Sermon at Parish Mass, St Pancras Old Church, Advent Sunday 2011

Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1. 3-8

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:33-37

Sunday can be an exciting day. Living in East London, and having to negotiate the changing pattern of weekend engineering works, my journey into Church is hardly ever the same two weeks running.

So every Saturday night I log on to the Transport for London Journey Planner and check what my options are. This morning, it was the 7.58 District Line from East Ham, changing at Mile End for the 8.12 Central Line, and again at Bank for the 8.28 Northern Line to Kings Cross. And it all worked. Hurrah! Well done, TFL.

Now this is partly practical and common sense. But it’s also to enable me to sleep on Saturday night. Because I have to admit I’m a bit of a control freak. If I know that the next day is planned and under control, then I can relax.

But imagine if I were to look up a train timetable and instead of that useful information all I got was, “be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the train will come”.

Well, today Jesus says to the disciples, “you never know when the time will come”. And this is because just before this they have asked him, “when will these things happen?” They want to know the timetable. But what “things”, what timetable, are they talking about?

Today, with a new church year, we begin the Year of Mark. Mark’s gospel is the one we will be reading through on most Sundays during this year. We don’t however start at the beginning, but quite near the end, and what we have heard is the last teaching that Jesus gives before the story moves into the plot to kill him, the anointing at Bethany which Jesus says is “for his burial”, the Last Supper, and his betrayal and death.

Mark 13, part of which we have heard today, is an apocalypse, a particular kind of writing that we find in parts of the Bible; Revelation and Daniel are other examples. “Apocalypse” in everyday speech usually means some kind of great disaster, like a nuclear war or the lurid scenes of global destruction painted by John Martin that were shown at the Tate Britain recently. There’s a whole movie genre devoted to that kind of thing.

But this is not what apocalypse means in the Bible. At root it means revelation, seeing, and is about final fulfilment, not final destruction. It is about seeing the hidden truth behind the universe, that ultimately God is in charge. It is about entering the Kingdom of God by seeing what the Kingdom is. The Kingdom is God’s reign of love, peace and justice, becoming real in the world.

But as Father Bruce said to us last week, the Kingdom of God is a very elusive concept. It’s not quite like anything we might expect; it’s more like a happening than a place, and when we think we’ve got it pinned down, it slips away from us.

The parable Jesus tells today has that slippery elusiveness of the Kingdom which is a characteristic of all the parables. Always when you read a parable, think, “what’s wrong with this picture?”. Today, it’s the curious travelling habits of the master. The times at which it is said he might arrive – between dusk and dawn – are simply not times that any traveller would arrive in the ancient world. There was no street lighting, no headlights on your donkey, settlements were small and the roads between them nothing more than dirt tracks in lonely and dangerous places. People simply did not travel at night. So the parable is about people staying awake at a time when no-one would have been expecting them to.

All of which reinforces Jesus’ point that we do not know when the Kingdom is happening. Which is also to say that we don’t control it. He doesn’t tell us that we will know, he does not instruct us to find out. He simply says, you don’t know. It’s God’s doing. Our part is not to know, but to stay alert, to be watchful. To be attentive, so that we can see.

Not knowing things is part of our limitation as created beings. We are not God. The first step to entering the Kingdom is to accept our created being as God’s free gift, and to accept with it all the contingency, limitation and transience that comes with that. We are not in control. Our being rests entirely on God’s will and gift, which is entirely an expression of his love.

This is the first good news of Advent: we are not in control, and God is. That can be difficult good news, because we like to be in control, and we don’t like to be the victim of circumstances and things going wrong. But it is truly good news because God has created us in love to share his life forever in heaven, and the fulfilment of that does not depend on us.

Just as well. In the news last week were reports of the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity in Cambodia. There was one man who murdered a couple because they fell in love without permission from the Party. A horrific reminder of what can happen when human beings think they control the fulfilment of human destiny.

Just after Jesus gave this teaching about the Kingdom, he himself fell victim to just such an attempt to control human destiny. In his betrayal and death he assumed the place of the outsider. He became the victim of those who thought they knew what the Kingdom was and could impose it by force.

But the words of Jesus hover over the scene of his passion and death: “Stay awake!”. Be attentive. Look. It is in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus that the Kingdom is happening. It is in the death of the innocent victim, and his being raised to the glory of the Father, that God is acting to put right what is wrong. Like the master returning when no-one would expect, the Kingdom is happening in the last place you would think of looking.

This is the second good news of Advent; but this, too, can be difficult good news. The Kingdom of God is happening amid betrayal and loss and death. The Kingdom is happening where human beings lose control and become victims. Apocalypse in the Bible has been called the “literature of the dispossessed” because one of the things it always does it to reveal the truth of where God is acting. And that is on the margins, among the outsiders and the victims – not in the centres of authority and the power structures of this world. Resurrection happens where death seems to have triumphed.

As Christians we live our lives suspended between two deaths: the ritual, sacramental death of baptism; and the biological death of our bodies. And each of those deaths is also a resurrection. In baptism we are buried with Christ in the waters of the font and rise with him to new and eternal life. Because of that, the death of the body is also a participation in the saving work of Jesus, in the Kingdom becoming real. Death becomes definitively the way to the glory of the Father.

The principle of dying and rising is imprinted on our lives, and is the mark of God’s Kingdom. Not just in baptism and our final dying, but in all the circumstances of life in every moment. Falling, failing, losing control, finding ourselves on the margins and not in the centre, all are where the Kingdom is becoming real. We don’t like to face the difficult times of life: illness, bereavement, the loss of a job, troubled relationships. But by the grace of God it is through those times of loss that we can discover that we are utterly safe in God’s hands because he has created us in love and will not let us go. We are not in control, and God is.

We do not know the day or the hour. But in every present moment, whatever it brings, Jesus calls us stay awake, to be attentive, for the Kingdom of God is very near.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time 2011

Wisdom 6:12-16

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

On the face of it, the Gospel story we’ve read today appears to be about being ready for future events, planning ahead, being prepared, just like the scouts. But, it’s a parable. Parables are stories which are meant to lead us beyond their surface to a deeper meaning. There’s always something odd about them, something that doesn’t quite fit, for example in today’s story there are ten bridesmaids – but no bride. What is that about? Parables interrogate our consciousness and ask us if we are understanding things right.

This parable is told at a very particular point in Jesus’ ministry. As Matthew’s Gospel tells the story, it is Tuesday in Holy Week. Jesus has entered Jerusalem and in two days he will celebrate the last supper with his disciples, and then be betrayed and crucified and raised from the dead. And just before these tremendous events happen he concludes his teaching ministry with three parables, a “triptych” of stories like three related panels on an altarpiece, the altar indeed of Christ’s final sacrifice.

The first of these stories is the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids that we heard today. The other two we will hear over the next two weeks: the parable of the talents, and the parable of the sheep and goats.

What these stories have in common is a theme of being caught out and exposed by the arrival of a figure of authority. In this case it is the bridegroom.

The image of bride and groom is a very important one in Israel’s history. The Old Testament prophets spoke of Israel as God’s “bride”, the one whom God had chosen for himself and married, so God is the “bridegroom” of his people. But his people, like an unfaithful wife, had constantly gone off after other gods, and not kept God’s covenant. And the result had been exile and other calamities.

But the prophets always insisted that God would not abandon his people. The bridegroom would bring his bride back again, make her his own once more. In other words, God was not going to forget his people, no matter what they did. God would once again “marry” his people and restore them to a right relationship with him.

So the image of the bridegroom is that of God returning to claim his people as his own once more. And it’s an image which elsewhere Jesus applies to himself. The message of the gospels is that Jesus is God returning to restore his people Israel, and in fact all people, to a right relationship with him.

What the Gospel is saying is that the arrival of the bridegroom, God reconciling his people to himself, was something happening right there and then. It was through the death and resurrection of Jesus that God’s self-giving love was about to be revealed, God’s reconciliation enacted. So this is not a story about a second coming of Christ in some remote future. It’s much more urgent than that: this is happening now, watch, stay awake.

What then does the parable mean when it says that some of the bridesmaids had oil and could light their lamps, and others couldn’t? Well, the most important function of a lamp is to shed light, so you can see what’s going on. It’s about perception. The message of the parable is, make sure your lamps are lit so you can see what’s happening.

But most people didn’t see. They had a different perception, a different mindset. They thought that God would return in power in a great final catastrophe, to punish the wicked and reward the good. And the wicked, of course, were always other people – Romans, the ritually unclean, the mentally ill, women – always the marginalised and the outsider, who were finally going to be thrust outside for ever, whilst only the pure and good, “people like us”, would be allowed in God’s kingdom.

What people were not expecting was that God was coming to die on a cross. God was coming to take the place of the marginalised and outsider, the place that the religious people allotted to the wicked. God, in fact, was coming to be the victim of the catastrophe, instead of inflicting it on others.

In order to see that, you need God’s light to switch on in your mind, so you can perceive things differently. You need a changed mind. The teaching of Jesus in the Gospels was constantly about repentance, metanoia in Greek, which literally means, change your mind. Not in the sense of deciding to have a jammy dodger instead of a custard cream with your tea, but in the sense of taking out your old mind and putting in a new one. St Paul says, in Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds”. If our minds are transformed by Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, then we will see truly. We will see that God is in the place of the victim and not the victimiser. The lamp of our consciousness will be lit, we will be awake.

When we read this parable, then, we are not hearing a warning about something that will happen in a distant future that we don’t need to worry about yet. We are hearing that the crucified and risen Lord, Jesus Christ, is the principle of transformation in the world and in our lives right here and now. Christ is present, if only we have eyes to see. The coming of Christ is not about an absence that Jesus is going to fill, but about our minds being transformed, our lamps lit, so that we can see him present now.

Father Basil Jellicoe was one who saw, whose lamp was lit. When he was the parish priest here he saw the slums that were here then, and the terrible degrading poverty in which people had to live. And he saw Christ. Christ in the place of the marginalised and the outsider, Christ in the victims of social injustice. And because he saw truly he was transformed himself and became an instrument of transformation to the world around him. He campaigned tirelessly and successfully to demolish the slums and rehouse the people of his parish in a setting worthy of their human dignity, worthy of the Christ whose image they bore.

In our own day, housing is once again an issue and many people are suffering through inadequate housing, and the threats of changes to rent and benefits which may see many people driven out of the city centres to places on the edge where they will struggle to commute to low paid jobs. And that is on top of people who are actually homeless on our streets.

And the Church responds, through initiatives such as London Citizens and the winter night shelter. We respond because by God’s grace we see Christ in those on the margins of society. We respond because we are being transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The Lord who is present in the Mass we are celebrating together, who is present day and night in the tabernacle here, is one and the same Lord who is present in the asylum seeker, the single mother struggling to make ends meet, the drug addict, the man sleeping rough because he hears voices telling him his home is evil.

The great words of Bishop Frank Weston are as true and as urgent today as they were when he spoke them at the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1923, when the slums still stood round here:

If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.

Let us then, before Jesus in this tabernacle, with Jesus in this Mass, turn to him once more for the renewing of our minds, that we may see him and serve him in all who are in need, in our parish, our city and our world.