Sermon preached this morning at the main service. The gospel reading was Matthew 3:1-12, Old Testament Isaiah 11:1-10, New Testament Romans 15:4-13.
My friend, a fellow curate, messaged me the other day with the question “why hope?” She wasn’t just having a really bad day, it turns out her church for Advent has a sermon series themed around hope and she was doing some sermon prep.
It did get me thinking though, how to respond to her question, especially as I’d just read this morning’s gospel whilst beginning to prepare my own sermon. John the Baptist’s confrontational manner has a tendency towards sounding terrifying rather than hopeful. This is a really challenging section of the gospel.
The good news is John isn’t addressing his comments to you and I, but to the Pharisees and Sadducees who’ve turned up to get their holy insurance policy. They’re probably going to be ok with God, they’re descended from Abraham after all, but just in case they’ve popped out to see John to get themselves baptised…you never know if it might be needed.
John’s a big deal at this point, people don’t usually just nip out into the wilderness but he’s drawing big crowds and his teaching is pretty popular, hence the religious big-wigs thinking they’d better check it out too.
Now, in context he’s talking to these folk, the “brood of vipers” as he calls them, which are harsh words, but that’s not to say that there isn’t something we can take and apply to ourselves- and the really good news is that it’s full of hope.
John the baptiser is the voice crying out in the wilderness, the one preparing the way for Jesus. As we know Advent is our time of preparation for Jesus, but we tend to go about things in a very different way to John.
I think for us as Christians in our society Advent has become quite a dichotomy; that pull or tension between knowing we should be spiritually preparing and the wish to join everyone else who’s already celebrating. I got grumbles at work last week for asking the girls to wait until December to put the Christmas music on.
In terms of the cycle of the church year Advent mirrors Lent as a time for prayer and penitence, but unlike in Lent it’s much harder to keep that spiritual focus. It’s impossible to not celebrate Christmas until Christmas.
More widely Advent, rather than a time of journeying towards something, has become a fun-filled time of arrival. The party season. A time for memory-making. People want to celebrate Christmas because it’s joyful, colourful, full of light and that all-important hope. It’s a time of escapism and putting off thinking about the serious stuff.
Yet by his stark and uncompromising message John lets us know that what’s coming demands a response from us, requires thought and preparation on our part. John is proclaiming the nearness of God’s reign, there’s an urgency to it, hence the big scary metaphors the listener can’t ignore. John’s telling us this is serious stuff, and something we need to set aside time for.
As well as thinking about, it requires “about-thinking”, which is another way to understand “repent”. The centuries have not been kind to this word but what it amounts to is a change in our thinking, a reversal or turning around. In this case a turning around to contemplate what our baptism means.
Most of us won’t remember our own baptism, but we will remember our confirmation where we’re asked to reaffirm our baptism. Baptism, for us, for the family of the children I’ll baptise today, “is a response to God’s love- a desire and commitment to respond to God’s call; remembering that we are loved by God, are part of a wider community and have a place with God’s people.”
John is telling his listeners that the baptism he offers isn’t a holy insurance policy. More is required of them and of us. In the letter to the Romans Paul explores the idea that it’s our baptism that unites us with Jesus, and therefore to each other. It’s not about us as individuals, not about individual salvation, but a great communal joining that links each baptised person to each other, entwined in the love of the Trinity. That gives us a responsibility to and for each other.
This definitely requires a response on our part as we’re not always great at being one connected community of faith, hope and love. Both Isaiah and Paul offer us visions in today’s readings of what a community reflecting that connectedness might look like. For Isaiah, it’s a return to Eden; for Paul, all Christians living in harmony.
For John, it’s an about-turn, turning to examine ourselves, our identity as the baptised and our communal life. He wants us to think about our response to God’s coming action in the world. What John doesn’t know is what that action will be, that Jesus doesn’t reveal God’s power through apocalypse but through love, remarkable preaching, parables of forgiveness and growth, deeds of compassion and healing.
What’s our response or repentance to God’s love revealed through Jesus?
Advent is a journey we undertake to get in touch with God and ourselves, and yet it can heighten our sense of responsibility to each other. It gives space for the purification of the heart and a place for a new start. “Advent promises us fresh possibilities, opens up new horizons and invites us into a world that offers a better way of living.” That’s our repentance, or turn around in our thinking.
To return to my friend’s question of hope, St Paul writes that "by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope" (Ron 15:4), yet not all of scripture is an easy read.
John the Baptist reminds us that our gospel disturbs and disrupts, as it ought to. Ours is not a religion of comfort and cosiness. It’s a challenge. We must face ourselves, who we are in our baptism and bring it all before God. God knows it already and loves us, but the depth of relationship he wants from us requires us to be honest about who we are.
The purpose of this disruption is to renew, refresh and replenish - both ourselves, our communal lives and our relationship with God.
My response to “why hope?” was as follows: we hope because of all those small things in our lives that bring us joy and glimpses of the divine even on the darkest of days, we hope because we love, we hope because we know we’re not alone.
This is the hope reflected in our baptism, and what we encounter through our Advent. God and God’s love reflected in all things, in the light and the shade, in the noise and the quiet, in peace and in disruption.
