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SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 
and St Alban’s, Kurow
THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 11^th) 2022
 
 
 READINGS:
 
Isaiah 35: 1-10
For psalm: Luke 1: 47-55
James 5: 7-10
Matthew 11: 2-11

 

As I interacted with my gospel conversation co-conversationalists the other day it occurred to me that one of the foremost and most neglected themes to emerge from this week’s gospel reading is the invitation established by John the Baptist to interrogate Jesus.

Often in my career I have tended to hang loose to the gospel readings, dipping more completely into the other readings and seeking application for our own times in those encounters with the God we serve. Occasionally I’ve been organised enough to weave through the readings, letting them cast light on each other – interrogate each other as I have just put it. That in fact is how the lectionary is designed, but whether we use what is called the “continuous readings,” something of a misnomer in any case, or the so-called “related readings,” the links are often tortured at best. Nevertheless our readings do in a sense interrogate each other. Isaiah’s ecstatic vision of joy asks our God – who as Christians we believe is definitively revealed in Jesus Christ as found in the gospels – asks our God where we might find joy in a tormented world, whether then in the first century – or today in our twenty-first.

“Here is your God … he will come” says Isaiah, foreshadowing that powerful word Immanuel, God with us. But where? Where is Isaiah’s God in the midst of the semi-apocalyptic doom and gloom of our era? Isaiah’s vision is of a God with a big stick who will bash up the Putins and Taliban and torturers and exploiters of his time. 

Is that our God? Such a God seems remarkably absent in our world, or at a more micro level, in the terrifying worlds of victims of war, famine or abuse. I will tend to explore answers, if such can be proposed to that question more in the context of Good Friday when we find God on a Cross crying out in resurrection solidarity with all who have cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is an eternal question. But let us for now acknowledge that the affirmation of either Isaiah or Jesus that there is hope, that God will come, that God will be with us, that God is with us, these can seem a pretty tenuous claim after 2000 years or more. Perhaps as philosophers like Nietzsche or Sartre and the fiercely evangelical New Atheists have claimed, God is simply dead or absconded.

Hopefully it is needless for me to add that this dark view is not mine. If it were I might well be mowing my lawns right now. But I’m not, long though they are after two weeks’ absence.

Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist – under threat of death – is understandably impatient too. It is sobering to note that he does not really see an answer to his question before he dies a brutal death. Interrogating Jesus, even believing in Jesus, is not necessarily innocuolation against dark times.

Where then is hope in the crazy Jesus-story? Jesus’ own answer is simply “go, see,” and we may well be human enough not to find that entirely convincing.

We have to be realistic. There is so much in our Christian story which is hardly Christ-convincement. We have seen exploitation, self-aggrandisement, grim stories of abuse perpetrated by those who claim the name of Christ, and suffering even to the extent of John the Baptist experienced by those who follow Christ. Where, then, is good news breaking through the white noise of calamity?

We might note  that Jesus warned that there would always be tares – thistles we might say – amongst the fine wheat of faith. That amongst those claiming the name of Jesus there would be wolves in sheep’s clothing, predators amongst the pure of heart. He also warns of times of great trial for his followers – John the Baptist at the very least foreshadows the trials that those who are obedient to God may face. I make no secret of my own belief that ours is a time of sifting, sorting the thistles from the wheat grass, or whatever metaphor we might choose. The brutal exposure of our institutional church by royal commissions, by collapsing kudos and resources, by marginalisation in society’s consciousness: these are amongst the trials predicted by Jesus, and they have always been a part of the Christian story. Jesus speaks of them when he prays that we may not be led into times of trial.

Yet we find ourselves at least to some degree in a time of trial. And there will be greater trials yet as our false gods are torn from us. Parishes collapse, church buildings crumble, close, or both, and numbers dwindle to nothingness. Those in what Jesus tellingly calls “soft robes” and ostentatious palaces are receiving the firm Size 14 boot of God’s winnowing Spirit. Our children and grandchildren, most of us, care little for our esoteric beliefs about an invisible friend.

Yet we can even without, no: especially without ostentatious palaces and soft robes – he says while admittedly wearing the beautiful robes of liturgy – be the sign for which John the Baptist was looking, for which John the Baptist asked Jesus. Are we able, in whatever small way, able to touch lives, to shine light, if only faintly, to penetrate a whole lot of grey dark?

It’s been kind of nice for me this past fortnight to return to old haunts across the ditch, and, returning, not to know but at least to wonder if God has maybe just once or twice or more, pray God, used this stumbling Christ-follower to touch a life or two, to murmur the rumour that love, hope, justice, joy, peace can still exist in some small but God-breathed way even in our century.

And, as John the Baptist interrogates Jesus, perhaps we can too, and can offer our lives as we do in the liturgy, to in some small way be a living sacrifice, be a vehicle through which God may touch and encourage those we walk amongst. Our task, in the words of the famous prayer of Richard of Chichester, is simply to know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day, by continued exposure to the experiences of those around us, by immersion in the stories of scripture, and in the rhythms of liturgy. May God help us so to do.