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?

Is religion good?

The other evening I listened to an interview with a well known Christian singer song writer and one of the questions to her was, 'So how can we keep Jesus and religion apart?' It was a depressingly familiar take on the usual dichotomy between religion (bad) and spirituality (good). Surely (I thought to myself, switching channels) we need to have Jesus and religion as connected as we can?

People sometimes say to me 'I'm not very religious', which is code for 'I don't go to church and I think I might feel uncomfortable if you start talking about religious things to me (usually in the context of preparing a funeral). At least you know where you are. Was Jesus religious? Yes. He identified as a Jew, was brought for religious dedication at birth, taught in the synagogue and knew the Jewish Scriptures inside out. He prayed, taught and lived God.

The Letter of James, which was set as a reading this morning in church, doesn't shy away from the word: 'Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world' (James 1:27). It's not a warm fuzzy spirituality developed in your front room with the latest diet/self help book, but sustained practical action for people whom society has forgotten, along with the implication that the pursuit of holiness is not to be neglected either.

Are we religious in Britain? The secularisation thesis posited that as the technologically advanced Western world increasingly turned away from formal affiliation to the Church, religion in Britain would die out. In the 60s, it looked like this might come true, but several things hadn't been factored in. One was the rise in interest through the 60s and 70s in Eastern religions; another, the advent of politicised Islam, and finally the effect of waves of immigration to places like the UK from other parts of the world where religion was still alive and well. All this of course continues today. 

So far from dying out in Britain, religion in daily life is instead complex and multi-faceted. A speaker at New Wine who is a journalist pointed out that in Fleet Street, the attitude towards religion is changing rapidly. Religion can no longer be ignored - clearly it makes a life changing difference to millions of people. In fact, in the history of the world, not to be religious is actually a strange 21st century Western anomaly.

As Graham Ward helpfully shows, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuXjPFLpWK0 today religion is on the news agenda and in the cultural domain more than ever before and people are having to make complex decisions about whether religion is a force for good or evil. I suppose it's like food - there's good food and bad food; but bad food is not a reason to stop eating. As the practical, often acerbic and no-nonsense Letter of James points out (Martin Luther called it the Epistle of Straw), don't drop religion; just make sure your religion is good religion.

The art of battling giants

Sermon for Trinity 3.

1 Samuel 17:45

But David said to the Philistine, ‘You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 

Do you ever feel, like me, that the church is somewhat the underdog today? What with falling numbers, rising bills and the slow onslaught of secularism, we can feel perhaps that the giants are just too many.

If that’s the case, the story of David and Goliath has much to teach us. We know the story from Sunday School and as a stand alone tale it tells us of victory for the little man – victory for the one who trusted in God, despite appearances suggesting his imminent defeat.

Most of us will not be called upon to battle a giant, at least not a literal one. So how can we take this is as God’s encouraging word for us today in our situation? We can take the template of the story and see what it can teach us, bit by bit, about 'the art of battling giants'. *

*The phrase is taken from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, a great read, which takes the theme of the original story to illustrate multiple ways in which underdogs and the disadvantaged in society have battled against the odds and won, not despite their difficulties but almost because of them.

Gladwell had been a writer many years before he published David and Goliath but it was this book he says brought him back to the faith of his childhood: 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2013/october/malcolm-gladwell-return-christian-faith-interview.html

I realised what I had missed. It wasn't an "I woke up one morning" kind of thing. It was a slow realisation something incredibly powerful and beautiful in the faith that I grew up with that I was missing. Here I was writing about people of extraordinary circumstances and it slowly dawned on me that I can have that too.

Reading between the lines, what happened during the writing of the book was that so many of the amazing stories of courage against adversity were from Christians whose faith had stood up to the most terrible prejudice or suffering, that Gladwell was faced with something very real that he felt he wanted to regain, i.e. his Christian faith.

So it’s an important book from an influential sociologist, and if we know the power of the story of David and Goliath can bring forth such a personal confession of faith, we know there’s something (or someone) powerful behind the story.

There are three movements to the story, which I’d like to take as headings as we think about our own situation as part of a church in the 21^st Century that sometimes feels like the underdog.

1. Know your giants

The writer of the story does not hide the real nature of the giant; he presents the case realistically. Goliath is enormous, he is powerful; he is well armed and dangerous. At the end of the section about Goliath, we read ‘When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid’.

What does this say to us? Be realistic. Know the culture you live in. Know the culture your children and grand children live in. Hang around with people and look, observe. What things are not being talked about? Where is God present and where does he appear to be absent? What things exercise people? What things are people worried about? Read the papers; be informed about the state of the church in the community here, and in the wider situation of the 21^st West. It’ll break your heart sometimes; it’ll mean focussing on real tragedy such as the South Carolina shootings this week. It’ll mean not underestimating evil. Know your giants: neither live in the past with rose tinted spectacles, nor despair of the present. Because…

2. Giants aren’t always what they seem

So Goliath is a terrifying giant. Or so it seems. Here Gladwell is interesting because he suggests that the very strength and might of the giant Goliath may have in fact been his downfall. He relies on heavy armour; David is nimble and has speed on his side. Goliath was a seasoned fighter and thought that David would come to him in the usual one-to-one combat; he wasn’t expecting a stone to come winging its way through the air and strike him on the head. Gladwell writes of the advantage of the seemingly innocuous stone in a sling:

Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath's head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.

What does this say to us? It perhaps suggests that the very things that tell us we’re struggling as a church might be the means for us to fix our hopes firmly on the surprise that God brings, in the form of unlikely victors.

Yes, secularism is a pervasive force. Yes we have a media that is suspicious of religion, certainly of Christianity. Yes, to all intents and purposes the people we live with and work with are getting along fine without God and many people one meets think they’re the masters of their own destiny.

But look deeper. There is still curiosity about spiritual experience. There is a hunger for mystery. There is loneliness; there is marital breakdown. There is illness and people we love die. We are mortal and none of us knows what’s around the corner. This is true of everyone you meet, even the very young. Teenage mental illness and depression is rising; fear of terrorism is high. There will always be a need for a people who know what/Whom they believe and who can hold out hope. In the Philip Larkin poem, Church Going, after painting a gloomy picture of an empty church, the poet admits wisely, that despite people abandoning traditional religion, ‘someone will for ever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious’.

And so we don’t lose heart. We pray for our neighbours. To pray for your neighbour, you need to get to know your neighbour. To know your neighbour is to love to your neighbour. If you pray for them, you will get to love them. If you love them, you will be expressing God’s love for them, and that way you can be a beacon to Christ. That’s what we’re here for. And finally…

3. ‘Giants’ are a matter of perspective

After describing Goliath, the writer of 1 Samuel turns to David. David’s perspective was entirely different to that of his contemporaries, and to that of King Saul. He could see that the real problem was not the giant, but the people’s perception of the giant. He says to Saul, ‘Let no one’s heart fail because of him’ (verse 32). God eventually chose David over Saul because ‘God looks at the heart’. David saw that this particular battle was a battle about faith. The people had lost faith in God to deliver them.

Have we lost faith in God to renew the church? To grow the church? To provide for the church?

What are your giants? We all face personal giants but as a church we don’t make things better by mourning our fall from a previously assumed superior place in the cultural imagination. Yes, things are ‘very different’ now, but people have always said that of their time. We can either be completely unaware of this fall from grace, which I think by now is unlikely; or over play it, and I do hear a lot of what might pass for overplaying the tragedy of this fall. I hear church people wringing their hands about secularisation, mourning the loss of this and that, instead of getting on and re-imagining what living the Christ-centred life actually looks like in the 21^st Century. It’s all a matter of perspective.

We may as well come to terms with the fact that Christendom is dead or at least nearly dead, and let God take us by surprise with his own solutions, which rely on faith and remembering his power is made perfect in weakness. This is how David defeated Goliath. His perspective was God’s perspective, and his victory God’s. 

‘Why are you so afraid?’ asks Jesus. ‘Do you still have no faith?’ (Mark 4:40).

Amen.