Here is Your God

Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

Last week I gave you what I called "an Advent mantra"; and those who were here then will no doubt remember what it was.  "Grace and peace to you from God."  Remember?  Those seemingly simple words from St Paul contain the entire Advent message, which means they contain the entire Gospel message.  God has responded to Isaiah's cry to "rend the heavens and come down" by doing just that at Christmas.  So that's the first Advent message I want to put to you this year.  Grace and peace to you from God.

Today we have another one, and this too is very special and very short.  This one comes directly from Isaiah, the great prophet of the Advent.  He says a great deal in this marvellous passage this morning, but I want to draw your attention to the last short phrase in the rather lengthy ninth verse:  "Here is your God."  We hear a lot these days about the need for evangelism, for church growth, for outreach, and all the rest of it; and hardly a year goes by without some new crusade, programme, seminar, course, or whatever, all aiming to teach us how to grow the Church.  Well, Isaiah says it all in those four simple words: "Here is your God."

Those words have been special to me for some years now.  When I first went to the parish in Wellington, there was a long-standing issue about the large notice-board outside the church.  The church was built on a high point overlooking the surrounding township, and the notice-board had high visibility.  It had on it the usual stuff; the name of the church, the service times, and the Vicar's contact details.  What it did not have was any words of Scripture, and this had been a source of ongoing debate for some years prior to my arrival.  There was widespread agreement that it would be good to have a short verse of Scripture on the board, but in fine Anglican tradition there had been no agreement as to which short verse of Scripture it should have.

I was unaware of all this when I preached on this Scripture in the first Advent Season I was there, and I focussed on this phrase: "Here is your God."  I said this is the proclamation that the Church needs to make to the community; and I pointed out how appropriate this ninth verse was to that particular church.  This is what the whole verse says: You who bring good tidings to Zion, go up on a high mountain.  You who bring good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, "Here is your God!"  And suddenly people thought, "That's what we should put on the notice-board – "Here is your God."  If I had known about the issue, and had put a paper to Vestry suggesting those words, my bet is no one would have been convinced.  But for some reason, in the context of a sermon, the idea seemed so much more convincing.

So here's our second Advent mantra for this year: "Here is your God."  There is the role and mission of the Church in four words – there is evangelism in four words.  There is the message – the only message – we have to proclaim to the world.

Let's think about each of those words for a moment.  The first one is "here".  What does that say about God?  It says that God is not there, but here.  God is not up there, distant, lost in the realms of heaven.  God is here with us as we speak.  That is the message of Advent and Christmas.  That is what this part of the story is all about.  God has come down, God has left there and come here, God is with us; that's why we use the name Emmanuel at Christmas time.  It means God with us.  It tells us in more personal terms what our Doctrine of the Incarnation says in more churchy language.  God is here, God is present where we are.

The second word is "is": "Here IS your God."  Present tense.  It is not that God was here once, back in the glory days, before the church started dying on the vine.  And even in Advent we are not talking about some distant, future hope when God will be here.  Our message now is that God is here: God has rent the heavens and come down.  So the whole purpose of this message, it's whole thrust, can be seen to be an invitation.  God is here now – come and see for yourself.  There's the edge of evangelism – an invitation to meet the God who is here with us now.

The third word is "your", and that's surely a very important word for the Church to remember as it proclaims this Advent message.  The God whose presence with us we proclaim is the God of those to whom we are calling.  God "belongs to" the world: or, to put it better, God is the God of all people, and not just the God of the Church.  Perhaps we tend to forget that sometimes.  We may sound as if we have a God whom others are invited to share if they first join our church.  No, says, Isaiah, we do not call people to come and share our God; we call them to see their God and ours who is already among them and us.

And the fourth word is "God".  I may have mentioned before that one of the best sermons I have ever heard was given in Wellington Cathedral by the Director of Music, who was leaving for a new position in the U.K.  At his last evensong the Dean invited him to preach, and in ten minutes he spoke about worship.  He said his great worry was that all too often we seem to forget that worship is God-centred or it is not worship.  And he didn't pull his punches.  He said that if people come to the cathedral to hear the choir sing well but forget that they are singing God's praises, those people should not come again.  And if people come to the cathedral to hear good preaching and forget that the preacher is bringing them a message from God, those people should stay away.  And if people come to the cathedral to have fun and fellowship with others and forget that we are members of the Body of Christ and participants in the great communion of saints, those people should stay away too.

We are not called to proclaim to the communities and cities of this land, the presence of our churches, or of fine choirs, or of good preachers: we are called to proclaim to them, "Here is your God".  There's the challenge for the Church as a whole, for our Diocese as a whole, our parish as a whole.  Above all, as each of our congregations head into next year, those words should be a challenge and a guiding star for us.  How can we draw attention to the presence of God here and now?

 How can we see the Christ Child in the midst of all the commercial and sentimental rubbish that attaches to Christmas these days, and say to the people of Port Chalmers/Warrington, and to the people of our city, "Here is your God"?  How can we point to an agonised figure dying on a cross and say to those around us, "There is your God"?

Perhaps only by following the example of John the Baptist.  John's whole ministry was about denying himself and pointing to the One who is to come and who has come.  Perhaps as a church we have to stop trying to draw attention to ourselves, and concentrate on drawing attention to God.  John shows us how: he it was who turned his own disciples to look at Jesus: "Look," he said, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  He could equally have said with Isaiah, "Here is your God."