Sermon Christmas 1/The Holy Family 2012

Images are copyright, but click here for a picture of "Our Mother"

1 Samuel 1:20-28

1 John 3:1-2, 21-end

Luke 2:41-end

Last year I went to the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum. Among the artist’s works on display was a pair of sculptures called ‘Our Father’ and ‘Our Mother’. Made in cast iron, they depicted a man and a woman, leaning on sticks, each of them bent over beneath the weight of an enormous pile of baggage, loaded on to their backs and hanging off them all over.

The Father figure was laden with guns, grenades, tools, books, barbed wire and coffins. The Mother carried baskets of fruit and bread, water flasks, mixing bowls, religious icons, and a baby. Both of them, somewhere in their bundles, also carried a withered corpse - their own father and mother, who had themselves carried these burdens before.

Having lost my own parents some years ago I found that I was very moved by those sculptures. They seemed to me to be deeply compassionate; they told the truth, but without blame. None of us is born into a vacuum. We all inherit, in one way or another, the baggage that passes down the generations - the weight of expectations, hopes, success, failure, all the things that people can’t cope with or even name, all the limitations that come with our upbringing and that of our parents and grandparents. Now most families try to do their best with what has come down to them, but sadly we have to acknowledge, too, that families can also fail even to the extent of being wilfully cruel and abusive. 

But however good the human family is, however loving and caring, it can never be everything. It can never be quite the idyllic group dwelling in unity that is sometimes romantically imagined. Children, particularly, are always different - unique, unrepeatable individuals, never the same as their parents, always to an extent new, unknown and unknowable, surprising and strange. 

The process of discovering this can be painful and difficult, for both child and parents. Individuation is a necessary and healthy part of growing up, but it does mean discovering our separation, that we are not simply an extension of our parents. That our need for belonging, for completion, is one that our human family can never meet.

There is, as it were, a tragic dimension to the family, the dimension of inevitable separation and difference, of failure however hard we try, and the Bible pulls no punches in describing it. 

From Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, through the Patriarchs and the Kings, the Biblical family is something that always seems to be going wrong. Stories like that of Samuel, Hannah and Elkanah that we heard today, where things seem to go right, are exceptions requiring Divine intervention. There are more dysfunctional relationships in the Bible than in even a Christmas episode of ‘East Enders’! And I do wonder sometimes if those Christians who make a lot of noise about ‘traditional family values’ have actually read the Bible. Indeed, the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who certainly had read the Bible, once commented, “the idea of the family is of no interest at all for Christian theology”.

But then, in the fulness of time, God sent his Son. Born fully human, he shared our human life not in the abstract, but in all its particularity, in all its limitation. And so he was born, as he must be, into a human family. 

St Luke portrays that family with particular intimacy in his Gospel, and today, uniquely among the gospel writers, he gives us a glimpse, not of the baby Jesus, but of the adolescent. Jesus in today’s reading is twelve years of age, which was the age at which Jewish children assumed their own responsibilities under the law. We see Jesus at that symbolic point of individuation, his emergence from the shadow of his parents as his own proper person. That day, perhaps for the first time, Jesus seemed to his parents to be new, strange and unknown.

I expect many of us can remember a moment like that, in our teens. And if you haven’t got there yet, don’t worry - it’s alright! That time when we realise that we need to do and express our own thing, and the fussing and anxiety of parents or guardians seems to us to be focussed on a place, on a stage of life, that we are leaving behind. 

For many of us that might have marked the start of what are sometimes called the difficult years, of teenage rebellion in one form or another. This is really part of ordinary development, of emergence from childhood, as psychologists such as Carl Jung have described. But for Jesus, as soon as he appears as his own person, in his own right, his focus is not on himself, but on his Father. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”. And of course this Father is not his human foster father Joseph, but God. 

Luke, in his description of the Holy Family, does what he often does. He gives us a ‘great reversal’ - the turning round and reordering of the world as Jesus comes to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The putting right of all that has gone wrong. So the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph seems to be the ‘traditional’ human family turned on its head. The most important person in this family, the person at the centre, is the child - who traditionally would have had no rights or position at all. The next most important, the one with a speaking role, and who ponders these things in her heart, is his mother - not, as might have been expected in a patriarchal society, his father. And Joseph seems to be the least important. In the gospels, he doesn’t actually get to say anything at all.

With the coming of Jesus, everything that has gone wrong in human society from the beginning is being turned round, and transformed into the Kingdom of God. And that includes the family. With the coming of Jesus, the tragic history of humanity is broken open, and a new beginning is made. 

Beyond the limitations of the human family, Jesus points to a new relationship, a new way of belonging. Humanity, re-created in Christ, is complete at last. “Call no-one on earth your father”, says Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, “for you have one Father, in heaven”. No human family, no human ‘other’ can complete us. No family or network of relationships can fulfil the need for belonging and unity to which we aspire, but cannot reach by ourselves, but only by grace.

Now of course it is right to affirm the goodness of human relationships and the family. When families work well they are communities of love, nurture and protection whose members remain committed to one another through good times and bad. Human relationships can reflect the goodness of God in creation. But they also point beyond themselves to something greater, which is one reason why the Church traditionally has regarded marriage as a sacrament - a sign mediating grace.

Jesus points us to God as our Father. Only in God do we find the ground and source of our being, the one ‘Other’ who completes us and makes us whole. Only in God can we truly name as brothers and sisters all our fellow human beings, because we discover that they belong to us, and we to them, to the extent to which we also discover ourselves in Christ. 

If we allow Christ to make us anew, through his grace, then we will enter his kingdom, which is the true human family at last: redeemed, made new, whole and complete, finding itself in one another and in God. And that is good news for all of us, whatever our family background may be, whatever life has been, whatever relationships and communities we are part of. Jesus offers a new beginning, a new way of being human. Not in some idealised world remote from the reality of our lives, but here and now, coming to meet us, turning the world around right where we are.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Advent III 2012

Zephaniah 3:14-18

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:10-18

This year our parish has been helping with a food bank for the first time, in addition to our long established work with the night shelter. Food banks are part of a response to a growing need seen across our country; as benefits are cut and prices and rents rise, more and more people are finding that they can’t afford to eat. An article in the Evening Standard a couple of weeks ago highlighted this, there was one person who walked 12 miles to the food bank and 12 miles back to get food for their family, because they couldn’t afford even the bus fare. 

The fact that we need things like food banks and night shelters may come as a surprise to many. I’m sure that among our congregations there is a broader understanding and a spirit of Christian solidarity, but I wonder how many in society at large will understand what it is like to lack the basic necessities of life, in London in 2012. Those who are in need of this kind of assistance are not necessarily obvious at all. They could be friends, neighbours, church members. They may very well have homes, and be well dressed, but still be in need of help. Can we see those who are in need in our midst? Can we see what to do?

Today in the gospel the people ask John the Baptist, “what then should we do?” John has just announced the coming of the Lord to redeem Israel, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. And the people realise that this means they need to do something. They need to respond to this good news. John is the last of the prophets, and like the prophets of old his message is that God is coming to his people with judgement and salvation. Judgement, to expose and bring to light what is wrong, so that the people might repent, and turn to the Lord once again, and be saved.

John the Baptist is the last of the prophets, the voice crying in the wilderness, and because he is a prophet he sees what is wrong with the society in which he lives, and proclaims a message of repentance. 

Notice who he 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. In Luke sin is never an individual private thing, it is always bound up with how we live in the world, how our choices affect and shape the society around us.

And notice, too, that the people have come to John to hear his message, even though he's all the way out in the wilderness - he hasn’t gone to them. There is something attractive about John’s message of repentance. It is indeed good news, 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. And this is to prepare the way of the Lord, to open the way for God’s kingdom to come in.

This is the whole 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 into God’s kingdom. And the way into God’s kingdom is repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance means turning away from everything that builds a society contrary to God’s will, oppression and alienation, robbery and extortion, injustice and exploitation. Repentance means aligning ourselves instead with God’s purposes and learning to reflect his righteousness in the world.

That call, that good news, is for us too. Luke knows how to tell a good story. At the beginning of his gospel the people ask John the Baptist, “what then must we do?” And at the beginning of Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, the same question is asked to Peter on the day of Pentecost, “what must we do?” and the answer is the same: “repent, and be baptised, every one of you”. The story of the Church, like the story of Jesus, begins with the call to repent. 

Advent, this season of self-examination and preparation, is a good time to reflect on that. In what ways do we need to repent? Are our choices, our actions, helping to build a just society in which all can take part? Or are we helping to exclude others, to keep them in poverty and deprivation? Luke tells us to look to the poor and dispossessed, those on the margins, because that is where God’s attention is, too. 

Now that call to repentance is something we need to hear for ourselves. There is a temptation to think that all the injustice and exploitation in the world is caused by other people - the bankers have been blamed for a lot in the last few years. Well, if you are a banker you do need to hear the message of repentance, but so do we. 

So do I. 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.

Things like food banks and winter night shelters are not just isolated charity projects, unconnected with the rest of life. Yes, part of our response to the gospel, our repentance, consists of helping those in need according to our ability. This is right and good. But we also need to see that these things are symptoms of something in the world that runs deeply contrary to God’s purposes. When some people are hugely affluent there simply shouldn’t be people who are starving. But there are. The Gospel calls us to examine the causes of injustice, as well as dealing with its consequences. 

Christ comes to us with the command to model God’s righteousness in a world which tends deeply to resist that righteousness. 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 spread 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.