Sermon for the 18th of December, 2022 - Advent 4

Psalm 80: 1-8, 18-20
Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,
you who lead Joseph like a flock!
You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth
before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh.
Stir up your might,
and come to save us!
Turn us again, O God;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.
O Lord God of hosts,
how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?
You have fed them with the bread of tears,
and given them tears to drink in full measure.
You make us the scorn of our neighbours;
our enemies laugh among themselves.
Turn us again, O God of hosts;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.
You brought a vine out of Egypt;
you drove out the nations and planted it.
Then we will never turn back from you;
give us life, and we will call on your name.
Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Matthew 1: 18-end
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother
Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found
to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous
man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her
quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared
to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary
as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will
bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from
their sins.’ All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord
through the prophet:

‘Look, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the
angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital
relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

As we draw nearer to the celebration of the great feast of the Nativity—the
coming of God to earth in the form of a child—we try to capture and hold
this brief time of contemplation before our joyful celebration.
How can we grasp more deeply what this historical event means for us,
this irruption of the Divine into the course of human life?
Each year the event we celebrate is the same, but we have changed, we who
have experienced a entire year’s worth of other events that have marked our
own lives.
So each year we approach the crib, the cradle, with a different sense of wonder,
of awe, of marvelling.
How will the experience of Christmas be different for you, this year?
What has changed you, in this past year?
As Matthew’s account of the Nativity is well-known among us, I wanted to
concentrate on the Psalm this morning, the Old Testament reading, and on one
word from it: the word, turn.
In Psalm 80, the refrain that recurs pleads:
Turn us again, O God;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.
You might think that this word is simply a useful one, telling someone how to
go: turn left, turn right!
But there are other meanings.
The word turn does indeed mean a change of direction while moving.
It also means to move in a circular direction wholly or partly round an axis or
central point.

Our axis, the centre around which we move, is the God above, the God of the
Hebrew people, who did answer their plea and who did save them. This same
God remains our axis, our centre, around which our lives also turn.
I think that of the many people who seem lost in our world in these times many
have never known a fixed point around which to move. There is no centre, no
unchanging and stable point that anchors them, that draws them back when they
wander far away.
I have been our representative to the youth events in Kensington that happen
three times a year—-it has given me a chance to get to know, or at least to
observe, some of the youth from our neighbouring churches. For the past couple
of years I have brushed up against one youth from another church who just
seems to be a trouble-maker. He not only pushes the boundaries of whatever the
group activity is, he stirs up the other boys around him to do the same—to
disrupt, to harass, to bully. The youth leader from his church says that it is a
hard call to make in his youth group meetings every Thursday night—-having
talked with this boy’s parents, with no apparent change in the boy’s behaviour,
to decide whether to eject the boy from the group or hope that by allowing him
to stay in he will, over time, change. This seems to me to be a boy with no
stable point that anchors him, no sense of God as that anchor. I don’t have an
answer to this situation.
But God is always able, when we are 15, or 95, to turn us again, as the Psalmist
pleads. It is never past time, never too late.
God as the centering point never changes.
Another meaning of the word turn is to move something so that it is in a
different position in relation to its previous place.
Even though we may feel we cannot move ourselves out of a place of sadness,
or even despair, God can move us. Not if we shut God out, but if we open
ourselves to how God might be speaking to us—in small things, in daily things.
Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.
God’s face shone in the nativity; God’s face shone in the gift of the Christ child.
That greater light that Christ brought us, in his life and in his bright and shining
resurrection, is our hope. Our lives can sometimes seem small, or insignificant,
disappointing, or incomplete. We cannot seem to change our lives to make them
what we want them to be. Only God has this power to take us and change us.

In the end, God can not only change us, but transform us. Because this is yet
another meaning of the word, turn. That we are turned so radically that we
cannot go back to the path we were pursuing, but have been radically
transformed into a fuller expression of the beloved creatures of God that we are
—-that God has always intended us to be.
So the word, turn, possesses all these meanings:
to change direction,
to be held around a centering point,
and to be radically transformed.
I read in The Tablet this past week about a transformation that was quite
dramatic—one that inspired me and gave me hope for our war-torn world.
Father Majdi Allawi is a Christian priest in Lebanon. Now 52, he grew up
against the backdrop of the protracted fifteen-year-old Lebanese civil war that
dominated life there between 1975 and 1990. There are eighteen religious sects
in Lebanon within a political system where former warlords use religious
affiliation to instil hatred and discord. In the city where he has opened a feeding
centre, Bourj Hammoud, there are Armenian Orthodox Christians, Muslims,
Kurds, Syrian refugees, and migrant workers from Asia and Africa.
They come to this centre because they are poor.
Born a Muslim, when Allawi was nine years old he hid himself under a table in
the next-door classroom of his school. The catechesis class was being held. He
overheard the parable of the Prodigal Son for the first time. He wept,
overwhelmed by the story of the merciful father. From that moment on, he said,
he began looking for Christ. At age 14, he left his family. He became homeless,
although he worked as a cleaner and as a carer for the elderly. He said that he
was very happy during those years, despite his hardships, because he had the
chance to love Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, everyone he met.
With Jesus, my love was endless, he said.
At Bonheur du Ciel, which means Joy of Heaven, Father Allawi ministers to
many thousands of people, not only housing, feeding, and clothing those who
come, but in seven other centres helping drug addicts, single mothers, orphans,
and others who are most vulnerable. He even works as a petrol station attendant
or waiter one day a week in order to give that person time with their family.
He chooses to see joy everywhere. His faith illuminates not only his life, but the
lives of those he encounters, everywhere. Despite the ongoing economic crisis

in Lebanon that continues to inflict terrible hardship on a majority of the
population, Father Allawi radiates the joy of his faith. Christ taught him, he
said, to see the world as beautiful, and nothing as bad.
How will the experience of Christmas be different for you, this year?
What has changed you, in this past year?
How can God turn you so that you radiate the light of Christ to all whom you
meet?
May the love and light of Christ so fill our hearts, so turn us, that we bless each
person we meet.
Amen!