Sermon for the 16th of November - Second Sunday Before Advent

Lectionary Readings

Malachi 4: 1-2a
See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.

Psalm 98
Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things. His own right hand and his holy arm have won for him the victory. The Lord has made known his salvation; his deliverance has he openly shown in the sight of the nations. He has remembered his mercy and faithfulness towards the house of Israel, and all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. Sound praises to the Lord, all the earth; break into singing and make music. Make music to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the voice of melody. With trumpets and the sound of the horn sound praises before the Lord, the King. Let the sea thunder and all that fills it, the world and all that dwell upon it. Let the rivers clap their hands and let the hills ring out together before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. In righteousness shall he judge the world and the peoples with equity.

II Thessalonians 3: 6-13
Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labour we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.

Luke 21: 5-19
When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’ They asked him, ‘Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?’ And he said, ‘Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, “I am he!” and, “The time is near!” Do not go after them. ‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’ Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. ‘But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defence in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

Sermon for the Second Sunday before Advent

I would like to talk, this morning,

about power, and apocalypse, and Christian hope in Advent.

I have eight minutes.

I turn to images:

first, a film. You may have been too young to have seen Spartacus, in 1960, but it is now a Classic, and you can find it and watch it, any time.

From that film, there is an unforgettable image of power: a line of crucified slaves, grim, appalling, their crosses planted upright along the Via Appia, stretching for many, many miles. A warning; a reality. Do not attempt what they attempted to do, to challenge Roman power.

Roman power at the time of Christ could not be thrown off, by any set of rebellious slaves, by any opposing army, certainly not by the Jews of Israel. It was the overlying larger reality to every small act of each Jew's daily life.

Read Tom Holland's book, Dominion. This will give you an idea of it.

A second image of power, from the Jewish historian Josephus:

he described the burning of the Jerusalem Temple, in the year 70.

Many who were already slowly dying of starvation and unable to speak, when they saw the Temple afire, gathered strength again for wailings and outcries. He tells too of six thousand refugees who perished in the flames of the Temple porticos, deluded by a 'false prophet, who had on that day announced to the people in the city that God commanded them to go to the Temple to receive the signs of their salvation.'

Luke wrote his Gospel after the complete destruction by the Romans of the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus's prophetic warnings--what we read today-- had indeed come to pass.

So that is the backdrop, of power.

When oppressive power makes reform unlikely and rebellion impossible, people have always turned to a way of communicating with one another that carries on resistance. Coded language. Apocalyptic language.

As in our readings for today, that are dreadful, and disturbing:

The day that comes shall burn them up (the evildoers) in Malachi...

Retribution, violence of all kinds, wars and insurrections, dreadful portents and great signs from heaven fill the lines of Luke.

These are images of the end-times.

Apocalypse: it means a lifting of the veil, an unveiling of that which has been hidden. Cosmic visions of the future that will come to pass, inexorably, sweeping away all that is known and familiar to us human beings. The angelic beings who deliver these visions are themselves mysterious, enigmatic, speaking in symbols and coded language. The end-book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, is the supreme example of this kind of world.

The world of the book of Revelation and of the so-called Little Apocalypse, a block of material found in all three synoptic Gospels--Mark 13, Matthew 24, Luke 12--is not our world--or, at least, not yet!

You may already have begun to speculate that some kind of end-time is approaching, given the chaos in the United States--my birth country--the crumbling of democracies into autocracies in other countries, as well, the imminent threat of climate disaster, and the lack of hope that gives rise to terrorism on a massive scale. Among other features of our present times.

Another film. I hope you have seen Francis Ford Coppola's appropriately named Apocalypse Now. The image I have carried away with me was of the helicopter descending, instrument of destruction bringing flames amid the cries of death.

The Vietnam War was part of our present time.

In our Gospel reading for today Jesus is warning all those around him to be vigilant, to persevere in faith, to pray. To observe the signs of the times.

Why did he say these things? What did he mean?

Should we wake up? Should we look out for the apocalyptic signs of the end-times that may indeed be all around us?

I would like to try to answer this question. And I would like to set it in the larger framework of the nature of Christian hope. What is Christian hope, and how is it different from just an ordinary kind of hope?

And why is Advent particularly appropriate as a season, yes, for penitence, but also for the celebration of hope?

Where are we in the Christian year?

After the harvest of autumn, we celebrated, with singing, all the saints, then commemorated all souls, and then the fallen of World War I, as a season of remembrance. But we look ahead, now, to the beginning of Advent, in only two weeks' more time. This season of preparation for the great feast of the Nativity is also, oddly, a season of penitence, that most consider only Lent to be.

The greater the feast, the more intense the period of preparation. For Christmas, as for Easter, the time before can be a fruitful time to examine our hearts--to look deeper, to see what the coming Light needs to transform.

In these darkening days of nightfall at 4:20 in the afternoon, we turn our faces toward the symbol of the light shining in the darkness, the light of Christmas.

The Gospel writers envision a future time when the world humans have fashioned for themselves does give way to upheaval and destruction. But we are not to be obsessed with counting days or interpreting signs. We are to refashion our lives. Christianity brought to the so-called civilised world of that time a new ethos of self-sacrificing love, embodied in the crucified Christ. We are to act in the light of the Cross, loving our neighbour as ourselves, caring for the least of these my children, as Jesus asked us to do.

Christian hope is a different kind of hope. It is not bland, or a kind of nice well-wishing, or a vague outlook, done with in a present presented on the morning.

It is the embrace of a fully lived life of love, and service, and joy.

I end with a few lines from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, someone whom I consider a modern saint and a profound theologian:

What does it mean to see God made mortal?

Jesus's life one was wholly given over to Divine giving and receiving, accepting mortality, but transfiguring it.

That's Christmas, the focal point in the entire history of the universe as we know it.

The moment when God shows God's faithfulness to what God has made, in which the full potential God has put into creation is brought to fruition, and in which, also, the cost of the truth in a world of change, a world sometimes of betrayal, violence and hostility, a world of instability and insecurity, is made plain.

In all that, God's faithfulness is not destroyed.

He adorns with glory what is passing and limited.

He identifies with what is fragile and poor.

God remains God. God remains faithful.

Our world needs to know where there is food to be had, where there is love, where there is nourishment. Where there is a truth that doesn't depend on our success or failure, but lives eternally--whether we know it or not--whether we've found our way to it or not--and that it is always there. Always working and living for our good, our reconciliation, and our joy.

So let us live toward the light of Christmas in this season, and every season. Amen.