The faith of Gd; Gd's faith in us

Sermon. St Michael’s and St Mary’s, Little Ilford, 29.11.20

Advent 1

 

Isaiah 64.1-9

Mark 13.24-end

 

Happy New Year!

 

It is indeed a new church year, and today’s sermon might dwell on that. Today we enter today into the Year of Mark. However, there’s been quite a lot of chatter out there, about how people cannot wait for this year, this calendar year, 2020, to be over, as if some accident of the diary will make our problems go away. I think – I know – that is doesn’t work like that. Viruses, in particular, don’t do diaries. So I’ll wish you all the blessings of the new year, the year or Mark, and move on.

 

Today’s Gospel, and the First Reading which mirrors it, speak of hard times, times of tribulation, times of trial. This is, let us be clear, one strand of the Bible, running from the Prophets through to the Book of Revelation. Gd does not say that life will be easy. Today’s sermon might dwell on that. Sometimes the Church finds itself in such comfortable calm, such that it really needs to face up to the prospect of hard times. But! But that really isn’t us. We are already in a hard and narrow place, and we know it. We need some word of comfort, not of hardship.

 

Today’s Gospel ends with a command. The command: Keep awake! This is a timeless message. So today’s sermon might dwell on what it really means to be awake, to be vigilant. Only vigilance is a theme we are only too used to. We are vigilant, when we wash our hands, We are vigilant, when we take put on our masks. We are vigilant about everyone we meet, making sure we don’t get too close. We are vigilant when we choose not to meet people – a strange thing indeed. The very last thing we need is yet another demand to be vigilant, to keep awake.

 

Looking for some comfort, then, today’s sermon might turn to the Second Reading, the opening of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. St Paul praises the Corinthians in glowing terms. Here, then, is a word of encouragement for us. Except, except it’s not that simple. What may seem to be praise may not be. St Paul says the Corinthians are gifted in speech and knowledge, and every spiritual gift. But some say that this is St Paul damning with faint praise, because St Paul can’t think of any virtue to attribute to the Corinthians.

 

We need a compare-and-contrast exercise to bring this out.

·        St Paul gives thanks to God for the faith and witness of the Romans;

·        He gives thanks to God for the Philippians’ sharing of the Gospel;

·        The writer of the Letter to the Colossians commends them for their faith and love;

·        The Thessalonians are praised for (brace yourselves…) their work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope, and again for their growing faith and love;

·        Philemon is reminded of his own faith and love.

 

No such mention for the Corinthians. No faith, no love to mention, rather just spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts are good things, but they are not faith and they are not love. St Paul is under-complementing the Corinthians, and is setting them up for the harsh words he’ll have to say to them later in the Letter. They love their “spiritual gifts”, but they neglect what really counts. So it may well be that there is no comfort for us, not even here.

 

Is there, then, anything, which might be of real comfort to us, now, now in our Coronavirus times? I suggest that there is. St Paul also says: “God is faithful, by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

 

Gd is faithful.

Gd is faithful and has called us.

Gd is faithful and has called us into friendship with Jesus Christ and one another.

 

Sisters and brothers, are these not the words we need to hear right now? We are at the beginning of a new Church Year, and/but with that we know that the strangeness and the pain of yesterday will be with us today and tomorrow, and – let’s name it – until around Easter.

 

Gd is faithful. Pistos ho theos, in Greek. It is worth dwelling on this, the faith of Gd. Yes, I got that right. There is faith in Gd, but there is also the faith of Gd, Gd’s own faithfulness. There’s a constant danger that we think of “faith” as something abstract. Some people have it. Some people don’t. It’s a thing. This is not the biblical way of thinking about it. Faith is always – always – relational. So it’s often said that a better translation is “trust”, because no one “trusts” in the abstract, but you “trust in” something or someone.

 

Pistos ho theos. Gd is trustworthy. That is our solid ground.

·        Whether the virus grows or diminishes in the coming weeks and months, Gd is trustworthy.

·        However different (small, narrow, unpeopled) our Christmas turns out to be, Gd is trustworthy.

·        However much we long for the chats we used to have over coffee, tea and toast, Gd is trustworthy.

·        Whether our supermarkets are full-to-busting or not, Gd is trustworthy.

 

I cannot persuade you that Gd is trustworthy, and, by the way, you can’t convince anybody by your words, either. We don’t believe that God is trustworthy because of some sort of scientific experiment we’ve run. It’s not as if we prayed for one thing, and refrained from praying for another thing, only to find that we got the first thing and didn’t get the second. It doesn’t work like that, at all. But our confidence that Gd is trustworthy is not nothing. We are those who find that the whole of life, of life itself, of the world itself, just makes more sense, just finds its shape, finds its depth, when we say and celebrate that Gd is trustworthy.

 

The scary thing about the trustworthiness of Gd – the bizarre thing about it – is that our trustworthy Gd trusts us. Even more bizarre is that Gd knows what Gd is doing. Gd willingly and knowingly places trust in us, feeble people and failing Church. That is the Christmas story that we are now inevitably thinking about. Gd comes to us as a human being, a baby, to be with us, as one of us, to show us what it means for us to be the trustworthiness of Gd in the world.

 

How we fail! We fail, but the invitation to become what we are called to become still stands.

 

Gd is trustworthy.

Gd is trustworthy, and has called us.

Gd is trustworthy and has called us into friendship with Jesus Christ and one another.

 

Happy New Year! Amen.