Sermon at Parish Mass The Baptism of Christ 2015

Genesis 1.1-5

Acts 19.1-7

Mark 1.4-11

Je suis Charlie. I am Charlie. We are Charlie. Following last week’s terrorist murders in Paris this slogan has appeared in demonstrations and social media. The magazine Charlie Hebdo was the target of the attack. But people want to say, not just them, us too. We are all in this together. It is an expression of solidarity. People collectively rejecting violence and seeking a better way. Solidarity is a powerful idea – it was the name of the union movement in Poland that helped to bring down communism. There is a sense in solidarity that humanity is more than the sum of its parts, that together we can seek what we cannot achieve by ourselves.

That idea is not wrong, and it is echoed in the scriptures. But the scriptures add the extra dimension that solidarity needs: God, the creator and redeemer, in whom and by whom alone we can achieve our created purpose. For instance, the idea of solidarity runs through today’s gospel reading: John is baptising in the wilderness, and “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins”.

The Greek does give the sense of an enormous crowd: the whole population has come together for baptism, confessing their sins. This is collective repentance, collective seeking after God. Repentance means turning away from sin and towards the Lord. And all the people do so in the expectation of grace, in the hope that God will raise them up and give them new life.

John the Baptist tells them that repentance by itself is but a beginning. Repentance prepares us to receive the gift of new life, but it is God himself who must give it to us. So he says of the Messiah who is to come: “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” He will pour out the gift of the God’s own life upon those who repent.

But here there is something in today’s reading that may seem a little strange. John has promised that the Messiah will baptise believers with the Holy Spirit. But when Jesus comes to the Jordan, it is he who gets baptised. He is baptised by John, with water, in the river Jordan. And he is baptised with the Holy Spirit, as he sees the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.

So it is Jesus who receives the baptism that John has said will be given to the people. Why is this? The answer is in the idea of solidarity, of everyone being in this together. All the people have come together seeking repentance and new life. But it is Jesus who enters the water, Jesus who receives the promised Spirit. Jesus does so not as an individual alone, but as the representative and head of all humanity. The human race has a new beginning in Jesus. All who are baptised into Jesus are made one with him in that new beginning. And all are made one with him in his Divine life, for he is both God and man. Jesus is God’s solidarity with the human race. So those who are baptised into Jesus, in him, have been baptised with the promised Holy Spirit. The voice addressed to Jesus is now addressed to the whole of humanity, as found in him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”.

This voice from heaven speaks to us not as separate individuals, but as part of a redeemed humanity made one in Christ. This is why the alternative name for baptism is christening. The Spirit says to all who are baptised, “You are Christ”. We are all made one in Christ Jesus, one new humanity. Christ is the new Adam, but so, in him, are we.

The Creator Spirit is poured out to save us from sin and death and to create us anew as beloved children of God. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of this idea of human solidarity in Christ:

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, [Christ] himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death[1].

God’s solidarity with the human race, in Jesus, means that he shares everything that it is to be human, including death, in order to save us from death. And indeed the symbolism of baptism is that of death and resurrection, as Jesus descends into the water to be raised up.

But that is not the only reference to the death of Jesus in this passage. Heaven is “torn apart” as the spirit descends. Mark uses the Greek word for “torn apart” only twice: here, and at the death of Jesus on the cross, when he tells us that the “curtain of the temple was torn apart, from top to bottom”[2].

The curtain in the temple hung in front of the holy of holies, the empty space filled with the presence of God. In Hebrew this curtain was called “the heaven”. It symbolized the cosmos, the visible creation concealing the invisible presence of the Creator. So, in both places, at the baptism of Jesus and at his death, the heaven is torn apart, the veil removed, and the Creator Spirit is poured into the creation.

At his baptism Jesus commits himself to his calling as Messiah, the new and representative human, God’s solidarity in person with the whole human race. And on the cross, by his voluntary pouring out of himself even to death, he fulfils that calling and his solidarity is complete.

The death of Jesus is a consequence of sin, and so it unmasks the heart of our sin. It is an act of religious violence, murder perpetrated by people who think that death is the ultimate reality, and who can only conceive of God in those terms. This is the false imagination of God, the fear of death, that has enslaved humanity from the beginning, as Hebrews says. But by surrendering himself to death Jesus tears heaven apart and the Creator Spirit is poured into creation to make all things new.

The Spirit is the true and living God in whom there is no death, who does not deal in death, who does not want death. God is love and light and life, and in him is no darkness at all. The first-fruits of that outpouring of the Spirit is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, breaking the power of sin. And, in him, all humanity now can be freed from sin and raised to eternal life.

All this is both promised and already present when Jesus comes to the Jordan and is baptized. In him, all humanity turns towards the Lord in repentance. In him, all humanity is born again and receives the Holy Spirit. And in him all humanity hears at last the true voice of our Father, who loves us and wants us to live in him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”.

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[1] Hebrews 2:14-15

[2] Mark 15:38

Sermon at Parish Mass Epiphany 2015

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

What time are we in? A curious question but one that frames our gospel reading today. What time are we in?

Today’s gospel begins, “In the time of King Herod”. This is more than just establishing a date. The time of King Herod is the time that Herod controls. In Herod’s time, it is he who determines how people live, what they do with the time he allows them, how much time they will have to live.

The time of Herod is a time when power is held on to by fear and the one final reality is death. As so many of Herod’s subjects knew, and as the poor children of Bethlehem and their families were to find out.

But Herod’s time is not really his own, and he knows it. He owes his position as a vassal king to the Roman Emperor who appointed him and gave him his official title: the King of the Jews. Herod’s fear of losing his own power is but part of the iron network of fear that kept the Empire going.

So fear is the order of the day, then, when the wise men from the east, those mysterious strangers, arrive and ask “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” That was Herod’s own title, so naturally they would come and ask at Herod’s palace, probably supposing that an heir had been born.

But the palace has had no royal birth. Herod indeed had sons, several of whom he had murdered when he thought they were threatening his power. But the wise men are seeking a child whose birth has been signalled by momentous events in the heavens. A new star has been seen at its rising. This is not any old royal birth, but the birth of the Messiah, the one who will be king and ruler of his people in his own right, and not by the will and pleasure of Rome.

That is a threat not just to Herod, but to the whole system of power and fear of which he was part. It is a threat to the time of Herod. The wise men studied the stars and the planets, whose movements marked out times and seasons. And suddenly into that cosmic order of time there has come a new star.

The time of Herod now has a rival, an alternative account of time that is not ruled by violence but by the will of God. God alone brings all things into being, and a new star has appeared in the heavens to mark a new birth on the earth. The time of Herod is being invaded and overcome by the time of God.

And Herod knows this. The priests and scribes tell him of the prophecy of the Messiah’s birth at Bethlehem, a town up till then of little account, which had never been a centre of power. But it is the new centre for the new thing that God is doing. And the old centres of power, Rome and Jerusalem, tremble with fear.

But the wise men are enlightened by faith as well as by the cosmic sign of the star. They follow the star to Bethlehem and find the Child. And when they do so they are overwhelmed with joy, and they fall down and worship. The new reality of God’s time and God’s rule has broken upon them, and they have left behind the shadows of fear and death that marked the time of Herod.

Last week we recalled Luke’s account of the shepherds, those outsiders who were brought into the centre of God’s action and whose lives were changed so that they praised and worshipped God. This week we have heard Matthew’s story of the wise men, the other visitors to the infant Christ. They too are outsiders, gentiles from far away. But they too have been brought by faith into the centre, where the Kingdom of God is becoming real in Jesus. For them too this results in the same transformation: freedom, joy and worship.

As Christians we live as those who believe in God’s time. Sure enough, the time of Herod is still with us. The time of fear, anxiety and terror still holds its grip on the world, as we can see well enough. But now there is an alternative: the time of Jesus, the Messiah. The old world order founded on violence and the fear of death is no longer the only way of living.

In the birth of Jesus God’s time entered the world, and began to overcome the time of fear and death. Through his life he proclaimed its message. In his death those two world orders, those two accounts of time, came to their great collision and final conflict. The time of fear could not bear any rival for its dominion. And so it sought to wipe out the threat with the one final reality it knew: death. But that very conflict, Jesus’s freely surrendering himself to death out of love, became the final victory.

In the resurrection eternity was opened. Jesus now lives entirely by God’s limitless and deathless life, life that pours itself out in love without ever being diminished. The time of Herod has no hold on him. From now on, what is there to be afraid of? Death is not the final word, not the ruling principle of the universe. In Jesus we find that we do not need to hold on to our life as though it were our own, for it is God’s gift, freely given. We do not need to count out our days and years from their ever diminishing stock, for we have an alternative account of time which is not based on our poverty but on God’s eternal abundance and generosity.

This means that we can live as though death were not, even in the midst of Herod’s time, the time of fear and death. Because in the end Jesus is Lord and Messiah, and Herod is not.

God’s eternity is present in every moment, if we have but eyes to see. And, like the wise men and the shepherds, this opens to us overwhelming joy, and the capacity to worship, to pour ourselves out at the feet of Jesus who pours himself out for us.

And like the wise men we too find that we have gifts to offer, bread and wine that become the body and blood of Christ, the food of eternal life and the cup of salvation. So the wise men, like the shepherds, bring us to the feet of Jesus at the altar, as we celebrate the Eucharist. Here, above all, we inhabit God’s eternity, God’s account of time, the alternative to the time of Herod, the time of fear and death. Here we worship with the saints and angels and the church in every age and every land. And here we are filled with joy, for the worship we offer is none other than the worship of Christ himself, into which he draws us.

For his worship is the eternal pouring out of himself to the Father in the Spirit, the eternal life of the Trinity, the endless dance of love for which we were created.

Sermon at Parish Mass Christmas 1 2014

Isaiah 61.10  -  62.3

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

Between Christmas and New Year the television does lots of retrospectives. We are invited to pause and reflect. But the story that is told depends on the editor. Which pictures to use? Who to interview? Which bits of the past to recall? Whose vision of the future are we looking to? And, crucially, what to leave out?

Luke tells us the story of a birth in Bethlehem. And it’s one that we’re very familiar with. Too familiar, perhaps. It’s become a kind of retrospective. We are used to Christmas card images of a picturesque middle eastern town, under a starry sky, dusted with glitter, with Mary in her robe of azure blue and pious looking shepherds kneeling in adoration before the Child in the manger. We are so used to that image that we have become comfortable with it. We don’t see what Luke leaves out. And so we are not startled by what Luke includes. But we should be.

Let’s then read the story with fresh eyes and ears, and allow ourselves to be startled.

The first startling thing is that Jesus is born in Bethlehem and not in Nazareth where his family lived. And this is because of a decree from the Emperor Augustus that caused upheaval and movement of populations on a huge scale. Even before Jesus is born he belongs to a people living under foreign occupation, with their rights severely restricted, subject to the arbitrary decrees of a distant political power.

Then, in Bethlehem, once born, he is laid in a manger, because there was no room, not actually in an inn, the word is more general than that. There was no room in the lodging places where people would normally stay, which was mainly with distant relations.

So, no place for him. And this is the next startling thing. The Messiah is born as a member of a people who are outsiders to the political power of their day. And once he is born he finds himself an outsider yet again, to his own people. He is on the margins of a marginal race.

But, never mind, God is going to intervene to tell people about this. He sends angels from heaven to announce the birth of the Messiah and saviour of the world. Who to? Jesus’s family? Other than Mary and Joseph, who were there at the event, no. The townsfolk of Bethlehem, in the streets and houses round about? No. The mayor and corporation, the town councillors? No. The local Rabbi, or the priests in the temple in Jerusalem, only a few miles away? No. The Roman authorities, then, the centurions and tax collectors, perhaps even the Emperor Augustus, the ruler of the world? No.

So who are the angels sent to? Shepherds. This is the next startling thing. You can forget the sanitised images of shepherds from Christmas cards. Shepherds were rough people of poor reputation and very low social status. If they came into town respectable people would lock their doors and try to stand upwind of them. But mostly they didn’t come into town, except to the markets. They stayed outside, in the countryside, living rough among their sheep.

The Messiah is born, on the margins of a marginal people, and the only people who are told are those who are even more marginal. The birth of the Messiah happens on the outside, where people don’t look, where people don’t notice what is going on. But Luke does notice. The outside is where God is at work, and that is therefore the centre of his story. And what people normally think is the centre doesn’t feature at all.

It’s a bit like looking at Oxford Street in the Christmas sales, all glittering lights and crowds staggering beneath the weight of designer label shopping bags, and seeing only the people who sleep rough in the doorways of the stores at night.

But the shepherds, those on the margins, respond in faith. They have been told that the Messiah, the Saviour, the Lord, is born for them. To you is born this day, says the angel. This is good news for all the people, but it is made known to those who are most on the outside. And so they go with haste, they rush to Bethlehem to see this child. This is an act of faith, and with it their whole world has changed.

They have left behind their sheep, up to now the centre of their world, and gone to seek instead a baby who is, in fact, the centre of God’s redeeming work, the true Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. They see the child lying in the manger, in the feeding place. The unlikeliness of the scene does not put them off at all. They have heard the heavenly message, and they believe. Faith shows them what the outward senses cannot. And they return glorifying and praising God.

From being on the margins, outside, the shepherds have been brought into the centre where God is saving the world in Jesus. And the centre of their own world has been blown open. Faith in Jesus has opened to them the relationship with God for which we are all created.

Notice that their response is immediate, and simple. Faith is not a state of mind we have to work ourselves up into. Faith is not screwing up our eyes and holding our breath until we can believe six impossible things before breakfast. Faith is simply being open to receive a gift. And the gift that God wants to give us is himself, in Jesus.

Luke is such a good storyteller. At the beginning of his gospel the shepherds come to see the baby in the manger, the feeding place, and by faith they recognise the Messiah, the Saviour, the Lord. And at the end, after the resurrection, those two disciples on the road to Emmaus talk with a stranger on the road, but then, at the supper table, the feeding place, as he breaks the bread, their eyes are opened and they recognise him.

So the shepherds bring us to the altar, our own feeding place, where Jesus still makes himself known in the breaking of the bread. For us, as for the shepherds, faith sees beyond outward appearances to the inner vision. For us, as for the shepherds, this changes our lives. In the Eucharist the marginal and the outsiders are welcomed into the centre where God is saving the world. In the Eucharist we come to see that we, too, have been outsiders to what really matters, the love of God in Jesus. And faith opens our hearts to the relationship for which we are created, so that we can return glorifying and praising God.