SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU
CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIERFOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 20th) 2015
Readings:
Micah 5:2-5a
Psalm 80:1-7Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55
Every narrator since before Homer created his or her tale to take their audience
to a particular perspective or experience. Whether the writer’s task be “mere”
entertainment or a much deeper level of instruction, they seek to take us into
a new perspective on what Douglas Adams called “life, the universe, and everything.”
The gospel authors were no exception. They took thirty or forty years’ worth of
remarkable, credible oral story telling about the man Jesus, dared to name him
Lord, and dared to tell of his conquest of all darkness and suffering and even
death despite his much publicised execution by Roman overlords. They dared to
tell of a powerlessness that conquers even the most brutal and manipulative
powers. They dared to turn reason upside-down.
Luke’s telling of the Jesus-story was based on his two or three decades
of life-transforming encounter with the risen Christ. That Christ had been made
known to him by the persuasive presence of the Spirit in evangelism and worship
and fellowship and scriptural exploration. At the heart of that experience was
the belief that against all appearances God the Creator had turned existence
upside-down in Jesus. No longer was the brutal Caesar Lord, but the crucified outsider
criminal was Lord. No longer were the proud and together and slick and polished
the mighty, but the broken and the hesitant and the Not Very Clever. No longer
were the dwellers in crystal palaces powerful, but the dwellers in culverts and
bus shelters. No longer were the clever creative aesthetes the conduits of
divine goodness, but the bumbling stumblers were.
In this reversal Luke interpreted the whole of Jewish history as a
history of expectation, a history of the hope that despite suffering and
despair, despite Daesh and a myriad myriad shootings and road traumas and human
catastrophes social and personal, despite all appearances, God’s “yes,” God’s
promise first whispered to Abraham, would one day be fulfilled, and indeed was
fulfilled in Jesus of the manger.
We know next to nothing about Luke, but he was not thick. He knew that
Caesar still packed a mighty punch, that poverty was unromantic, that death
either by natural causes or at the hands of a brutal state was fiercely
unattractive for both the dying and for those who love them. But Luke’s years
of worship and fellowship, practising the presence of God by building on his
first life-changing encounter with Jesus, his years of breaking open the Hebrew
scriptures and finding his Saviour writ large there, these had persuaded him
over and again that it was not the silliness of belief in the resurrected
Christ but the silliness of the failure to see beyond suffering and death that
represented truncation of the human heart and soul. And so he either put into
Mary’s mouth, or more likely recorded a poetic vision that had originated with
Mary the mother of Jesus, the mystical Mother of God, the words through which
the Christ-life must be lived: “my soul doth magnify the Lord … despite
everything logical.”
This means though that as Christians we are not called to see the rational
and coherent and strategic and sequential, but to see the vast and
incomprehensible upside-down blessing of God, the inextinguishable blaze of
Christ-light in which human experience of sensibleness and coherence and strategically
planned-for and sequentially ordered existence is made inconsequential. He has
scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts. We are called not to
see things as they are to us, but as
they are to the eternal perspective of God. This is impossible, but aided by
the Spirit of the Resurrection we can withstand God-given glances of the
eternities.
Centuries ago the great saint John Chrysostom wrote to Christians who were
experiencing persecution and death in a brutal reprisal initiated by the
Emperor Theodosius. Theodosius had begun by stripping away the privileges of
the city Antioch in which those Christians lived, removing therefore the
comfortable protections they had relied on. History is slowly repeating itself.
For social chit chat today is increasingly toxic in its assessment of
Christianity and its practitioners. Groundswells of murmuring and economic
realities coalesce to indicate that one day even western or global north Christians
will not enjoy the cosy infrastructural privilege that has been our Linus
blanket for centuries. As this happens we might learn from Chrysostom’s sage
warning: the honour of a city, Chrysostom warned, is not the favour of the
emperor, or the large and beautiful buildings, but the piety of those who
worship the God of Jesus Christ.
The beauty and security, the Linus blanket of a church or a cathedral
or a diocesan infrastructure will crumble, but it is the prayers of the people,
the journeying of the people in the way in which and to which we are baptised: these
are the church and the cathedral and the diocese and the collected authenticity
of the City of God.
To that we must witness by our mad-crazy actions. Are we a people who
welcome and embrace the odd and dysfunctional or the just plain different? I
speak not only of our big picture response to the world’s growing migration of
refugees, but the far more difficult small picture response of our attitude to
a noisy child or an unshowered street person or a person with prison tats in
the pew next to us. Do we embrace or do we exclude? I know my first reaction,
and I suspect I am not alone in needing to confess my reliance on comfort zones
that do not represent the topsy-turvy Magnificat values of Jesus the Christ. Do
we embrace and include those who are not from our socio-economic, chronological,
ethnic or cultural milieu, or do we subtly (not least by our expectations of
high literacy) exclude the lowly and the other, as we sing or read our
Magnificat?
Advent is a time of preparation. Sometimes the temptation is even to make
preparation distant and abstract, if aesthetically pleasing. Remembering the
sage words of R.A.K. Mason’s “On the Swag”
at least as much as those of Jesus the already-come and still-coming Christ, or
indeed of Mary his mother, we need to ask once more whether our hearts are
really prepared to encounter Jesus, to “bring him in, ” to “let the wine be
spiced in the old cove’s night-cap.” Can
we pause to meet him in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world he simultaneously inhabits
and promises, or are we prisoners of our own paradigms of comfort and propriety,
orderliness and niceness?
May God help us to be ready for the coming, upside-down Christ of the
Magnificat.
The peace of the coming Christ be always with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment