some of that is happening here at St Andrew’s, maybe we are actually each involved in something very exciting, something that is so important that we can hear John’s earnestness afresh, and hear it in the light of the loving creator who is fully revealed in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the one who is to come, the one who brings the kingdom with him. John the Baptist says to every member of this congregation, are you ready for that? Are you ready today? Are you ready now?