by Rev. Dr John Evans
Sermon delivered 14 Dec. 2008
At the heart of the season of Advent, and of Christmas itself, there is an exciting, inspiring, and yet also a challenging paradox. A paradox which our readings today highlight . . . so let me explain.
On the one hand, because of our trust in God, our personal experience of God, we can believe; we can have hope that God is with us: we can trust that God will again break into our lives – that God can come to a world which is affected by despair, injustice, war and gloom – and offer hope. This is the anticipation and the joy of Advent. On the other hand, this in-breaking of God may not be readily discerned. God can surprise. We just may not be looking in the right place, or looking at all – and we may miss our hope that is in Christ. Because we will neither know the hour, nor the place – or how God’s presence will happen – we will miss the advent of our God.
As I said, our readings, particularly our psalm and the gospel reading, highlight these two features of Advent.
Psalm 126 is a simple psalm, with a clear two-part structure. The first part of the psalm recalls how God has acted in the past –
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream …
our mouth was filled with laughter,
And our tongue with shouts of joy.
Generally this psalm is thought to apply to the return of the Children of Israel from exile in Babylon, to Jerusalem. God had acted in their lives – there was unbounded joy, happiness and rejoicing. The image of being “like those who dream” is particularly powerful. Again the people could dream of a new future, a different future. In exile, even to dream of another future was difficult and virtually impossible.
So with this experience of the love and goodness of God, the request thus comes:
Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
… may those who sow in tears
Reap with shouts of joy.
Because of their previous experience of God, when facing difficulty, they could hope for a new future in their current circumstance. Such was the trust in God, that their hope for salvation was not unrealistic. Hope arose because there was a personal and lived experience of God’s love and grace.
Whom do you trust? Whom do you believe in? On what do you base your hope?
I am sure you trust people you know, people whom you come to respect; people you know personally and whom you believe can be depended upon. You have had experience with them, and you believe you know what they will be like in the future. You can take them at their word. And if you do not know the person individually you might trust their family; “they are a good family I know this person’s parents”; or you might trust the institution – the government, the bank, the university, the church – because those institutions have standards, mechanisms to maintain probity and dependability. After all, aren’t they the very foundation of our society? But then that is the trouble today. People are not trusting these institutions. This part of the pickle the church and banks are in at the moment. The Church, because it breached its trust with the community over child sexual abuse; and banks because they became fast and loose with other people’s money. Indeed, the current global financial crisis is all about the breach of trust; the breach of faith. Why would one bank lend to another bank in today’s climate – they cannot be trusted. And because there is no trust – there is no sense of hope for the future . . . and so we swirl in this global financial crisis, because that simplest of virtues – trust – is no longer there.
The Children of Israel however trusted God – they prayed that God would save them; God in the past had done this. Again he would be there for them.
Our advent hope is similarly based on our experience of God breaking into our lives. And the implications of this message for Advent are immediate, for the church has a memory too. Like Israel-of-old, the church remembers God’s saving deeds, but in this instance they are memories based on Jesus of Nazareth — his birth, his life, his redemptive death and resurrection; of God’s commitment to life over death. And because we remember what God has done, we also have certain hopes and expectations concerning what God can and will do in the future: that God who came once will come again, and that in the interim, in the in-between time, the church continues to actualise the living Christ to the world by means of its own witness and its works of service.
The Lord has indeed done great things for us and we have rejoiced! And this becomes our Advent hope.
However, I began this sermon by saying there is an advent paradox. And I believe this paradox is important: we have a trust that God will break into our lives and the life of the world – but we do not how. God is a God of surprises. We have a hope in – well, what?
John the Baptist, as we know, was the forerunner. As John’s gospel is at pains to point out, he was not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor a prophet. He was “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness”. However, in his discourse with those sent from the Pharisees, almost in passing, he says:
Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.
Jesus was not known or understood, not recognised. The Messiah was not going to be like they had envisaged, like what they had hoped for. Among you stands one whom you do not know.
The difficulty for the Jews, the difficulty for the Church today, is that we believe we know how God is going to act – in our lives or within the church or within the world. Not unreasonably, indeed it is a matter of our faith, that we believe God is at work within the world and within the lives of his men and women. Our Advent cry of, ‘Come Lord Jesus, Come’ is based on our belief God has acted decisively in human history in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We have experienced joy, been able to dream, to laugh and shout for joy and so, like the psalmist, believe our hope for the future is well-founded. The danger, however, is that we know, we believe, how God will act . . . and we will not be open to God’s surprising presence. We will constrain the nature of God’s inbreaking.
Children's toy nativity set
How we treat Christmas is a classic illustration of this. Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, sundry animals have become cute; we have domesticated them. Perhaps we did this last Sunday in our Christmas pageant. Does God’s surprise that Jesus was born to an unmarried mother, in Bethlehem still confront us: and that this is where the hope for the world is to be found? Several weeks ago we had Justin Feuerring’s painting of of Madonna and Child. It was stark and shocking to our sensibilities. Justin, who is not a church person, a bit edgy in his life and his art, is somehow gripped by the big themes of the biblical story. Mary was not a beautiful young thing, she was a drug addict – and Jesus was born in a public toilet. And yet the painting clearly showed that this child was the holy one, and his mother was anointed by God. Justin is saying to us – be open to God’s surprising presence within our world. This Advent, this season of Christmas, are we open to God’s presence among us.
So John the Baptist provides a warning to the church, that although we believe God will act within the world, do not presume we know how that will be. How our strategic planning will determine god’s presence. At all times be open to God’s in breaking. Again the message: watch, be ready. Or as Paul says (using Peterson):
Be cheerful no matter what; pray all the time, thank God no matter what happens. This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live.
Don’t suppress the Spirit, and don’t stifle those who have a word from the Master. On the other hand, don’t be gullible. Check out everything, and keep only what’s good. Throw out anything tainted with evil.
There is also here good wisdom in not overly relying on those who have “a word from the Lord”. Paul is saying, check everything out. And that is good advice too – and comes back to the first arm of our paradox. We do need to understand how God has acted in history, how God has been revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, so that we may be able to discern when and where God acts in the world. Not all claims – this is a word of the Lord, can be sustained; not all supposed sightings of God are necessarily true. As Paul says, check everything out . . . but in such a way that does not kill off our openness to being surprised by God’s presence within our community.
Especially at Advent time – may we have confidence that there will be the presence of the Spirit in our lives and world; and may we be able to have fresh eyes and ears as we engage again with the story that Christ has come among us, born of the virgin Mary.
