Sermon: Mary, John, Uncertainty and Joy

Sermon. 11 December 2016. St Vedast-alias-Foster

Advent 3 (Gaudete Sunday).

Isaiah 35.1-10

Canticle: Magnificat

Matthew 11.2-11

The late and I would say great composer John Tavener once preached on Mary and the Annunciation in Durham Cathedral. I wasn't there. But a friend said to me that the highlight and good summary of the sermon was...

And Mary said YES [shouts].

I've often wanted to do that for years. Sorry that it happened on your watch, and if it woke you from gentle sermonic slumbers. His point was of course that Mary was a woman of great courage and confidence. Providing, that is, we understand that neither courage nor confidence means she was without fear. For it may well be that her own 'How can this be?', and her pondering things in her heart, had the quality of bewilderment about them. But she was a believer before-its-time in the slogan 'Feel the fear and do it anyway'. And so she could say 'Yes' [soft] to Gd and change not only her life but the world. Not only the world, but her whole life.

In today's Canticle, the Magnificat, we again see Mary as courageous and confident. With or without trepidation, she sees - she really sees as a prophet sees - the world being turned upside-down. The great and the good thrown down and the humble and overlooked raised up. We can have all kinds of discussions about how political the message is really, and what political consequences the Church should draw. But there is no doubt that the Magnificat is revolutionary. It is about a new order already breaking in, to displace, indeed to smash the old order. And, by the way, in this she stands in a tradition with other biblical revolutionary women – I say again, biblical revolutionary women – such as Miriam, Hannah and Judith.

Gd changes the world.

Gd has changed and is changing the world.

It is happening, it is real, it is evident, it is unavoidable.

Mary is confident.

The gospel proper for today says something a little different. Let's be blunt. It says that John, a prophet and more than a prophet, who also saw into the nature of things, was not sure about Jesus. He had to get his disciples to ask whether Jesus was the one to come or not. Jesus indeed gives an answer that (like Mary) says that the world is being turned upside-down. He relates his miracles to certain texts in the Hebrew Bible, principally from today's reading from Isaiah. The blind see, the deaf here, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. But – we are not told if this answer convinced John. The silence is deafening.

For John, Gd's actions in the world he knew were ambiguous, and the difference Jesus was making was open to different interpretations. Some people were healed by Jesus. But there are other healers in the world (as Jesus knows). Some people even receive their dead as alive again. But others have experienced that already in the biblical story. Think Elijah. Think Elisha. Other – very many other – people remain blind, deaf and dead.

And all this in the context were the People of Israel, of covenantal faith were still oppressed by an alien and godless power (as John has good reason to see it). Jesus, then, on this reading, may stand in a long tradition of the renewers of hope in Israel, with acts that are healing, glorious and symbolic. But it cannot easily be said that the whole world has been manifestly turned around.

This line of argument is of course that articulated by Jews to this day. Jesus cannot be the Messiah because – look around you – this is not the Messianic Age, which by definition is of global peace, justice, freedom, devotion and feasting. We may have a counter-argument. But we cannot say that this position is simply implausible. It is plausible.

And where are we? By which I mean of course: Where are you? In the middle of Advent hope... and in the middle of parochial hope. Which is to say you are in some senses still in a place of uncertainty. You are looking for renewal. You are on-the-point-of. You are at the threshold. What is ahead is not unclear. Will the world be turned upside-down? Will there be some kind of revolution, such as Mary sang? Or will there emerge a steadier process of renewal, which takes some careful discernment, some process of interpretation, such as John was trying out.

I have no answers for these questions, not being a prophet who sees through to the nature of things. I will share my intuitions – nothing more than intuitions – that the link with the Moot community is a creative one. And that you are, given all the uncertainties and frustrations you have had to deal with over so many months, a community in good health. Resilient. In any event, I pray with and for you, for a good renewal. That Advent hope flourishes into Christmas joy. Speedily.

Today is of course the day to pray that Advent hope flourishes into Christmas joy. It is Gaudete Sunday – Rejoice Sunday. Just as we have a chance to lessen our Lenten fast in the middle of Lent – Mothering Sunday - so also in the middle of Advent, we can moderate that Advent fast we are all keeping (ho! ho! Ho!), and rejoice.

I am not going to seek to 'explain' anything about this rejoicing to you. Except to make one important point that bears repeating: spiritual rejoicing is not the opposite of sadness or depression. It's about an orientation towards joy - which may come naturally to us, or may be hardest thing. But we look for joy.

The word 'Gaudete' comes from what used to be the Introit for today. How else to finish...

'Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob.'

To that, let us all, in the spirit of Mary say: Yes [soft]. Amen. 

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!