indiscernible breaths of new beginning

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

29^th November, 2020

 

Readings:       

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19                                         

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 12:34-37

 

 It is both deeply peculiar and deeply profound that the Church year begins with endings. As we leap into Year B (and perhaps begin to hope that the calendar year 2020 might be put to bed), we turn to readings about doctrines of the second coming, the end of chronological time, what the visionary of Revelation calls the New Heavens and the New Earth. Speech of new beginnings after utter, complete terminations must needs be strange, surreal speech. We have nothing bit strange and surreal available to us. This is beyond our understanding, and, despite the screeds written on it, is beyond all human understanding.

And that’s okay, because while understanding is useful, it isn’t everything. I don’t understand the intricacies of my body. Fortunately, doctors and medical specialists understand much that I don’t. There remains much that they don’t understand, mind you, and I suspect the confidence we experienced in the 1970s that there would one day be no gaps in our understanding have somewhat dwindled in the years since. Still: medical understanding is impressive, and most of us have benefitted far more from it than our ancestors did, or indeed many people in poorer nations still do, today.

There remains much, even in simple human experience, that is unknown. Why does the human heart, as Hopkins put it, stir for a bird? Why do we care for music, why are we moved, not all of us, but many, by certain forms of music, certain types of food, activities, books or flowers or sunsets or sunrises?

Human understanding: so many limitations. As western society, we have tended to reject faith in matters spiritual, or religious, except in small sub-cultures. The sway held by churches through the Middle Ages and on through the Reformation has fragmented and crumbled, often deservedly so, and believers in the messages of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures are fewer and further between;  markedly so in the Europeanized nations. If our scriptural readings today speak of a hope beyond the collapse of our own lives, beyond the death that awaits us all, but beyond, too, the death of our planet, by and large we are considered fools for believing. What a fool believes! And, given the terrible ways in which we have in the past proclaimed Christ with brutality I suspect our diminishment is well-deserved. Isaiah saw that, too: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Our churches empty, our stipends dried up, our families long gone from the places where we have prayed or the hopes that once sustained us or our forebears.

How then do we have faith? The desertion of faith did not begin yesterday: at the very least I believe its seeds were sown in the fragmentation and persecutions of the Reformation, yet of course the seeds were sown long before that. Before that we imposed faith far too often by the sword: I tend to think our credibility – our ­collective credibility as bearers of Christ – crumbled at around the time Pope and Emperor climbed into a political bed together, church and state entwined, and Constantine proclaimed those dreadful words “in this sign (we) conquer” as he at least allegedly held a cross on high.

We got it badly wrong. If it’s any comfort out Jewish forebears did, long before us: at least 26 kings of the Hebrew kingdoms, according to my head count, got things badly wrong, and no doubt were supported in their wrong-doing by at least many of their people. Yet God loved and stood by the Hebrews (and still does it seems). For what it’s worth Manasseh, probably the worst of the Hebrew kings, stands firmly in Matthew’s version of the genealogy of Jesus (Mt. 1:10). Hebrews and Christians alike have often got it badly wrong, and as the Royal Commission will be starkly reminding us, far too little has changed in our own lifetimes. Yet there have also been profound sparks of integrity, diamonds of faith amidst the coal dust of religious mediocrity or worse.

How then do we believe, do we have faith in the light of so much wrongdoing, and when our society has so much scepticism towards the key claims of our faith? Much of the doubt and scepticism is not unwarranted, too: how then do we believe? Can we really believe in the Coming Christ of Advent, as one book title put it? Is it shocking if I acknowledge that there is much that I find hard to believe in our faith? As I often say, and will probably have said before now in this place, there is much that I gather together amongst the famous six impossible things to believe before breakfast, like those things  to which the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland holds daily.

At the very least the benefits outweigh the cost of ridicule. The breath of hope in our lives that seems at times to envelope us, the breath of hope in times of personal darkness, is an immeasurable benefit of faith. There are times when, like all breath, it seems impossible to cling to the passing air, and yet it can, as we let it, envelope us in its mystery. There have been times of darkness in my own life when the breath has become undiscernible, and yet the support and love of others has sustained the dying shadows of belief. Perhaps, writ large, that is precisely the situation for the western, global north church: our self-assured complacency has been stripped from us in recent years and decades, and we are thrown back on the bedrock of faith as our infrastructures crumble. Sometimes even the bedrock seems to have turned to sand – as perhaps it must when it is poorly formed – yet in other parts of the world the followers of Christ are growing in number and tenacity, and praying for us as they do.

For us, the task is one of perseverance. What are the errors of our past that must be jettisoned if we are to have credible faith in the decades ahead? Our presuppositions and bigotries, as an institution, though probably as individuals too, are being stripped from us. We are being taught by the inclusive Spirit of God to be an inclusive People of God. Our reliance on prestige and on false sources of security are being stripped from us by the Christ who was stripped of all protection on the Cross. Our obfuscation, our muddling of gospel love in high-sounding words (like obfuscation!) and wordy rites need at the very least a deep, searching edit so we speak with attractive magnetism of the welcoming embrace of the Saviour who enters deepest human darkness and there breathes light (though at the same time we must by the help of God avoid cheap and meaningless clichés and trite faith).

All this, we are reminded as Advent descends on us again, dwells in the realms of grace. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” we mumble in many of our prayers. It does, no matter what some psychologists may tell us, no harm to remind ourselves of that. We do the things, Paul said (and Cranmer after him), that we do not wish to do, and leave undone the things we should do. Advent is a time when we recall again that we are far removed from the person we could be, or the people we could be, and we turn again to invite the transforming love of God into our lives.  Advent is a time when we turn again to the God-in-Christ who reaches to us from the end of all time and from the end of our own times. Advent is the time when we implore God that we might not be barren fig trees, but conduits of life and hope. Advent is when the Coming Christ beckons us be made whole, beckons us to turn from dark to light, from despair to hope, and be filled once more with the life giving love of God, the God of the Cross.

 

 

TLBWY