SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU
CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (30th November) 2014
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (30th November) 2014
Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
Outside
academia it is little remarked that the author of the Second canonical Gospel,
who we call Mark and who may have been an eyewitness of Jesus, a companion of Paul
or even both, was one of few creative artists to invent a wholly new genre. As
he penned his resounding words which depict a new beginning for humanity, he
did so not with the expectation of admiration, but of conveying new hope. Quickly
in his instinctive and urgent story-telling he diverts attention from himself
(by the simple expedient of never permitting it), bypasses one of the great
religious and cultural icons of his era (John the baptiser), and places attention
squarely on Jesus.
He does so
because Jesus is for him the issue. But
he does so with words that for us are blunted by 2000 years of use and misuse
and even abuse. In Greek: archē tou euangeliou
yesu christou. The resonance and the danger and sheer subversive brilliance
of his words are blunted by 2000 years of tradition. To Mark’s audience, these
words meant “roll over, Caesar, a new boss is here.” These words were
laughable. The so called new boss had been executed under Caesar’s delegated
and disinterested authority two decades before. Only if light bulbs went on in
the experience of the first hearers of Mark would these presumptuous words make
sense. Only if the first hearers felt that their long-crucified messiah was indeed
bigger than Caesar would these words achieve anything other than to have Mark
despatched to a first century looney bin.
There, for a
moment, we will leave Mark. He stood in the line of a series of brave speakers
who had dared to subvert dominant paradigms with their preposterous pronouncements.
Five hundred years earlier a second Isaiah had stood in the dangerous shoes of
prophesy and told his simultaneously complacent people that their God was re-establishing
their comfort and hope. The words that Handel rendered so brilliantly in the Messiah were daring words, disturbing
words, and surprisingly unwelcome words: “comfort ye my people.”
The
infrastructure of the Hebrew peoples had been shattered, the world they knew
destroyed when the Assyrian Empire had swallowed them and all their security a century
before. But they had become contented in their exile, and Isaiah’s words were
deeply ambivalent: did they want to go back to the old ways? As prophets today
speak of downsizing our infrastructure we hear the same lament: you can’t put
the clock back, can’t stop the rape of the earth that produces climate change,
can’t redraw the arbitrary boundaries that fuelled nationalism, can’t put back
in the ground the uranium that casts the shadow of nuclear winter across the
globe. The Assyrian and subsequent gods were sexier than the God of the
Hebrews: did they really want God’s comfort? Keep your comfort, Isaiah, keep
your comfort and your God.
But Isaiah
dared to dream a dream of a challenging, different and un-complacent reality. He
dared to dream of a less sexy existence but one in which the Creator God
brought a deeper narrative of meaning into human lives and deaths. Superficiality
is fine, but when the twin towers of commerce are destroyed by terrorist
action, or a tsunami destroys a quarter of a million lives in a single boxing
day surge, or when another tsunami wipes out a nuclear power-station and
renders the ocean toxic, or when airliners disappear without a trace, or
cyclones and typhoons obliterate entire cities, or terrorists kidnap hundreds
of schoolgirls, then superficialities dissolve and humans lapse into stunned
impotence and rapid-onset amnesia. When our language no longer permits the
harsh truth of death, and we just pass or pass on or pass over, then when the
reality of our own or our loved ones’ vulnerability sinks in we have no words
with which to embrace hope and comfort. Isaiah would have none of it: Comfort,
comfort ye my people.
His comfort
would embrace reality, embrace truth, embrace pain, and there find hope without any denial. Isaiah was mad. He dared to suggest
that his people reconnect with their demanding God, rediscover that all people,
even you and me, are grass, are perishable, and wither and die. He dared to
suggest that only in the embrace of God, only in the harsh and demanding
disciplines of God, the embrace of a demanding God, could meaning to life be
found. Like all the biblical writers Isaiah dared to suggest that the emptiness
and the pain and even the sense of abandonment that is a part of human
journeying is not a place to be denied or repressed or partied away. It is
instead a place where we encounter the God who, in the very depths of God’s
self, also knows loneliness and abandonment and superfluity, and only there begins
to breathe the miracle of new life. Isaiah dared to suggest that pain is the
place where God dwells best, because God knows it best.
So the
prophets waved no magic wand. But the people of God who have stood in their
line, including the first Christians for whom Mark told his crazy tale of a new
and death-transcending Caesar-Christ, discovered something in the rites and
rituals of their faith. They discovered that as they came together and suffered
together and bore one another’s often quite heavy burdens, they began to
discover that hints of light conquered even their darkness, and hints of hope transcended
even their despair. They discovered that Mark’s claim of a death transcending
Christ-Caesar was not crazy after all, no matter what the Roman authorities tried
to tell and do to them.
In Advent therefore
we are challenged to journey on through the superficiality in our lives, the
complacency and what Peter calls the spots and blemishes in our lives, and find
a deeper, inextinguishable blaze. We are challenged to find that it is in raw
honesty that there breaks a yet more glorious Day, as William How put it. We
are challenged to serve a different paradigm to that which surrounds us,
putting aside the superficial and the sexy and finding instead the deep and
uncomfortable places of the comforting God. At the end of Mark’s good news
frightened women dare to live and tell out the resurrection story, however
silly and even inconvenient it seems. We are challenged to do likewise.
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