The pink one

This Sunday will be the third in Advent and those of a churchy nature (well, some at least) will be lighting the pink one, aka the candle for Gaudete, or Rejoice! Sunday. 

Contrary to (confused) popular opinion, this is not the one for Mary.

Once upon a time I used to think of pink as a colour for small girls' tutus, or sugary nougat, or a useful highlighter pen, but since I went into the Church, I've become aware of the liturgical weight of pink during Advent.

Advent is really purple - purple altar hanging, purple stole, purple service booklets, if you have them. And purple candles on the Advent wreath. Even those of a medium churchmanship will light the first on Advent Sunday, the second a week after, and then we come to this Sunday, which is, in most Advent candle sets at least, pink. 

The confusion arises from a clash of symbolism from two different developments of the Advent themes. A more Catholic tradition would see no flowers in churches during Advent (despite, ironically, Christmas trees going up earlier and earlier). Advent themes are, after all, sombre, being the four themes of heaven, hell, death and judgment. Some clergy attempt to stick to these themes and preach on nothing else during Advent, but with community Carol concerts and suchlike, I would imagine only the hardcore manage it (I must admit I'm already on to fluffy reindeers and how to incorporate them into the Christmas message).

Pink vestments -
puzzlingly, one of the priests appears to be combining then with fairy wings

So the pink candle represents a lightening up of Advent sombreness, a kind of 'keep going, we're almost there - rejoice!' and some clergy even wear pink vestments to boot (I admit I haven't gone this far liturgically, though if someone were to gift me a pink stole, I would not be averse...)

So far, so good. The complication arises in that at the same time as the purple, purple, pink, purple thing, there are also four themes to the lectionary readings developing each Sunday. So:

Sunday 1=the Patriarchs
Sunday 2=the Prophets (NB: this typically features a reading about John the Baptist, but that's just to catch you out...it's not his Sunday yet, it's simply to show that he was in the tradition of the OT prophets).
Sunday 3=John the Baptist
Sunday 4=Mary

And there you have it - the first mention of Mary and everyone does an immediate gender association; Mary - that must mean we light the pink one....? Because, pink for a girl, right? Also, pink vestments are worn by our more Catholic brethren (who venerate Mary) therefore pink=Mary.

You can see it on the faces of Vergers up and down the land - standing over the Advent wreath each week, taper in hand, looking uneasy and trying to work out whether to start at this candle or that, anti-clockwise or clock-wise; is it John the Baptist yet, or Mary? Where exactly are we in the Church calendar and why can't religious symbolism be a little less complex?

So, for all you C of E aficionados, just to see where you are on the pink scale, feel free to take this small season-specific liturgical/ministerial test.

On a scale of 1-10, how Advent-pink are you?

1. Never even heard of Advent (not recommended).
2. Saw an Advent wreath once on Blue Peter (it's a start).
3. Love the Advent wreath idea but our church doesn't go in for it (you've saved yourselves a lot of complicated explaining but also missed out on some nice photo opportunities).
4. We have an Advent wreath but I've no idea what the candles stand for (good job you're reading this).
5. All four of our candles are purple (ha!!! possibly more straightforward, but less fun).
6. We have the pink one but I thought it was for Mary (see point 4).
7. We have a pink candle and the pink+John the Baptist clash has always left me feeling mildly liturgically disturbed (me too, as soon as I realised the pink was not for Mary, which happened a full 3 years into ordained ministry).

The last 3, for clergy only:

8. Pink candle; pink stole. 
9. Pink candle; pink stole; pink chasuble.
10. Pink candle; pink stole; pink chasuble; pink walls throughout the vicarage.

Wherever you are on the Advent-pink scale, Happy Third Sunday in Advent.

The Advent agenda

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. 

 Luke:  21:25-6

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 

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.

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.

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?’

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?

No more Mr nice guy

Isaiah 64: 40: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down
John 1:23 I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord".


Sermon for Advent 3

It’s sometimes the case that when a new minister comes to a parish, or there's a new doctor in the local surgery, or a new class teacher in the primary school: people want to know, are they nice?

Being nice is hardly an epithet appropriate to John the Baptist – although in John he is more sympathetically portrayed than in Matthew and Luke – where he utters the immortal words, not normally printed on evangelistic leaflets, ‘you brood of vipers!’ to the Pharisees that come to him for baptism.

But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt this Advent and ask what was so memorable about his message, and what can we take from it for ourselves.

So, three things about John the Baptist and his message:

    1.     He sees himself as preparing the way.

Advent is a time of preparing the way – for Christ to be born amongst us again - and a time to think about his second coming too.

For John the Baptist, 'preparing the way' was figurative for getting people ready for the coming of the Messiah.

He didn’t go along the path in the desert with a broom, sweeping the sand off the path so Jesus could walk on by; his preparation was spiritual.

And it’s the same for us.

In many respects the Christian life is about preparing the way, year in year out.

What we prepare is our hearts, to receive Christ – as the hymn says ‘where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.’

So it’s not just at Advent that we prepare our hearts for Christ – it’s really all year round.

Preparing a way in your heart for Christ is as good a description of discipleship as any, in fact.

Here, the heart is the centre of our personality, the driver of everything we are – ‘man’s entire mental and moral activity, both the rational and emotional elements. In other words, the heart is used figuratively for the hidden springs of the personal life’ (from http://www.awakentoprayer.org/heart_in_script.htm).

But what does preparing your heart entail?

This question leads us to the second point about John the Baptist:

    2.     He calls people to repentance.

Because the best (and in fact the only) way to prepare for Christ is through repentance.

Repentance is not an entirely easy topic, even for Christians, perhaps especially for Christians, as we can become overly familiar with the confession we say in church week by week.

What does repentance look like for someone who’s been a Christian a long time?

In some ways, it’s easier to imagine someone who’s been estranged from Christ over something quite major, coming suddenly to value repentance.

What of all of the small sinners, who can’t recall the last time they truly felt sorry for anything.

Here it can be helpful to find a spiritual advisor, someone who knows how to discern God’s work in your life and who will suggest ways in which the arteries of the spiritual heart may have got clogged up along the way.

Another way is to read inspiring literature, to see how someone else a bit further along the path has grown in the ways of discipleship.

One such writer for me has been the elderly American pastor Gordon MacDonald, whose book A Resilient Life, really spoke to me this year.

His description of repentance is apt as we think about John the Baptist, out there in the desert.

He writes of a meadow, which he and his wife bought to clear and develop.

First the meadow needed to be cleared of boulders – these were big things, obvious from the surface, and a hindrance to planting.

They were relatively easy to see, and therefore easy to remove.

Then came the middle sized rocks, also fairly easy to see and to remove.

Finally, there were small pebbles scattered over the meadow – there were more of these, and they were less serious, but eventually they were cleared too.

He likens all this to the obvious things in our life that need attention – and the less obvious things, though still seen by God.

Then he takes the clearing of the meadow metaphor one stage further.

He writes, ‘when we cleared the field of its rocks and boulders, and cut back the vegetation so that the grasses could grow, we didn’t anticipate one thing that the locals could have told us if we’d asked. We didn’t know that underneath the soil (shallow as it is) were countless other rocks and boulders, each of which would make their individual appearance in time. As the winter frost went deep into the ground each year, it would thrust up many of these rocks and boulders. In the spring I would climb on my tractor mower and suddenly hear the blade hit a rock I’d never seen before. When I checked, I would be surprised to see the face of a rock peeking up from the soil. I hadn’t known it was there before. And when I tried to pry the rock loose, I often discovered that it wasn’t a rock, it was a boulder – much bigger than a breadbasket – and it had been there all the time’ (p. 122).

Repentance means we take seriously those things below the surface that only the Holy Spirit can point out to us, though we need to be willing and keen for this to happen, and to take steps to make it happen.

So John the Baptist prepares the way; he calls his hearers to repentance, and finally,

    3.     He points to Jesus.

Do our lives point to Jesus?

We’ve already mentioned that in John’s gospel we have no ‘brood of vipers’ speech – just John pointing to someone else.

This is John stripped down to the bare essentials – he points beyond himself to Christ - a mere signpost.

His life is in exact contrast to the self-promotion of our culture.

And before we run to judge our culture, when did we last do something, perhaps an act of random kindness, that went entirely unnoticed, and feel happy with that?

It’s not that easy to point beyond ourselves, to let someone else take the credit.

But it is the calling of every Christian.

We point, not to ourselves, but to Christ.

Could someone look at your life and see the connection between your faith in Christ and the fruits of the Spirit in you; see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness and self-control?

Do you have a holy frustration for God, akin to that of Isaiah, who cries out, ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’?

As we approach the final countdown to Christmas, let’s learn form John the Baptist, who, though he may not have been 'nice', knew that we need to prepare the way of the heart; who called his hearers to repentance and who pointed beyond himself to the Christ who was coming, and is coming still.

Amen.