Grace and Peace

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Grace and peace to you from God.

Such simple little words, words that are very familiar to us.  They are the first words to be spoken in our first liturgy (page 404).  They are the words with which we start our service on Wednesday mornings.  They are the words with which this morning's second lesson begins as St Paul greets the community of faith at Corinth.  They are just that, words of greeting, and like all words of greeting, we may be inclined to take them for granted, to skip over them, to cut to the chase.

Yesterday, our archdeacon, Jan Clark, rang me up.  As always, she greeted me, "Hullo, Roger, Jan Clark here.  How are you today?"  And I replied as I always do, "Hi, Jan, I'm fine, thanks, how about yourself?"  Nothing terribly profound there, was there?  Neither of us expected a full medical bulletin from the other.  I knew that she hadn't rung me up to ask how I was; and as we were going through the ritual of greeting I was wondering what she wanted, and she was probably rehearsing what she was going to say.  The words of the greetings were not important.  They were the prelude to the real message that Jan wanted to give me.  She could equally well have said, "Hello, Vicar, how's life treating you?"; and I could have said, "Greetings, Archdeacon, how lovely to hear your dulcet tones!"  It would have made no difference to either of us.  Words of greeting are not significant in themselves; they serve a purpose, and when that purpose has been served they can be forgotten.

But I don't think that's the case with these words we have before us today.  Grace and peace to you from God.  These words are very much more than a pro forma greeting; they seem to me to be part of the substance of the message St Paul wants to get across to these new and somewhat unruly Christians.  And to get something of a handle on just how significant these words are, we should hear them against a backdrop of this impassioned cry from the great prophet, Isaiah: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!"

God, it seems, has fallen silent.  All around him, Isaiah sees evidence that his society is going off the rails, but God seems indifferent.  Isaiah expects God to turn the volume up, to call the people back from their path of self-destruction, to give them a stirring message of law and order, to threaten, to warn, to exhort, to say SOMETHING!  But there is only silence.  God has nothing to say to his people.  He seems to have abandoned them, lost interest in them, left them to their own devices, is no longer interested in being their rescuer.  And so he utters this terrible cry of dereliction: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down!"

It always reminds me of Christ's terrible cry from the cross:  "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Those words come from the psalmist – but Jesus dying in agony could just as easily have cried, "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down."  They are words of despair, of abandonment, of dereliction. They convey that awful sense that God no longer cares; that God has abandoned us to our self-made fate.

With that in mind, now listen to these words of St Paul again: "Grace and peace to you from God."  St Paul is telling us, reminding us, that God has indeed rent the heaven and come down; in a way, of course, that staggers us today.  God rent the heavens and came down as a mere baby in Bethlehem.  It sounds terrifying, the idea of God rending the heavens; it sounds like the worst versions of the Apocalypse, doesn't it?  And yet we know it was nothing like that, because we have eye-witness accounts.  A bunch of shepherds saw and heard the whole thing.

St Luke says the shepherds were keeping watch; that's a good Advent expression.  And while they were watching an angel of the Lord appeared, and glory shone around.  Then the heavens were rent and a great company of the heavenly host appeared, praising God and singing: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests."  "Those on whom his favour rests" could be translated, "those to whom God has given his grace."  It's the same message: "Grace and peace to you from God."  That wasn't what Isaiah expected, perhaps, but it's exactly what he wanted – he wanted God to rent the heavens and come down and God did just that in Bethlehem.

We seem to be living in a time much like Isaiah's.  We only have to think of some of the stories that we have had in the media in the last few days to question the direction of our society.  Horrific cases of child torture, leading to death.  A ninety-nine year-old woman attacked and indecently assaulted in her home; a retired teacher murdered in his.  Two men accused of stealing millions from our local hospitals; reports of school bullying are now so commonplace, they hardly make the news.  A survey finds that over 70percent of respondents would not leave their contact details if they damaged someone else's car in a supermarket car-park (or anywhere else, presumably).  And in parts of Auckland, people are afraid to walk down some streets for fear of being accosted by kerb-crawlers, prostitutes, pimps and drug-pushers.

Now turn on the television!  Thailand in uproar, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, deliberate tainting of milk in China causing infant deaths, in the United States hundreds of men and women queuing in gun-shops to stock up in case their new President tries to take away their "right" to arm themselves with machine guns and heaven knows what else.  And already we have two cases of companies being bailed out with taxpayers' money using it, not to reduce toxic debt as they were supposed to, but to pay millions in bonuses to the very executives who led the companies into the financial mire in the first place.  Greed has no shame, it seems.

Truly we can understand Isaiah's anguished cry: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens, and come down!"  BUT – Advent is the season of hope, not despair.  Advent begins with these words from St Paul: "Grace and peace to you from God."  They could well be our mantra for this Advent Season.  Whenever we feel downhearted, whenever we are hurt by yet further evidence that our human race is going in the wrong direction, when yet another bad news story assails us from our TV screens, whenever we are tempted to scream with Isaiah at an apparently silent, uninterested heaven, let us instead recited these simply words from St Paul, "Grace and peace to you from God."  And in the privacy of our own homes, in front of the bathroom mirror, we might even say, "Grace and peace to me from God."

That's the Advent message.  In fact, we might go so far as to say, it is the gospel message.  God in his grace has made peace with us.  All we have to do is hear the message, believe in the message, and live our lives accordingly.  God has rent the heavens and come down; if we are watchful, we will see the evidence for that all around us.   As we commence this new year in the Church calendar year, may we re-commit ourselves to listen, to watch, to receive God's greeting to all humanity:  Grace and peace to you!