#fulcrumsermonthoughts
Sermon thoughts for everyday discipleship
Sunday 1st December 2013
Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44
Isaiah sees with the eyes of faith a new reality to the one that is being presented around him. In a place of imperial darkness and wars and rumours of war - these words speak of a new vision to entice a beleaguered and hopeless generation. This is not some form of escapism but a call to imagine the world as God imagines it. This is not some form of make believe but a call to live out that new reality in the present one. They remind us of other well known speeches that offer hope as in ‘I have a dream’. (In fact this is a very similar poem to the one found in Micah 4:2-4).
These speech acts are deeply rooted in a hope an anticipation of a future that is God’s. These words flicker in the darkness pointing towards a greater light to come. Isaiah rings out that those whose energy is bent on destruction and whose resources are spent on wickedness will not win. Here there is no vindication in the sword. Here no moral theology can ever try to make sense of a ‘just war’. Here the vision is a transformation. These words are greater than all the efforts of humankind to bring peace through war - this is a radical conversion. And conversion it is because this transformation will not occur as if by magic. There is no disney effect here. There is a ‘beating’ that happens on the anvil of life. ‘They shall beat’ - there is a change that must come. How will that change come if they do not see or hear the promises and hope of the kingdom of God?
So we come to the words of Jesus in Matthew which asks us to keep out eyes open for the coming of Christ. Not that we begin to try to spot the clues of his coming but try to not become blinded by the world, so that we do not see the signs of the Kingdom. The example of the days of Noah are given by Jesus as an example of just that. They were taken up with the joys and aversions of life, going on an usual, not listening to the voices of warning and coming judgement. Waiting does not take us out of the world and enclose us in our own small circles. Waiting for the Lord takes us out into the streets with the words of freedom and hope, the promises of the kingdom. It involves an active waiting as God’s presence ad come and is in the midst of us now.
That presence will help us see where we are inconsistent and where we need transforming in our lives, so that we can better engage with the world. So that we are shaped by God’s Spirit not the spirit of the present age. It will help us see with new eyes a world that is promised and yet to come; a future that is imagined and yet to be realised. It will help us become a people that can speak of a new hope and who cry out with prophetic truth to a world that is wounded and weary.
What an Advent hope we have.
John is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Tupsley and St Andrews, Hampton Bishop in Hereford Diocese. He’s also currently doing Doctoral Studies at Kings College London.
The thing about hope is it is a very human emotion. Hope comes from opportunity. Love appears to come prior to opportunity , so all hope becomes about Love, which was displayed in and through Christ example to humankind as an extension of God The coming of Christ brings peace which is not entirely a human emotion .As we know the elements can be still and give us peace, the birds can sing and give us peace, Yes Noah showed us that way before Jesus was an actuality on earth Jesus was the hope of things to come. The transition between the humanity of Christ and the Spirituality of the same Christ is the gap where the hope in humanity feeds our spirituality and gives us peace. There are so many distractions and indeed Jesus himself is a distraction, when the recent helicopter crashed into a public area, the overwhelming response of the people was to run to the people to help, Jesus does the same, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, sometimes as fast as Jesus runs towards us so do the distractions, whatever the distraction is , it sort of piggybacks. The hope is that we will recognise and be able to respond to the Jesus we see running towards us, and that the distractions are merely the stepping stones to a world and a faith which exists without a beating and a battering of the soul but with an uplifting feeding of the soul, the inconsistency of today is the weary prayer for tomorrow, which is the hope of peace in the welcome distraction of Jesus who gives us hope . Jesus is the calm in the storm, Jesus is the centre so that which would distract us becomes the very thing which gives us hope. I like the contradiction of “active waiting” it tells us very clearly that we are working towards the Goal that we know we have not yet reached. The goal of Hope. Hope comes before the actuality, and it is hope that tells us that the word is fulfilled.
In America today, millions flocked to stores for ‘Black Friday,’ the customary start of the holiday shopping season. (Indeed, this comment reaches you from a Starbucks inside a Target.) And from now ’til Christmas, parishioners in church will hear dispiriting jeremiads against the season’s vacuous materialism, amnesia about Christ, depressing family dysfunctions, stressful disquiet, etc. Yet bracketed on one end by Christ the King and on the other by the Nativity, and sustained throughout by strong readings and propers, Advent seems to call for an inspiriting series meant, not for passive-aggressive cheap shots at the world ‘out there,’ but for molding these weeks around thoughts like the ones that John offers here. Most promising perhaps is the idea that our ethos should reflect the creativity of the Word that does not return to the One who utters it unfulfilled.