A Voice Calling

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

 

There is no doubt that in the early church there was considerable tension between the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus.   All four gospels show a real concern to spell out that relationship: they are not to be understood as rivals, but as two characters in God's great drama playing different roles.   John is the one who was sent on ahead – to prepare the way – to proclaim, to warn, to get ready.  In some ways he is like the supporting act in a modern pop show – he comes on in the first half to warm up the crowd for the Big Act to follow.

 

So we first hear from him as he emerges from the wilderness.  He draws the crowd, he preaches repentance, he tells them of the coming Messiah, while being careful to make it clear that he is not himself the Messiah.   At least, that's where we first hear from him in three of the four gospels.  But St Luke takes the question of John's relationship with Jesus back even further.   He tells us that John's mother, Elizabeth, and Jesus' mother, Mary, were cousins, so Jesus and John were second cousins, members of the same extended family.   And according to St Luke, they first knew each other pre-birth – which may be something about eternity, pre-history etc.

 

That's as maybe.  What is certain is that John was a prophet, whose specific calling was to help to establish Jesus' identity.   And that's what he does when he first emerges as an adult from the wilderness.  Crowds flock to him as he warns them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, and the time for repentance is NOW.   And St John's gospel has John pointing Jesus out as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and directing his disciples to follow Jesus.

 

At this stage in the drama there is no hint of uncertainty: he speaks with the conviction we associate with the other Biblical prophets.   But by the time we get to today's passage, things have taken a turn for the worst.  John has upset King Herod, and is languishing in the royal dungeons.   His fate is not yet certain, but his future is under severe threat, to put it mildly.  Not uncommon among the prophets of old, most of him suffered terribly for the privilege of speaking for God.

 

And in some respect his reaction is rather like theirs.  Elijah comes to mind, sulking in a cave, wallowing in self-pity, and muttering his complaints against God.   Jeremiah also complained about the hand he had been dealt.  Now we find John in the dungeon beset by doubts: if Jesus really is the Messiah, how come the Romans are still in charge – how come John himself is facing the death penalty – how come the glory of God is not filling the earth as the waters cover the sea?

 

In other words, John is no longer convinced that he heard what God had told him, he is no longer convinced that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the one promised hundreds of years ago by Isaiah and many of the other prophets.   The trouble is, there was no precedent for this – he had nothing to compare it with.  God was doing a new thing, and John was not sure that he had called it right.   God was moving from the aural to the visual, and that was something God had not done before.  In the past God had been heard, but not seen.   Now, in Jesus, God was to be seen as well as heard.

 

We can easily overlook how different the God of the Jewish Scriptures is from the divinities of other cultures and holy books.   The Greeks believed that divinity was seen in beauty – in shapes and forms.  If God created all things then he must have acted like an artist, a sculptor, taking primordial goo and shaping it into various forms.   The Hebrew Scriptures take an entirely different starting-point.  God created all things, not as an artist, but as a Caller.   God created by calling things into existence.  Let there be…and there was.  In our faith history everything occurs through call and response.

 

When the human drama with God really began, God did not show himself to Abraham, he called him.  Leave the land of your fathers…   The Hebrew God is a Voice calling out to us.  When we are asked how we know there is a God, it is because we have heard him, not because we have seen him.   We experience ourselves being addressed, being called, being spoken to – and that Voice we call God.

 

Moses is one of the pivotal figures in this disclosure, because in him we see most clearly the next stage of the self-revelation of this God who calls.   In Moses we see the concept of "call forwarding", so to speak.  God calls to him, as God called to Abraham, but now the call is not only for the recipient, it is for others to whom the recipient must forward it.   Go to Pharaoh and say to him…

 

There, perhaps, is the birth of the prophetic ministry.  God has a message for Pharaoh, but the message is not sent directly to him.   It is given to Moses to forward to Pharaoh.  At that time Moses is both leader and prophet, but as time goes on we see a split take place in those two ministries.   Samuel and some of the other judges seem to combine both, but by the time we come to the heyday of the monarchy we find the political power in the hands of King David and the prophetic ministry in the mouth of Nathan the prophet.   You are that man…

 

In many ways that great story of Nathan's prophetic challenge to the King is the biblical equivalent of the Magna Carta, establishing for all time that even the King is under God's law.   And from that time on, the role of the great succession of prophets was to call the nation and its rulers back to faithfulness to God.  They were not powerful people in the ordinary sense.   They could not force people to do anything – they were in fact, very often, the powerless victims of the powerful elite.  They were mere voices…calling in the political wilderness.

 

Instruments to sing the song of God, to proclaim words they themselves first had to hear.  And it is in that tradition that John the Baptist stands as he emerges from the wilderness.   He has heard the words of God, he has been called to forward the message to the people of his day, and he has obeyed.  He has spoken out the message that the waiting is over, the Messiah is coming, and he has correctly identified Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

 

His task is done; but the results he had anticipated had not occurred.  Or had they?   He sends emissaries to Jesus to ask him a simple question: are you the Messiah or aren't you?  No doubt he had hoped for a simple answer, yes or no.   But Jesus told him to look around him, to see the effects of Jesus' ministry.   The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.   That's what the prophets of old said would happen when the Messiah came.  Now you do the maths!

 

But here was something completely different.  Jesus appeared to be, not another messenger, but the message itself.   Jesus spoke, said the crowds, with his own authority.  Jesus did not point out the error of their ways, he simply called them to follow his way.   He called people to himself.  He called attention to himself.  He didn't ask God to do something, he did it himself, things that only God could do.

 

We will never know if John understood Jesus' reply when he received it from his emissaries.  Did he understand that his distant relative was not ,like himself, a mouthpiece, an instrument for the God who calls.   Did he understand that Jesus was himself the God who calls to us?  Come to me…Come, follow me…

 

Did he understand that for the first time in history God had become incarnate, ("incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary", as we say in our Creed)?   Can we understand it, even two thousand years later?  Or do we take the easy modern way out and dismiss it as pre-scientific twaddle?

 

This Advent and Christmas Season we have the same questions addressed to us by the Voice crying in our wildernesses.   Will we, can we, give the same answer that Mary gave?  It's to her that we turn next week

Approaching the End

 

 

Texts: Malachi 4:1-2a; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

 

Next week we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year, when we sum up all that we have heard during the last year, and every other year before this one.   It is the climax of the Christian story, our story that is also, first and foremost, God's story.  We should not be surprised to hear that it all ends in Christ.

 

Over the last few weeks we have been working towards this conclusion as we have gradually turned our gaze from what happened, to what it means for us, and then to what is still to come.   We might say that each year we look first to the past as we are reminded of the great events of the whole Christ event, from his incarnation at Christmas to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.   Then we look to the present as we ponder what it all means for us in the here and now, as we try to live our lives of faith in this country, in this place, in this time.   Then we look to the future, the future towards which we are constantly journeying as God works his purposes out.

 

In doing all this each and every year we are guided by the great framework of our faith, summed up in various "slogans" that occur from time to time in the Scriptures and in our liturgies.   God is the God of the past, the present and the future.  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.   He is the One who was, who is and who is to come.  He is the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

 

So now we are approaching the end; and the first thing to notice is that word "end".  In English it has two interesting but different meanings, and both of them are important for the understanding of our faith.   The obvious meaning is "finish" or "conclusion".  Films always used to have the words "The End' on them, in case we didn't realise the thing had finished.   Novels, too, often had the same words printed at the bottom of the last page – (but not, for some reason, books of non-fiction, short stories or poetry).   But that meaning of "end" is clear.  There is no more –it's finished.

 

The second meaning of "end" is not quite so obvious; it is something like "aim" or "purpose": the end we have in mind when we set out to do something.   That which we aim to achieve.  And, of course, the two meanings coincide when we achieve our end – our task is finished, it is ended.   And here we have the heart of the Christian teaching about the end times, or the end things, or simply the end of the story.  The end comes when God has achieved the end he had in mind in creation.

 

We had that end spelt out for us two weeks ago (All Saints Sunday) with that glorious reading from the first chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians.   The end or vision that God had in mind in creating the universe and everything in it was to have a Significant Other to love and to be loved by.  All through time God has been wooing his creation, and in particular humanity, to receive his love and to give him our own.  He seeks a free and loving relationship with his creation.

 

But loving relationships don't happen overnight, as the saying goes.  They take time.    Along the way difficulties arise.  Patience and endurance are called for, as well as understanding and forgiveness.  In one sense the whole of Scripture is an account of that love story, of God's wooing of humanity, and of our failures in response.   It is a story that is still unfolding, we live our lives in its pages; and yet we know how it ends.  It is a love story with a happy ending.   In the end, God wins our love – achieves his end – finishes creation.  The End.

 

Except that the end lasts for all eternity.  There is now forever more.   Time ends but life doesn't.  Life continues outside time.  That's what we mean by "eternal life" – not life going on much as it is now for ever, but life as we know it transformed into eternal life, of which at the moment we have only brief glimpses, if that.   Not only is eternal life beyond time, it is beyond our words, beyond our imaginings.  Having got to this part of our story it is time to fall silent.

 

Today's readings point to this difficulty.  The old Testament, like the New Testament, points forward towards the end without telling us much about what the end will be like.   For some reason we are given only a brief extract today from the last chapter of the last book in the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi.  The chapter is only 6 verses long, so we could have had the lot, but we have been left to read the rest of it for ourselves.   In my Bible the chapter is headed, "The Day of the Lord"; and the first thing that Malachi says about the day is that it is coming.  And the second definite thing is that the Day will be bad news for the wicked, but good news for the people of faith.

 

Beyond that it has to be said, Malachi seems a bit hazy about the details.  For you who revere my name, he says, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.  And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.  All of which may or may not strike you as something to really look forward to.  But the key is right there: as people of faith we look forward.

 

The Thessalonians were looking forward with gusto!  But some of them were so busy looking forward that they were no longer looking out: they were so focussed on the future, they were no longer concerned with the present.   As the old saying has it, they were so heavenly-minded, they were no earthly use.  St Paul did not mince his words.   Those who have stopped work while they wait for Christ's return shall not eat.  St Paul says they are to "settle down and earn their bread".  We live in expectation, we live in hope, we look for the coming of the Lord, but we live in the present.  And in the present, in the meantime, we must "never tire of doing right".

 

Once again, our chosen reading has missed out an important point of St Paul's teaching.  At the beginning of this last chapter of his letter, he asks for prayer that "the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honoured".   As that happens, of course, so God's end is fulfilled and the end comes ever nearer.

 

In today's gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, seemingly for the first time; for the Twelve Disciples are doing the tourist-thing at the Temple.   They are struck, not by the holiness of the place, but by its enormity and beauty.  As faithful Jews we might have expected them to be moved by its sacredness, but the fact that they, a bunch of fishermen and the like from far distant and despised Galilee, are now standing near the House of the Lord.   But they notice in particular how the great building is "adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God".

We can imagine the shock they must have felt when Jesus assured them that the time was coming when the Temple would be destroyed.   When would this happen, they wanted to know.  And so, once again, our readings turn our attention to the future.

 

And once again the details are fuzzy.  The world will get worse, before it gets better, for them personally and for the rest of humanity.   They will be persecuted for their faith.  Jesus himself will give them the words to say in their own defence; and yet some of them will be put to death.

 

Is that the end in store for them?  No, it isn't, for Jesus gives them this assurance: But not a hair on your head will perish.   By standing firm you will gain life."  Even those who are put to death for their faith will gain life.  Why?  Because the end God has in mind is to share his eternal life with all those who love him.

 

The End.

Jesus as the New Moses

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 63:7-9; Hebrews 2:10-18; Matthew 2:13-23

 

Well, it's over for another year.  And as we eat our way through the leftovers and return our fridges to something approaching normality, we may want to reflect on how it all went.   Was it everything we had hoped for, and more?  Was it all rather an endurance test?  Did we feast well or unwisely?   Did everything go as planned, or did it sometimes seem as though we had somehow been given a part in a Mr Bean movie?  Are we now most in need of rest, restoration – or perhaps, repentance?

 

Whatever it was like, I can't resist the temptation to remind you that I did warn you.  Whatever else Christmas is, it's an interruption.   And, if the experience of a friend of mine is anything to go by, it is an invasion of reality.  She sent us an email on Friday describing her experience of sharing Christmas with her three young grandchildren.   She had loved the idea of becoming a grandparent; and when it happened and kept on happening she has enjoyed receiving photos and news, etc.  She enjoyed, in other words, the whole idea of grandchildren.  But this Christmas it seems, the ideal was invaded by the real.  I won't go into detail, to protect the guilty; suffice it to say, her choice of Christmas presents for the little dears was not well received – and as for the outing to McDonalds…!

 

The romance of having grandchildren can be rudely interrupted by the grandchildren themselves.  And the same is true of Christmas.   We tend to be all sentimental at Christmas time – it turns it into a romance, in the Church just as much as outside it.  Listen to the way in which the story is re-told, in the children's pageants, in the carols, and sometimes, no doubt, in the Christmas sermons, and keep a particular ear open for the bits that have been added, that are not in the original accounts in the Gospels.   We've given ourselves a beautiful Mary, not just a young woman, but a beautiful young woman; and, of course, Joseph bears a striking resemblance to Burt Reynolds in his younger days.   At Christmas we can't bear to think that Mary might hve had crooked teeth, or Joseph spots!

 

As for the baby, when he comes – he bears a striking resemblance to the plastic models couples get to practise on at ante-natal classes.   No crying he makes!  There is never any suggestion of labour pains before the birth, or colic or teething after it.  Jesus is to be the perfect baby, and perfect babies do not do anything natural.   What is even more amazing is that the strange collection of animals that St Francis tells us also attended the birth do not do anything natural either! There must be no hint of manure, smell or flies in this Christmas story.

 

So being unreal about Christmas has a long tradition behind it.  So, too, does the invasion of the unreal by the real, the romance by the truth, as we see in our readings this morning.   They continue the theme of this birth as interruption, disruption: it is a real story of a real birth of a real baby into a real family.  And perhaps this is a good place to say one more thing about the so-called virgin birth.

 

As I said last Sunday, we have St Luke to blame for all our angst on this particular subject.  It's just not an issue for St Matthew.   St Matthew gives us a much more realist account of the arrival of Jesus than we find in St Luke.  In this gospel, we have no trip to Bethlehem, no manger, no angels rejoicing and no shepherds watching their flocks by night or trying to find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths (whatever they may be).   Nor do we have the archangel Gabriel frightening the wits out of Mary.  All that stuff is left for St Luke to bother about.   St Matthew has a different story to tell, because he has different concerns.

 

He's not bothered by the virgin birth.  It was quite a common idea at the time for great men to be born from above, to be both human and divine.   What bothered St Matthew was much more mundane than that.  For him the great issue was one of pedigree.  Jesus could not be the promised Messiah if he were not descended from David.  And there was the problem.  If he did not have a human father, how could it be said that he descended from David or from anyone else for that matter?

 

St Matthew didn't duck the question; he faced it clearly in his opening chapter with the genealogy of Jesus.  Each generation is begotten, right down until we get to Joseph.  Then the long line of descent turns sharply sideways: and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.   And there is what we might call the genealogical interruption.  Something has happened to interrupt the line of descendants, and every Jew would want to know what.   Is Jesus then illegitimate?  Is that what is being said?

 

There is the other problem St Matthew is faced with.  The virgin birth is not a problem for him; but the possible illegitimacy of Jesus certainly is.   It would be an absolute disgrace in the society at the time.  So it is both socially and theologically necessary for St Matthew to assert Jesus' legitimacy, while at the same time insisting that "Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit".   How is this to be achieved?  By taking the focus off what is happening to Mary and emphasising what Joseph does.

 

By accepting Mary as his wife when she is already pregnant, and by naming the child, Joseph does what would be expected of him if the child were his own.   So any Jew would immediately assume that Joseph is the father of the child, not because it is said, but because it appears from Joseph's actions.  That's why the whole of this first chapter of St Matthew's gospel is really about Joseph, and only incidentally about Mary and the baby.

 

The next chapter is then pure Matthew – St Luke has no equivalent to these two stories.  Because of the peculiarities of the Church Calendar we're looking at these two stories in the reverse order.   Next Sunday is the Epiphany, when the Magi arrive; today we're looking at the aftermath, when Herod is about to launch his campaign of infanticide.

 

Once again the story is related from Joseph's point of view.  He is warned in a dream to flee to Egypt, taking Mary and the infant Jesus to safe refuge there.   Then, in the fullness of time, when the murderous Herod has died, he is advised in a dream that they may now return to Judea.  What is this story all about?   St Matthew leaves us in little doubt, as he draws our attention to various Scriptures that, he says, are fulfilled in these events.

 

Theologically, he is surely linking Jesus with the Exodus story.  Like the Israelites of old, Jesus spends time in Egypt.   Like them, the Lord God calls him out of Egypt.  There follows the "wilderness years", until the time is right and Jesus appears out of obscurity to call the people to new life in God.   At its heart this story is pure theology.

 

But it also has a practical side.  It's about the real disrupting the unreal.   It's about God incarnate entering, not a perfect, Christmassy, tinselled world, but the real world where infants get slaughtered for political purposes.  It's a story that defies all attempts at sentimentality.   It might be lovely to have the three wise men in the Nativity scene (even if historically inaccurate!), but nobody would want to include King Herod's order to wipe out every child born in the preceding two years in and around Bethlehem.

 

And just in case we still haven't grasped the point, we have a further does of realism from our second reading this morning.   The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is almost dismissive of the angels of Christmas.  The real point of Christmas, he says, is that God turned his favour, not on angels, but on humanity.   Jesus is, despite our carols, a human baby like every other human baby at birth.  His flesh is no different from our flesh.   And only because that is true could he be our Saviour, dying in the flesh for us so that we might live with him.

 

As I have said on more than one occasion recently, Christmas is as much about our salvation as Easter is.  When we look at the Christmas tree we are reminded of the Tree of Life AND the Cross of Christ.  In the Christian faith the two are inseparable.

 

I doubt if my friend saw it this way at the time; but maybe her little grandchildren were bringing her a little of the reality of Christmas – a little of the reality of the world into which God chose to enter.

 

Thanks be to God.

One King, One People

 

 

Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

 

We have come to the end of our story; and what we find ought to astonish us.  What we find is contrary to all human history, all human experience, we might even say, all human instinct.   What we find is contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, our own ears, our own prejudices, and our own desires.  What we find at the end of our story is that there is only one race, the human race – and that all divisions, all borders, all boundaries between us are human inventions, they are contrary to the will of God, and they are therefore sinful.   To put it in modern terms, globalisation, or, to use a better term, universalisation, has been God's plan from the very beginning, is now and will be for ever more.

 

And at the end of our story we find something else, too.  We find that, after Jesus himself, the hero of the story is none other than St Paul, whom the more modern-minded among us today usually look upon as more of a villain than a hero.   Perhaps 'hero of the story' is not quite the right way of putting it.  Perhaps I should say St Paul is the great narrator of the story, the one who explains the story to us.   Others play their part, of course, - the four gospel writers, the writer of Revelation – but surely without St Paul we would still be wondering what on earth is really going on.   Or would we?  Would we have even heard of the gospel today if St Paul had never arrived in the story at just the right time?

 

So as we come to the end of the story this morning I find I want to spend some time on St Paul, and the role he plays in it – either as hero or narrator or both.   Until the 20^th century scholars used to say of St Paul that he found the answer before he was aware of the problem.  What they meant was that St Paul' encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus was an encounter with the Saviour of the world, and it took place before St Paul knew that humanity needed saving.   As a Pharisee, so it was said, St Paul had all the answers in his head.  He wasn't concerned about the Gentiles – only the Jews were God's people, and God had provided for their salvation by giving them the Torah.   Stick to that and all would go well for you.  No problem – so why the need for a brand new solution?

 

But in more recent terms it has been argued that this picture of the state of mind of the pre-conversion St Paul is false.   There was a problem.  God had promised a future that was very different from the reality of St Paul's times.  He had promised to gather his people from wherever they had been scattered throughout the world, and bring them home to Israel.   Was that happening?  No, it wasn't.  Far more Jews were living outside Israel than inside.   In many ways, the great return from exile had not happened.

 

God had also promised to come to his people and set them free.  Had that happened?   No, it hadn't.  For hundreds of years Judah had been overrun by various invaders, and in St Paul's time, of course, it was under Roman rule.  So there was another problem – another divine promise so far unfulfilled.

 

And there was something else.  We can put up with an awful lot of hardship in the present if we have confidence in a better future.   What sort of future had God promised for his people?  At first sight it was a glorious one.  Through the prophets God had promised to raise up a new king, to restore the House of David.   Israel would re-live its glory days that it had enjoyed under its two greatest kings, David and Solomon.  And so impressive would this new king be that all the nations of the world would bring their treasures to Jerusalem and bow down to Israel's leadership.

 

A wonderful vision for any Jew to hold on to, but there were two major problems with it.  First, there was not the slightest sign that the world was moving towards it.   And secondly, even if Israel was restored to political greatness as in days of old, how realistic was it to expect the other nations of the world to recognise her superiority over them.   Rome was going to bow to the greater wisdom of Jerusalem?!  Something wasn't adding up, and St Paul, being the highly intelligent and learned Pharisee that he was, would have known it better than most.

 

Then comes his encounter with the very early followers of Christ.  Most of them, but not all of them, were fellow Jews.   And St Paul was horrified.  They were talking nonsense; and far worse, they were talking blasphemy.  Their leader was executed as a criminal, and the Law said he was under God's curse.   The Law said there was only one God and he alone was to be worshipped; but the Christians were worshipping their executed leader and insisting that he was God.   The Law said Jews and Gentiles were to be kept separate, particularly at mealtimes, and particularly in the Temple; yet Christian communities were forming that included both Jews and Gentiles on equal times, and they were eating together.   The Law said men and women were to be kept separate at worship; but in the Christian communities men and women were joining together for worship.

 

And so on and so on.  No wonder St Paul was outraged; no wonder he felt compelled to do all that he could to stamp out this terrible heretical movement.   But then he met the Risen Christ and his whole religious world was turned up outside down.  We're told that very soon after this experience he went to Arabia (meaning the desert) and spent about 3 years there trying to make sense of his experience in terms of his faith.

 

And out of that profound period of re-thinking he began to see a whole new vision of what God was up to in the world.   We often forget that he had never met Jesus, he had met Christians only as enemies to be exterminated, and he had very little knowledge of Jesus' teaching.  But one thing he did know, even before his conversion: when Stephen was martyred for his faith, he forgave his persecutors and died praising God.   How was such a thing possible?

 

And then the Risen Christ had come to him, had identified himself as "Jesus whom you are persecuting", and had called St Paul to become his follower.   And with all that in mind St Paul sits in his desert tent somewhere and starts to think.  Jesus had come to him at the very time when he himself was Jesus' sworn enemy.   How strange is that?  What can it mean?  It can only mean forgiveness and love prevail over ignorance and hatred, even between enemies.   In fact, it means that Jesus refuses to allow himself to be cast in the role of enemy.  Enmity is abolished.  But what would the world look like if there were no enmity in it?

 

It would be a world in which there were no divisions, no borders, no boundaries.  And perhaps the penny dropped a bit further for St Paul, sitting in his desert tent, as he remembered those very early Christian communities that had so shocked him.   They allowed no boundary between Jew and Gentile or between men and women.  Were they not early signs of God's new way forward?

 

Where might it all end?  And as St Paul pondered this, and read and re-read the Hebrew Scriptures, so his vision broadened and deepened.   Had not God promised a new King whose kingdom would have no end?  How could that be unless the King was divine?   Had not God promised that all the nations of the world would pay homage to this king?  How could that be if this were a mere King of Israel?  Had not God promised to set the people free?  How could that be unless all the people of the world were set free from all that drives us to threaten the freedom of others?

 

St Paul eventually emerges from his desert tent and starts preaching this wonderful vision.  We have another breath-taking version of it in our epistle reading today.   And again let me remind you that he is writing within 20 years of Jesus' death, before the gospels have been written, before any churches have been built, before the number of Christians had gone much above a few thousand, in a world divided between the monotheistic Jews and the polytheistic Graeco-Roman elite, a world in which the Emperor claimed divine authority for himself.

 

Despite all that, St Paul now sees Jesus as the image of God, the one in whom God is fully present.  He says that all things in heaven and on earth were created for and through Jesus.   He is the one in whom heaven and earth are united; he is the one in whom all enmity is abolished because in him God is reconciling all things to himself.  

 

And he agreed with St Luke that all this was first revealed on the cross.  In today's gospel reading, Christ is identified as king by the representative of the Roman government on the cross.   To all that we will return in the New Year.

 

Today we simply follow St Paul in acknowledging Christ as king over all the world – one king and one people.  That is the end of our story.

 

 

The End in the Beginning

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 26:36-44

 

Today as we start our new year in the Church, I'm reminded of a friend who, on hearing that I was to be ordained, asked what that involved.   And when I mentioned preaching he was very intrigued.  What will you preach about?  The Scriptures, I said.   What will you preach about when you have finished those?  I hadn't thought of that.  In some consternation I went off and asked my mentor, a very senior and experienced priest.   I don't know either, he said.  I've only been preaching 35 years so it hasn't arisen yet.

 

That's part of the marvel of the Scriptures.  Every year for close to two thousand years now the Church has been telling the same story over and over again.   Think of the greatest novels ever written – Dickens, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, or whoever is your pick – which of those stories could be told and re-told, read and re-read, to the same people year after year without them becoming a tad stale?

 

Yet the Scriptures retain their freshness – their unique ability to shock, to surprise, to warn, to encourage, and generally to excite and hold our interest no matter how often we hear them.   That's due, of course, to the Holy Spirit, who speaks to us through the Scriptures, leading us ever deeper into their truth.  Someone has said that the Church reads the Scriptures, not in a circular way, going round and round and round again, but in a spiral, going round and down, exploring them at ever greater depth.   Our prayer, then at the start of a new year, is that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide us as we spiral down into the truth that God has chosen to reveal about himself through the pages of the Scriptures.

 

At the same time, we must remember that the story itself does not spiral, and it certainly doesn't go around in circles!   Like all great stories it has a beginning a middle and an end.  And like all great stories it only finally makes sense in the end.  Stories only convince us if, when we know the ending, we can see how it has arrived at that ending.   We can look back and see how the beginning led to and through the middle to the end.  It hangs together.  It makes sense as a whole.  Our story, God's story, is like that.  It only makes sense as a whole.  We need to know the end so that we can understand the beginning and the middle.

 

And so this morning we start where we left off last week.  Then we were celebrating the end of the story, the coronation of Jesus as the king over all creation.   We were reminded of the great vision of the prophets, especially Jeremiah last week, who looked to a time when all the peoples of the world would come to Jerusalem to worship the one true God.   We were reminded that this was the end God had in mind from the very beginning.  This was God's purpose in creating all things, to have creation as something other than himself, something to love and be loved by.

 

And we have been reminded throughout the last year that we are living in the middle of the story: that God is still working his purposes out as year succeeds to year.   We know how the story began, we know how it ends, and we know what our part is as we live out our lives in the in-between time, in-between the beginning and the end – in between the coming of Christ and his return.

So our first reading is from that other great prophet of the future, Isaiah, often called the Prophet of the Advent.   Over the next few weeks we will hear again his astonishing prophecies concerning the birth of Christ, and in the New Year as we move towards Easter we will reflect again on his prophecies about Christ's suffering.

 

But first, today we have his view of the end of all things as God's great creative vision reaches its fulfilment.   Like Jeremiah, Isaiah sees a time when all the nations of the world will be united in their worship of the God of Israel.  He sees it symbolised as people streaming to the Temple, the House of God, to be taught his ways, the way of life.   And he sees a new world in which there will be no more wars between nations, and all the wealth and material that is now wasted on the production of armaments will be turned into agricultural tools for the production of food.

 

No more hunger, no more disease, no more war.  A world renewed in accordance with that vision, that will of God. A world of peace and justice for all.   That is what our story is about, that is where we are headed, that is the marvellous and surprising end to which we are called.  The prophets saw it and proclaimed it to the people of their day.   Through the mercy of God, the Holy Spirit has preserved their words, collected them together, and gives them to us fresh every year through the pages of the Scriptures.   What then must we do in response?

 

First and foremost, we must say yes to God.  We must accept his gracious invitation to be a part of his story, to become actors, characters, participants in it.   Not just to accept it in a passive sense, grudgingly, as some Eastern religions would have us do.  We're not talking Fate here, or karma : we're talking relationship, the relationship into which God is calling the whole of his creation through humanity.    As we say our yes to God so we advance the story, bring it just a bit closer to the end.

 

That's one of the great strands of St Paul's teaching.  Each day is a day nearer the fulfilment of that wonderful vision of a new world.   Every time we do something that is consistent with that vision, so we help to implement it: every time we forgive, every time we turn the other cheek, every time we reach out to others in their best interests and not our own, every generous act or thought, every prayer for the good of others, every gift of money or goods to meet the needs of others – all of that and more means a step closer to the redemption of the whole of creation.   That's what the Christian story involves as it unfolds through time.

 

 

That's what St Paul is on about in our reading from his Letter to the Romans this morning.  He is a marvellous combination of visionary and pragmatist.   His vision is just as broad and deep as Isaiah's, but now he says something simple and straightforward.  Believers should lead decent lives.   Which part of that can't we understand?  We shouldn't waste our time in satisfying our selfish needs and instincts.  Life's too short.   Time is running out.  This is urgent.  It could be tomorrow.  Are we prepared to meet the Risen Christ face to face tomorrow?

 

And being St Paul, he throws in a wonderful image for us to ponder.  "Clothe yourselves', he says, "with the Lord Jesus Christ".   Recently, Rose and I attended a diocesan training day, and at one point we were in a small group reflecting together on the Parable of the Wedding Feast.   St Matthew's version is rather fiery, and has a strange reference to one of the guests being found without the proper wedding attire.   What on earth was all that about?   I think St Paul is giving us the answer here.  The proper wedding attire is the Lord Jesus Christ himself.  The Christian lifestyle is about conforming to the image of Christ.   Following his example, his way of life.

 

And doing it now, the only time in which we can do anything.  I have always remembered a conversation I heard between a mother and the Vicar of our parish.   The mother was explaining why her teenage son had stopped attending church.  He had, she said, discovered girls.   But she wasn't too worried.  He was young: there was plenty of time for him to rediscover his faith.  To which the Vicar replied: "Is there?   How do you know?"

 

I thought at the time that the Vicar's comment was a bit harsh; but now I'm not so sure.  "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father."   Or as we say in one of our liturgies, "Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of our salvation."

 

That's why we must tell and keep telling our story.  It really is that urgent.

The Rudeness of Christmas

 

Texts: Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

 

Christmas has got something to do with childhood; and perhaps that's why a rather strange thought popped into my mind when I started to focus on the coming week, and to re-read the Christmas narratives in the Scriptures.   I thought of my Mother, and her seemingly endless quest to teach me good manners.  There were various things that we weren't supposed to do at the dining table; we had to use our knife and fork properly (which meant, never turn the fork the right way up or put food on the knife), keep our mouths closed while chewing, and, of course, never, ever put our elbows on the table.   Many of the rules seemed to be like rules in a game, invented to make a very simple operation as complicated as possible.

 

But if there was one supreme rule in my Mother's collection that mattered to her more than all the others it was the prohibition on interrupting.   Children must never ever interrupt when an adult is talking.  And as my Father was a very quiet man, it's not hard to see who the principal beneficiary of this rule was!    Interruption was a very BAD THING!!

 

So why did all this come back to me as I started to think about the Christmas Season?  Because at all sorts of levels Christmas in about interruption – about disruption of normal routine.   At this time of the year we put things on hold.  Things like our education – our schools, colleges and universities close down – our learning is interrupted.   We go on holiday, interrupting our usual work routines.   National Radio takes off all the programmes we would now have time to listen to – even Morning Report goes into hibernation – or whatever the summer-equivalent of hibernation is.

Normal service will resume one day, but in the meantime we must survive the Christmas interruption.

 

And if you look at the Christmas stories in the Scriptures you will see a whole string of interruptions, political and angelic.   Earth and heaven is interrupted.  Caesar Augustus was one of the chief causes, of course.  He suddenly took it into his head to order a census to be held throughout the entire Roman Empire; and for reasons best known to him, every person had to return to their place of birth to be registered there.   Just think about that for a moment.  Apply the same rules to the Commonwealth today!  People were suddenly on the move throughout the empire, their lives interrupted for no obvious good reason.

 

But in the scheme of things, massively disruptive as that must have been, a political interruption of that kind was just part of the reality of life in that part of the world at that time.   Worst things could happen in occupied lands, and frequently did.  If all that your political masters wanted to do was count you, well, thank your lucky stars and get on with it.

 

Most of the other interruptions in the Christmas story come from on high.  Zechariah is going about his priestly business in the Temple when he is interrupted by an angelic visitor who tells him that he and his elderly wife are to have a baby, and then strikes him dumb for daring to express some doubt.   Mary receives a similar visitor with a similar message; Joseph gets a complementary message in a dream

And it doesn't stop there.  When the big day arrives, shepherds are quietly minding their sheep and are interrupted in spectacular fashion.   Wise men notice a star that was never there before, drop everything, abandon their families, work commitments and everything else and set off on a journey.   King Herod goes ballistic and orders mass infanticide; and Joseph and Mary are directed into exile in Egypt.

 

That's quite a lot of interruption caused by the birth of just one baby.  But, of course, this isn't just one baby.   This is the greatest interruption imaginable.  This is the interruption of history, no less.  This is the eternal God interrupting Time itself.   Spend a moment thinking about that first Christmas night – put yourself in that dark, smelly uncomfortable stable as Mary is delivered of her child.   Now remind yourself that, for much of the time ever since, and in much of the world, history has been divided into "B.C." and "A.D.", according to whether it occurred before or after the birth of that particular baby.   Isn't that amazing?  How are we to explain this interruption of history itself if not as the working of God himself?   Put like this, isn't it incredible – and yet it is an historical fact!

 

I wanted to put all this on the record first because there is no doubt that the Church has become more and more defensive about these Christmas stories in this modern age.   They make us feel uncomfortable with our educated friends.  They are hard to explain to inheritors of the scientific revolution.   It's bad enough that they are rather full of angels bearing messages, frightening people witless, and bursting into song.  But strangely it's not them we feel called upon to defend.   Perhaps we can all agree that they are colourful characters as real and unreal as Hobbits and other inhabitants of Middle Earth, and just as harmless.   We can indulge a taste for angels – it's Christmas, after all.

 

It's the virgin birth that causes us the real worry, isn't it.  That is flatly contradicted by science, so what are we to say about that?   Well, as Christians what we are to say about that is very clear and simple, and we will say it together shortly.  It goes like this: For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became fully human.   That's what we are to say about this infant, born on Christmas Day.  That in him the divine and the human came together, and that this coming together was for our benefit, for our salvation.

 

In him human nature was joined to the divine nature; in him it was taken down into the depths of death  and purged of sin; and in him it was raised up to enjoy full communion with God.  Christmas Day is as much essential to human salvation as Good Friday and Easter Day.   If that baby is not God incarnate, then Easter does not work.  As I have said on many occasions recently, the Christian story is one whole story – it only makes sense when taken in total.

 

How, then, do we tell it without deeply offending our scientific friends?  Well, as much as I love St Luke's gospel, I do think that when it comes to the birth of Jesus we should stick more closely to St Matthew, and then add a little dash of St Paul.   Look at today's passage from St Matthew: see how much more restrained and discrete it is.  By focussing on Joseph's reaction to the news that his fiancée is pregnant we are offered a way into the story that doesn't require any suspension of belief.   We can understand his reaction; we are sympathetic to him.  Then he has a dream – again, we are with him.  We all have dreams.  In that dream he is told the truth behind Mary's pregnancy.  He decides to accept the truth that the dream reveals to him.   He decides to accept that the baby is 'incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary".  He accepts that the baby's name is to be Jesus, the one who saves.

 

And look at the discrete but clear way St Paul puts it in the opening paragraph of his Letter to the Romans.  Speaking of the Son of God, he says: who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.   The resurrection declared what had been true from the beginning – that Christ was both human and divine.  Christmas and Easter are all part of the one story.

 

The story of divine interruption.  And there's one thing more to say about that.   It's an interruption that does not end.  We live in the wake of God's interruption until the end of time.  Morning Report may return to air in January, but in the wider sense normal service will never be resumed.

 

That's the good news of Christmas.  It lasts for ever.  All we have to do is believe it – and live it!   May 2008 be another year of interruption – whatever my Mother would have thought of it.