Remembrance Sunday 2016

‘See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.’ (Malachi 4:1-2)

Malachi is a dreamer. He dreams of a day that is coming, when all who are arrogant and all who are evildoers are consumed like the stubble of a harvested field, that is set on fire. That day will be a new dawn for all those who revere God’s name, a day of restoration, a healing of all their hurts.

More than 400 years later, John the Baptist proclaimed that the day Malachi dreamed of had arrived, in the person of Jesus, whom John portrayed as coming with the tools of harvest and with fire, to gather the grain and burn up the chaff.

I don’t know how Malachi’s dream sits with you. It is, I think, a dream that echoes in the dream to Make Britain Great Again, or Make America Great Again. We’d all like to see a day when bad people get what is coming to them and good people are vindicated. But then, we tend to like to see ourselves as being, essentially, good people – at least in comparison with others. This is not the hypocrisy of religious people, as some make out, but the hypocrisy – literally, mask-wearing – of human beings.

The problem is, if I am honest, that I am arrogant, and an evildoer.

I am arrogant, in that I assume that my experience of life is the same as yours, indeed is normative, and that you can be measured against me. At least, this is my default assumption, which I might be helped to resist. This is what is called white privilege, or male privilege, or the privilege of any number of other things including my upbringing, my education, my sexuality, that it is so easy for me to take for granted. And we all have our assumptions: I am constantly talking with people who assume that I am familiar with the TV or music or football team or technology they love; or that I have the same knowledge of Sunderland they have, even though I have lived here for only three years and they have lived here their whole lives!

And I am an evildoer. In what I think and say and do – and fail to do, that ought to be done – I contribute to that which is wrong with the world. That isn’t the whole story – thank God! – but it is true, for me and for you. That is why when we come together, we begin by placing ourselves in the hands of a God who knows our hearts better than we do ourselves; confessing our sins; receiving pardon for, and deliverance from, our sins; and renewed hope of being kept, and strengthened, in all goodness.

These are important verses to hear on an occasion of public Remembrance, because of the strong tendency to view ‘us’ as liberators and guarantors of all that is good in the world, instead of recognising that we share fully in the folly and capacity for wickedness that is common to humanity. Fully human.

I need my arrogance and evildoing burnt up, rooted out, cut away.

God knows, it will need to be an extreme action. God knows, I need a Messiah.

But I don’t only need someone who will burn up what needs to be burned: I need someone who will then heal my wounds. I need that hope of a future, hope based not on my being right or good, or even on our being right or good, but on God’s righteousness: on God’s ability to relate to us – who were his enemies – rightly.

The verses we heard read out loud ended with an unusual image: those on whom the sun of righteousness dawns shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. I don’t keep a cow in my house, and I guess you don’t either. But in biblical times, many families kept a small cow – much smaller than our cows today – along with a few sheep and perhaps a donkey. At night, the animals were brought into the house, often a one-room home with the animals corralled at one end, their body heat keeping the family warm. One of the first jobs of the morning was to open the door and drive the animals out. But when the cow calved, it was even more crowded; and calves – like human children – are more ready than their parents to get up and out.

This is the image: being contained, in darkness; safe, but restrained; and, all-of-a-sudden, the door thrown open: light streaming in, a wider world beckoning.

Jesus has come. The day of the Lord is here. Not every wrong has been made right, not yet. But we can submit to being brought low by him (which turns out to be a necessary part of healthy, sustainable community; necessary for being a good society). And we can welcome a healing that is as dependable as the sunrise (even if some days the sunrise is hidden by clouds).