Sermon: Gaudete Sunday

Sermon. 13 December 201: St Mary's Great Ilford

Advent 3 (Year C)

Philippians 4.4-7

Luke 3.7-18

Brothers and sisters, it is always a pleasure to be with you. And with that it is a particular delight for me to be standing here... in rose vestments, on this, the Third Sunday of Advent. Being a simple Church-of-England priest, from the Provinces, indeed from Protestant stock, I did not think I'd ever have the privilege of wearing rose vestments. Yet here we are! And since I am in this house of liturgical correctness, I am further pleased that I don't have to waste any substantial time explaining how it's not 'pink for Our Lady'. No! It is rose for our joy, for Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday when we are commended, as we heard in our Second Reading, from St Paul's Letter to the Philippians, to rejoice, which becomes in Latin: 'gaudete!'

More is going on here than we have a little visible, colourful token of our partisan Catholic identity. This is Gaudete Sunday because it is around the middle of Advent. Advent is – or, let's be honest, is supposed to be, or once was - a fasting season, sometimes called the Lesser Lent. And, like the Greater Lent (Lent itself) the Church knows that fasting (however we interpret the word) can be hard. So in the middle of Advent and Lent, the Church invites us to relax our self-discipline a little. We have a 'Sunday of Rejoicing' or a 'Sunday or Refreshment', and we take the colour rose, to lighten our purple (we nudge it in the direction of the white of Christmas or Easter, of festival-feasting).

In other words, and bluntly said: the Church knows that we are fragile, weak, frail – we are unreliable - and so the Church makes concessions. And that's how it is, at least from time to time, when things are complicated in Church – it can be all about concessions for us.

We might put this another way. We might say that the way the Church puts together the liturgical year, with checks, balances and concessions, shows that it values moderation. In our fasting and in our feasting, we should be moderate and demonstrate moderation. But... if we do put it that way, there is an irony here. For this very Sunday, Sunday of rejoicing, and of concessions - of moderation, if you like - is also, always, the Sunday of John the Baptist. The gospel always refers to the Baptist's own message. And... I don't think anyone in the history of biblical interpretation has ever described John the Baptist as 'a moderate'. For he was not.

True, a fair bit of what John demands this morning might be called ordinary human decency. The call to repent means to think anew, or to turn around. And when John is addressing tax-collectors who are into fraud, or soldiers who are into extortion, then indeed, he's calling for the law and professional ethical codes to be obeyed - scarcely an 'extreme' message. But the danger is that those of us who (if we are honest) have no stomach for fraud or extortion anyway will focus on these lines, and forget the more challenging [v 11]: 'Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.'

This is hard. It's extreme. It seems that rather than adding to our jumper collection with this year's Christmas special, we should be making sure we don't have a collection. Rather than ordering some other meat to complement the turkey for the evening of 25th, we should be cutting back to nutritional basics. And what is more, no part of us can pretend that the days are now over when other people need clothes and food more than we do. We know of homeless people in our parishes. We know of refugees from war and terror (not least Christians) who have lost all sense of home. And, again, being blunt: we know there are mountains of troubles which barely make it into our newspapers or onto our screens. Who, then, are we to have the luxury of more than one jumper?

Well, I am not going to answer that question. There are arguments for and against our seeking such material security as we might have, all valid. I am, though, going to say that we need - this Advent and always - to pay attention to this call. We must attend to John's call to sit lightly to all our possessions.

If we enjoy them, then, yes, great! Enjoy them.

But let us not 'need' them more than we literally need them.

Let us not let them 'define' us.

Let us not get as 'attached' to them as we are to people, to our loved ones.

Above all, let us not get attached to them as we should be attached to Gd and Gd alone.

It would be good for us to sit lightly to our possessions even in a world of abundance everywhere.

But in our world of poverty, and environmental crisis (another thing we need to speak bluntly about, and please Gd we as an international community are now beginning to speak plainly about), we need to live simply, that others may simply live. That future generations may simply live.

I wonder what you think. Does the idea of having possessions but 'sitting lightly' to them domesticate John's extreme message, and so undermine it? Or does it make sense to moderate the extreme, to make it workable to us weak folk?

There is a complication. It is that we are so used to thinking of 'religious extremism' and 'religious extremists' as being alien, over there somewhere, a problem stemming from other people, problem people. To be blunt yet again: we think the language is code for certain sorts of Muslims (and maybe a few others), who are in favour of violence or ambivalent about violence.

Now, we do need to be very vigilant for all forms of life (religious or not) which promote violence, manipulation or hateful discrimination. We cannot have the luxury of naivete about any faith – our own or another's/another's or our own. But there are dangers if we find it wholly natural to call debased and distorted manifestations of religious life 'religious extremism'. We are in danger of being prejudiced about our Muslim neighbours - who may be extremely religious, who may indeed be socially conservative, but who have no truck whatsoever either with Da'esh in Syria, or for that matter Anjum Choudary, sometime of Ilford.

But more than that, if we simply oppose and always dismiss 'religious extremism', we may be making a rod for our own back. After all, if we are here today (and we are), it is likely that in most people's eyes, we ourselves look 'extremely religious'. And we all know of those clever, clever people who are already writing books saying Sunday School is a form of 'child abuse'. When they realise that baptism is a ritual drowning... well, we'll have another fight on our hands. In short, we cannot simply condemn 'religious extremism'. It is too vague, and relative a term. And sometimes we will want to claim our right (and our neighbours' right) to be extremely religious.

But, you know, it can be a good thing that the combined themes of this day stop us from choosing 'moderation' over 'extremism', or 'extremism' over 'moderation'. There are but crude labels, and inasmuch as they mean anything, we need both.

We need the uncompromising call of John the Baptist to 'repent':

brothers and sisters, turn your whole life wholly around. Nothing less will do.

And we need the measured counsel of the Church:

sisters and brothers, recognise your frailty; allow yourself concessions;

and, already in the middle of Advent, and in this time of stress and uncertainty,

pray that Gd will lead you to the place where you hear the call:

gaudete! Rejoice!