1 Thessalonians 3:13
And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
Sermon for Advent Sunday
I attended the Memorial Service of my
mother in law this week.
Her church is very rural, a tiny church
in a hamlet of about four dwellings, around it chilly autumn fields and the
rolling Sussex countryside.
People were already gathering there,
half an hour before the service began.
The church was warm and inviting, there
were candles burning and a choir was already assembled, with organist playing.
We were welcomed at the door by smiling
stewards who gave us our orders of service, all people who knew and loved my
mother in law as part of God’s family.
The vicar arrived and gave me a hug,
although I’d never met her before.
The service began, with dignity and
solemnity, but with a sense of celebration and tenderness as we shared our
memories.
In our singing, sharing and praying, we
affirmed our faith that though death parts us, in reality ‘nothing can separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
The Church does this sort of thing well.
Candles and stained glass and paintings
and hymns, sacred words and participation - the every day and the holy – all
God’s people together, laughing and weeping, joined by more than blood.
Afterwards we adjourned to the new extension
where wine and home made food was served in the meeting room, and people could
use the modern facilities that include a kitchen and disabled toilet, also
appreciated by the Sunday School that meet there once a month.
In a climate of apparent deterioration
in church attendance, a Memorial Service in a well-loved and well cared for
church is a sign of God’s continuing presence in the community and, for that
matter, in the Church of England.
The C of E was in the news this week as
cinema chains declined to air the Lords’ Prayer advert that the Church of
England Communications Department had put together and were hoping to screen in
the run up to Christmas, to coincide with the release of the new Star Wars
Movie.
The short film shows a series of
different people each saying a line from the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s well made, current and touching.
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| See link left for the 'banned' Lord's Prayer ad. |
The ‘actors’ on the video include the
Archbishop, a young man laying flowers on a grave, a Police Officer, a weight
lifter, a farmer feeding his cows, a choir, two people in a coffee shop, a woman
in a campsite, a mother and son at a joyous full https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxgwWzh0h-w
immersion baptism, cute children in an assembly and a couple kneeling at their marriage service.
immersion baptism, cute children in an assembly and a couple kneeling at their marriage service.
The cinema group, initially positive,
later said they had a policy of not showing religious or political advertising.
Cue headlines of the ‘banning’ of the
Lord’s Prayer in cinemas and much handwringing...
It has caused the C of E, and others, to
think with many furrowed brows about the position of the Established Church in
today’s society.
As one writer suggested, (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/25/church-of-england-lords-prayer?CMP=share_btn_tw#comments)
since cultural disestablishment is
practically complete, perhaps actual disestablishment will follow shortly.
In his view, the Church of England needs
once and for all to shed any assumption that it is a cultural force in British
society and stop acting hurt when its message is apparently rejected by secular
institutions.
In a world where ISIS want us to be
divided along binary lines (Muslim and infidel) the writer actually celebrates
the ‘grey area’ that he thinks the Church of England inhabits, although he thinks we
should die off in our present incarnation in order
to be reborn for the good of society (which sounds biblical to me).
About the ‘grey area’ that is the C of E,
he writes ‘It is
between Catholic and Protestant, between organ and drum kit, between robes and
T-shirts, between conservatism and liberalism, between certainty and doubt,
between silence and noise(…) In a culture that is increasingly polarized and
awash with labels and identity politics, the C of E is a beacon of murkiness, and is all the more
beautiful for it.’
I’m not
sure how I feel about being part of a beacon of murkiness, but I see his point.
So, a
little village church, still full of life, and the controversy of the Lord’s Prayer.
What
have these got to do with Advent Sunday?
They can
be united in the question we ask today at the beginning of the new church year…
And the
question is, ‘Who sets the agenda?’
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| St Luke's Linch |
That joyful
Memorial service in a tiny rural church was a little knot of resistance to the
secularisation agenda, that wants to leave a troublesome God and a troublesome
prayer out of society if at all possible.
In that
quiet church, Christian hope that God’s
kingdom come and his will be done, is alive and well.
So who sets
the agenda for our lives?
At this
time of global terrorism, is it fear that sets the agenda? (as expressed by one
listener who phoned the Jeremy Vine show to say that as a result of the Paris
terror attacks he’d canceled his shopping trip to London this Christmas).
Or even
if you don’t fear terrorism, maybe you fear that the Christian faith will
disappear altogether from society, or at least the Church of England will
disappear…
We all
have fears, but they pale into insignificance in the face of the fear spoken of
in our gospel today:
Luke
records Jesus’ prophecy that at the end of the world, people certainly will be in fear, but it will be fear on
an astronomical (literally) scale, as people ‘faint from fear and foreboding of
what is coming on the world’, and as nations are ‘confused by the roaring of
the sea and the waves’.
To those
who think that global warming is a myth, maybe we should point them to these
verses in Luke.
Or maybe
in the face of unknown fears, we seek to numb reality with distraction, with
the huge number of our relatively small daily worries.
Luke
suggests we should be alert to much more important things.
And so we
pause this Advent Sunday and take note of the season.
Advent
is the season of waiting, of watching, of reflecting.
And it’s
a good question for Advent: What or who sets the agenda for your life and
energy?
Advent
is a good time to reset the agenda.
In both
our readings, the agenda is Christ’s Second Advent, his return to earth in
triumph.
It is this agenda that ultimately dictates the
future of the earth and of history, not the agenda of terror, or secularisation,
or shallow distraction.
Luke
does not want his readers to be caught unawares by the return of Christ, and
it’s the same for us.
He
writes, ‘Look at the fig tree and
all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves
and know that summer is already near. So
also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God
is near. Truly I tell you, this
generation (i.e. the one seeing these things) will not pass away until all
things have taken place’.
Meanwhile
Paul prays that the hearts of his fellow believers may be ‘strengthened in
holiness’ so they may be blameless at the coming of Christ.
‘Stand
up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near’, says Luke.
‘Stand
up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near’.
What
better way to begin Advent, as we re-set our agendas today?
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