BACK TO REALITY

Hebrews 2, 10-end. Matthew 2, 13-end

On Christmas morning the sermon spoke of how the familiar Christmas story wraps us round in comfort and security, like the swaddling bands in which the infant Jesus was wrapped.

But the Christian tradition does not allow us to remain in comfort and security for long. Immediately Christmas Day ends, the calendar directs our thoughts to Stephen, the first Christian martyr, on 26 December; then to John, exiled to Patmos in his old age on 27th: then the Holy Innocents, killed on the orders of Herod on 28th; and Thomas Becket, martyred in the course of a dispute between church and the civil state on 29th; and finally on 31 December, to John Wyclif, sent to the stake for daring to translate the Bible into a language people could understand.

And today we are led to contemplate the Holy Family – but it is not the Holy Family resting secure in their home, receiving the adoration of either simple shepherds or the wise of another culture. It is the Holy Family fleeing for their lives to escape the murderous intent of a megalomaniac ruler, who can see even a newborn baby as a threat to his continued power.

Today we are brought back to reality with a bump. The reading from Matthew reflects what we have been reading in our newspapers and seeing on our screens over the past few days – innocent people killed as a result of political rivalry, or natural disaster; families hit by tragedy at a time of joy;and as always refugees fleeing for their lives and seeking shelter in alien lands – real life in all its difficulty and confusion.

But the comfort and security of the Christmas picture has not disappeared. It is still there to strengthen us as we live out our Christian faith in the real world. It assures us that if we listen to God, we can come safely through the trials which life throws at us. It reminds us of the help and support we can expect in hard times from our Christian family. It reassures us with the truth that there is nothing we suffer which Christ did not suffer before us; as Hebrews says, “because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested”.

May the faith of Mary, the strength of Joseph and the peace of the Christ Child be with us all as we go forward to live through whatever the New Year may bring.

READY TO RECEIVE, READY TO GIVE.

Advent 4, with baptism and admission to communion. Isaiah 7, 10-16; Matthew 1, 18-end

Like many of you, I am sure, I have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks preparing to give presents – choosing suitable gifts for different people, going out shopping or on the internet to buy them, wrapping them up and putting some in the post and others ready to go under the Christmas tree.

But I have also ( if I’m honest) been getting ready to receive. I hope there will be some presents for me on Christmas Day – indeed one has already arrived in the post and is waiting to be unwrapped.

In our service today, we are celebrating the giving and receiving of a very special gift – our Saviour Jesus Christ. We are celebrating this gift which comes to us in two different ways – first of all through the child born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and second through the sacrament of Holy Communion, week by week.

Our readings from Isaiah and Matthew told us of how people were prepared by God to receive the gift of their Saviour, by the teaching of the prophets through the years of Old Testament times, and through the co-operation of Mary and Joseph in the birth of Jesus.

Mary and Joseph received a gift from God – their first born child – but they also had to be ready to give too – they had to be prepared to give up their respectable reputation, the understanding of their family and neighbours, and, in Matthew’s version of the story, the security of their home, as they became the parents of this special child.

The hymns and prayers and readings we have during the service are helping us to be ready to receive the gift of Our Lord through the sacrament of Holy Communion. And for five of our young members, today will be the end of several weeks of preparation to receive this special gift for the first time.

Through Christ’s sacramental gifts of Baptism and Communion we receive a wealth of presents – the presence and the love of Christ, the strength and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, unity with God and with our fellow Christians, new life and the promise of salvation, in addition to the gifts God has already given us – our talents and skills, our families and our secure and comfortable homes.

But as we receive these special gifts, we are also being asked to be ready to give – to give our loyalty to Christ and to be ready to defend our faith against those who disapprove or make fun of it. To be ready to give our time and our talents to support Christ’s Church and to serve the people of the world in Christ’s name. To undertake to prepare ourselves properly week by week and year by year to receive the wondrous gift of our Saviour, given to us in the infant King and the bread and wine, and never to take God’s gifts for granted.

So we need to pray for each other, and especially for those baptised and admitted to Communion today, that we may receive worthily, and give generously, as God does. And may we all – newly baptised Christians and those who were baptised many years ago, new communicants and those who have received Communion many times before – find joy in giving and receiving God’s many gifts this Christmas time.

Something’s Coming!

Advent 1. Yr. A. Isaiah 2, 1-5; Romans 13, 11-14; Matt. 24, 36-44

Do you ever get a song or a piece of music on the brain? It is something that happens to me frequently ( to the irritation of other members of my family, as I go around the house singing it!)

At this time of year it is often a song from the musical West Side Story. The words go like this:
Could be, who knows.
There’s something due, any day
I will know, right away, soon as it shows.
I got a feeling there’s a miracle due,
Gonna come true, coming to me.
Could it be, yes it could.
Something’s coming, something good, if I can wait.
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is gonna be great.
The air is humming
And something great is coming.

Now, it’s not a religious song, but it seems to me that it encapsulates what we Christians call “The Advent Hope”. The feeling that we express in lighting Advent candles, opening Advent Calendars, buying presents, preparing food, practising carols and nativity plays. It is the sentiment that runs through our Old Testament reading from First Isaiah. The anticipation, the expectation, the excitement of preparing for a surprise and the confidence that, when it comes, it will be marvellous.

But this year another piece of music has been running through my mind ( perhaps because I was listening to it on my iPod as I did the ironing last week). It is the ‘Libera me, Domine’ from Faure’s Requiem. The words say ( in English translation)
‘Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death
on that dreadful day
when heaven and earth are moved,
when you come to judge the world by fire.
I tremble and am afraid,
I fear the trial and the wrath to come’.

That music typifies the other aspect of Advent – a season of the Church’s year that has a sort of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character. It is the aspect which runs through our Gospel reading – part of the ‘Little Apocalypse’ that we find in all the synoptic Gospels. It reflects the traditional themes of Advent – The Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, and the liturgical traditions which say we don’t have flowers in church, or sing the Gloria, and use purple hangings during this season. It expresses the anxiety, perhaps even the terror, as we await the Second Coming of Christ, bringing with it the end of life as we know it, and judgement.

The dual faces of Advent show themselves also in the hymns we sing during the season – some hopeful like “Hark a thrilling voice is calling” and ‘Wake O Wake’, and ‘The advent of our King’, others with a mixture of anticipation and terror, like ‘Lo, he comes with clouds descending.’ Though no-one, I think, will countenance singing the hymn I found in a very old version of The Methodist Hymnal, one verse of which goes:
The ungodly, filled with guilty fears
Behold his wrath prevailing.
For they shall rise, and find their tears
And sighs are unavailing.
The day of grace is past and gone,
trembling they stand before his throne,
All unprepared to meet him.

Both these faces of Advent have their place in the Christian tradition. Advent as a penitential season has its roots in the days when baptisms took place at Christmas and Epiphany, so there needed to be a season of fasting and discipline in the weeks preceding them to allow the candidates to prepare to receive the sacraments.

All the indications are that, nowadays, we’re much more at ease with the ‘Something’s coming, something good’ Advent, than the ‘Prepare to meet thy doom’ Advent. But our hymns and readings face us with both themes; and since the secular world places all the emphasis on anticipation, we Christians really do need to pay some attention to the theme of judgement.

As the old hymn I quoted shows, previous generations seemed to be much more comfortable with thoughts of judgement. Many of the Old Testament writers seem quite happy to speak of a God who unleashed his wrath against those who broke his laws, and everyone associated with them however, innocent. The Messianic age to which many of the prophets look forward is conceived of as a time when justice – seen in terms of the punishment of the wicked in an eternity apart from God – will be done. This is God being ‘fair’ in purely human terms – dealing out retribution to the unjust and goodies to the righteous.

But modern Christians tend, on the whole, to have more tender consciences. We expect God to behave in a more ethical way. We expect punishment to be reformative, rather than retributive. We find difficulty in reconciling the idea of a God who decrees eternal punishment for some with the idea of a God of love.

People try to avoid the problem of these conflicting ideas in various ways. Some reject the Old Testament picture of a vengeful God, and say it is mistaken. Some avoid thinking about the Second Coming and judgement at all. ( Isn’t this what the great majority of nominal Christians are doing when they avoid coming to church in Advent and Lent, but turn up in droves when the Church gets back into celebratory mood at Christmas and Easter? And isn’t their God a celestial version of the kindly grandfather who turns up at weekends and holidays dishing out fivers and sweeties, but is never around to make demands or to exert discipline at any other time?)

Other people split God into compartments and only think about one aspect at a time: The Creator God when they read Genesis; Baby Jesus at Christmas; Jesus, Friend of Sinners most of the time; and the ‘Judge Eternal, throned in splendour’ only when their thoughts turn – as rarely as possible – to their own death and the end of the world.

Yet, if we are to be honest in our faith, and faithful to the tradition, we need to try to live with these contradictions, difficult though that may be. We have to hold in tension God as Judge and God and Saviour. Whether we hold the traditional picture of the second coming as a time of judgement, or believe we face judgement at death, or that we face judgement every time we make a decision which involves moral choices, we need to present the secular world with the uncomfortable truth that actions have consequences and we cannot simply do as we like, because we are all answerable to a divine judge.

It is difficult to keep to the traditional solemnity of Advent, when the world around has been preparing for Christmas since the end of October. In the Church Times last week, a sister from a religious order suggested we should move Advent to November to cope with the reality that the secular world celebrates Christmas from the beginning of December. But I think the Church has an important role in teaching the world about the importance of waiting for what is valuable; and the need to prepare properly for the coming of Christ. And it has an important function in providing a place of respite from the frenetic activity of the weeks before Christmas, a quiet space in which we can prepare spiritually.

We need to learn to cope with an Advent Season which is both joyful and penitential – and to be able to explain to the world why we keep Advent in the way we do.

From time to time we may discover a thought or a story that enables us to rest, even if only for a short time, in some sort of equilibrium. I offer you one such thought now – one of Rabbi Lionel Blue’s ‘Bolts from the Blue’. (Hodder and Stoughton 1986)

“In case the Last Judgement terrifies you, I give you this forecast of it, given to me by my teacher. “All that will happen”, he said, “is that God will sit you on his knee, so to speak, and explain to you what your life was really all about. Then you will see it all without illusion – and that will be your heaven and your hell”.

Love and judgement.
May we prepare ourselves this Advent to receive both.