Bearing fruits worthy of repentance

 

Sermon at Parish Mass, Advent 3 2021

Pieter Breughel the Younger  (1564–1638), St John the Baptist Preaching, 1601

 

Zephaniah 3:14-18

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:7-18                                   

 

Three years ago, on the third Sunday of Advent, I preached my first sermon here as your interim Priest in Charge. On Friday, that interim appointment came to an end, and today I am preaching my first sermon here as permanent Priest in Charge.

When a community celebrates a new beginning, a preacher wants to find something uplifting and encouraging in the readings. So, let’s see what we have, in the Lectionary from three years ago, and again today:

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

John the Baptist is an uncompromising character. The way he’s described, living out in the desert, wearing camel skins and eating locusts, is wild and alarming. And his preaching is not exactly understated. He tells the truth, to power, with power, and doesn’t care whom he offends.

And, yet, there is something about him that is hugely attractive. The people go out to him in crowds to be baptized. They recognize that John has a message that that they need to hear and to do. He preaches integrity and righteousness, a demanding message. But they recognize that he is a person who practices integrity and righteousness, and that give authority to his message.

The people ask him, “what then should we do?” John has announced the coming of the Lord to redeem Israel, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. And this means repentance, changing the way we live. The Lord is a God of justice, and the people must reflect and enact that justice.

This is not just about our interior personal lives, but is to do with how we live together. Social justice is at the heart of John’s message.

Notice who John is proclaiming the message to. People who have two coats - that is to say, people who have more than they really need. Tax collectors, who raised money for the Romans but were in the habit of charging higher than the official rates to line their own pockets. Soldiers, who clearly at this time extorted money by threats.

John is not saying to those who are already poor, “be content with what you have”, rather, he is speaking to those who have been causing poverty by their own greed. He is calling them to renounce their greed. His call to repentance is very much about how people’s actions impact on the community. And this is very much in harmony with the rest of Luke’s Gospel, where sin is never an individual private thing, but always bound up with how we live in the world, how our choices affect and shape the society around us.

This message of repentance, although it is challenging, is attractive. It is indeed good news, and the people recognize this, even though it means giving up greed and excessive riches. There is something much better on offer. Forgiveness of sins, a new beginning, a fresh start. A way of living together in world that is life-affirming for all, rather than life-denying for many. And this is to prepare the way of the Lord, to open the way for God’s kingdom to come in. In our lives, and in our society.

How we live together in the world matters. There is a great focus in the news at the moment on integrity and standards in public life. Much of what has been done by those who have authority has been laid open to question. As it was indeed it was with those in authority at the time of John the Baptist.

But the call to repentance has to begin with us, in our own lives. Are our choices, our actions, helping to build a just society in which all can take part? For example, if I buy some coffee or a shirt which are really cheap because they have been made with exploited labour in some other part of the world, do I not need to repent? Do I not need to see what I am doing, and turn around? The sobering edge of the Advent message is that we need to hear God’s judgement in our lives if we are also to receive his salvation.

We want to see integrity and uprightness in public life. We want to see those in high office holding to truth and high standards of personal conduct. But we will not make that attractive by pointing the finger of blame at others. We need to model it ourselves. We need to be the change we seek. Can people see, in our lives, an integrity that might be challenging but is also attractive, a little glimpse of the way the world could be better. And if there are many little glimpses, in the lives of people of faith and all those of good will, then they will all build together until we start to see that better world.

Christ comes to us with the command to model God’s righteousness in a world which tends deeply to resist that righteousness. With his truth, in a world that often turns away from truth. The Gospel calls us to conversion, to repentance for the forgiveness of sins, not only for our own sakes, but so that God’s kingdom can grow in the world. And that is the true way to prepare for the coming of Christ, and the feast of Christmas. As someone is said once to have prayed, “O Lord, convert the world - and begin with me.” That’s a good prayer for Advent. Amen.

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

 

Sermon at Parish Mass, Advent 2 2021 

Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598–1657): The Preaching of John the Baptist. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Baruch 5

Philippians 1:3-11

Luke 3:1-6

 

Where are you from? Oh, that’s interesting. How often do you go home?

In a global city, these are questions we might hear quite a lot. But they’re complex. The simplest answer is to say, well, I’m from Colindale, I go home every day. But Colindale, for many of us, is a long way from where we were born and grew up. Never mind a global city, we have a global congregation. Where do we really belong? Where is our sense of identity? What place pops into our heads when we hear the word “home”?

Perhaps “home” evokes a sense of belonging in terms of the kind of society we want to belong to. Much of our national politics in recent years has been driven by competing visions of where we feel truly at home. But, whatever ideal we may have, the reality usually falls short. So many are displaced, migrants in a risky search for a better life, refugees in search of safety.

And then there are those who feel dispossessed and alienated in their own land. Those who feel left behind, abandoned, while so many prosper. It can’t be right that food banks are seeing ever higher demand in a country that has some of the richest and exclusive neighbourhoods in the world – often just a stone’s throw from deprived estates with endemic poverty and unemployment and all the social problems that those bring.

There’s a sense of exile in so many places. Those on the move from their own homes, but also those who feel they don’t belong even in the place that in theory is their home.

John the Baptist speaks to a similar situation. When asked who he is, he says he is “a voice crying in the wilderness”, quoting the prophet Isaiah. What a haunting and evocative phrase. The wilderness is nowhere, no-one belongs there. Nobody could call it home. The land of Israel felt like that, as the announcement at the beginning of John’s ministry tells us – it was occupied by the Romans, and divided up. Yes, geographically, it was the ancient land of the Jewish people. But they didn’t feel they were at home.

Exile and alienation are huge themes in the Bible. The historic exile of the Jewish people in Babylon was perhaps their greatest formative experience. Many of the distinctive observances of the Jewish people date from that time, it was how they kept their identity as strangers in foreign land.

And the prophets speak about exile and return a lot. The beautiful passage from Baruch this morning is one such promise of return. But a curious thing happens in the later prophets. Those who were active after the return from Babylon speak as though the people were still in exile. They had come back to their land, but they weren’t really home. The last chapters of Isaiah, for example, which date from that period, hint at a new, spiritual, sense of belonging, of being rooted and abiding in the homeland that is God himself.

The sense that the people are still in exile is picked up, particularly, in Luke’s gospel. It’s something to listen out for as we read through Luke this year, that sense of still being in exile and waiting for the Lord to come and take his people home. And it’s there in today’s reading, too.

Because it is in the wilderness that John the Baptist speaks. The herald of the Lord proclaims his word in the place of exile, in the wilderness where no-one belongs. The wilderness that is an image of the people of Israel, and of the peoples of all the world, still awaiting their true homeland. It is right there, in the place of alienation and exile, that the word is proclaimed: the Lord has not forgotten you. Your exile will be ended.

This is good news for all the people of the earth. Jesus has come to restore Israel, the chosen people, and through Israel to extend the blessings of God’s kingdom to all people. All flesh shall see the salvation of God, says Isaiah. God’s promise, that all will find their true home in God’s kingdom, is for all people, and Jesus has come to deliver on that promise.

This is the grand movement of Luke’s story, as he tells it in his Gospel and in Acts. Jesus is the Lord and Messiah who has come to restore his people Israel, and through Israel to bring all people, all nations, home from their exile into God’s kingdom. And the way into God’s kingdom, as John proclaims, is repentance for the forgiveness of sins. That is, turning away from all the ways of exile, of oppression and alienation, from everything that dispossesses, and learning instead to reflect God’s righteousness in the world.

That call and good news is for us too. The experience of exile is both around us and within us: all the ways in which sin and loss and dispossession affect us and our world. In Luke sin is never just an individual private thing, it is always bound up with how people live in the world, how our relationship with God affects and shapes society. But the call to repentance comes in the wilderness, on the margins, away from the centres of earthly power, because that is where God’s attention is, too. Where are the voices crying in the wilderness in our own day, and what are they saying?

Exile, alienation and dispossession are the desperate reality for millions of people in the world today. And the gospel tells us clearly that the solution has to begin with repentance. Repentance of the inequities and injustices that keep poor nations subjugated to the rich. Repentance of the hardness of our hearts in the face of so much human need. Repentance of the violence that mars our world. We must believe the Gospel! There can be no end to violence without a radical change of heart.

The Gospel calls every one of us to that change of heart and repentance, not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world. God in Jesus offers to all humanity a new beginning, the forgiveness of sins, the end of exile, finally coming home to God who has always awaited us. This is the true good news, and, like John the Baptist, God’s church and people are called to go ahead of the Lord and prepare his way, even in the wilderness of exile and alienation. Because the good news is for everyone who longs for something better than the present state of the world.