Christmas Day 2020

Christmas Day 2020

Set III readings: Isaiah 52:7-10 and John 1:1-14

 

The theme chosen by the Church of England for Christmas this year has been Comfort and Joy. It has been the message we have held out, to one another and to our neighbours, because comfort and joy have been so very necessary this year, for so many reasons, and because they are something that the Church, of all people, can offer. And if you were listening attentively, you will have heard both words appear in our reading from Isaiah:

‘Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy…

Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted his people…’

Because we have experienced God’s comfort, we can sing for joy.

And of course, we have not been able to sing for almost the whole of the year now; or, at least, not to sing together, not to lift our voices with others. I know that many of you have really missed singing; and that this has been especially hard at this time of year, when, ordinarily, we would have held our carol service and sung familiar carols whenever we came together. But we are allowed to sing outside. To fasten our coats against the wind and the rain, and sing. Is that what it might sound like, for the ruins of Jerusalem to break out into singing? Not the splendour of days past, but the welling-up of faith, of hope, of love, in response to the glory we have seen in the face of Jesus, whose birth we celebrate this day, the One who was and is full of grace and truth?

And so, we shall end our service today by going outside and singing together; and then, we shall go back to our homes and, perhaps, our families; and no, it will not be all that we might have hoped for; and yet, we shall know that there is a light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

 

Christmas Eve 2020

Christmas Eve 2020

Set I readings: Isaiah 9:2-7 and Luke 2:1-20

 

‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.’ Well, it has undoubtedly been a dark year, and there is nothing good to be gained by pretending otherwise. The joy Isaiah points us to is not one that denies the demanding work of gathering-in the harvest or the tragedy of war, nor how draining our own days have been. And yet, we proclaim good news: of One who comes bringing counsel to those in desperate need of wisdom; rescue for those in need of freedom; enduring, loving presence with those in need of comfort; and wellbeing for those who are sore pressed by circumstance. There is hope worth holding on to.

Maybe it is because this year we have had to book our place to come to church on Christmas Eve, but this year I have been struck by the recurring word ‘registered’ or ‘registration’ in our reading from Luke’s Gospel. I do not recall being so struck by them in quite the same way before. But the root of the word means to write one’s name, or enrol; in this case, to enrol on a census for the purposes of taxation by the Roman empire, whose emperor claimed to be the son of a god whose advent brought peace to the whole world. Hardly a voluntary enrolment, or an equitably shared peace.

But enrolment itself is something we do on a regular basis. There has been much made of voting enrolment, and disenfranchisement, in the United States this year. Closer to home, many of you will have voluntarily signed your name to enrol on the Electoral Roll of St Nicholas’ Church. We sign up for something we believe in, want to be part of. We sign up to change the world, to play our part in making it a better place. And, of course, census records are also used to trace our family trees, to discover our roots, to discover something about our ancestors that we might weave into our own story.

And then I am struck by the shepherds, who hear the herald proclamation of peace on earth for those who are blessed by the favour of the God, not in Rome but, in the highest heaven. And who, in response to the announcement, go, from where they are to Bethlehem, not far, but in order to enrol themselves. To sign themselves up.

And then, because the backdrop is one of an enrolment to pay taxes, I am struck by Mary, who treasured all the words that the shepherds spoke. As if their joy was a tax, voluntarily given in order to make the world a better place (isn’t that what paying taxes should be?) and Mary were the tax-collector, on behalf of the King of heaven and earth.

And I wonder what we have signed ourselves up for—if, indeed, we have—and how our glorifying and praising God for all we have seen and heard might play a small part in how Jesus will establish and uphold the kingdom God has conferred upon him, in the place where we are registered, in the coming Year of Our Lord Two-thousand-and-Twenty-one?

 

Fourth Sunday of Advent 2020

The Lord is with you

Lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 and Luke 1:26-38

We have heard read to us two episodes, one from the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, and the other from the Gospels. And in each, one person says to another, ‘the Lord is with you.’ And I wonder what it means, to say to someone that the Lord is with them? Mary is quite right: these are perplexing words, and we should ponder what sort of greeting this might be. It is a highly unusual one, but not without precedent, occurring, as far as I can tell, four times in our Scriptures. The first time is when ‘the angel of the Lord’ addresses a young man named Gideon (Judges 6:12). Gideon is not quite, but as good as, a nobody from nowhere; the very last sort of person he (and we) might expect to be sent an angelic messenger. Moreover, Gideon is doing something highly unusual: he is threshing grain in a wine press. I say highly unusual, and in any other year it would have been, but, in a year when his people were sore pressed by a recurring threat that curtailed every aspect of their lives, it was probably just one of any number of adaptive practices constituting a ‘new normal’. In any other year, we, too, would find threshing grain in a wine press highly unusual; and yet, here we are, receiving the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, usually found in bread and wine, ‘in one kind,’ in bread alone.

The next time we come across this phrase in quite the same way is, as we heard in our first reading, when the prophet Nathan says it to king David [though in the form ‘the Lord be with you!’ it is used by David’s ancestor Boaz as a greeting to his harvesters (Ruth 2:4) and by king Saul as a blessing-cum-dismissal to David as he goes to face the Philistine, Goliath (1 Samuel 17:37)]. Whereas the Lord wishes to call out the ‘mighty warrior’ from within Gideon, with David, the Lord has already called him out, from following the sheep to be prince over his people. Surrounding enemies have been subdued—though the Lord has more to do, to establish rest from all [David’s] enemies.

The third time we meet this phrase, it is addressed by the prophet Azariah, to Asa and all Judah and Benjamin: ‘the Lord is with you, while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you abandon him, he will abandon you.’ (2 Chronicles 15:2). Like David, Asa is king. Like Gideon, the territory of his people is broken, over-whelmed and ravaged by am enemy. And whereas David does not get to build, Asa must tear down, must overthrow practices that have come between God’s people and their God. In Asa’s day, they must rediscover their identity, must renew their covenant commitment, and, flowing from that renewal, must experience a new normal in worship.

And last but by no means least, the angel Gabriel addresses these words to Mary, who, like Gideon, is as near to nobody from nowhere as you could care to imagine; who like Gideon and Asa lives among a people whose daily lives are constrained by invasive, occupying, inhumane forces; who is connected, by marriage, into the house of David. ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’

The thing that runs through each one of these occurrences, carried by these words, is a recurring promise of peace, of living no longer disturbed by enemies. A peace that is enduring, albeit conditional: a seemingly impossible peace that can be embraced, or abandoned, with costly consequence.

Gideon’s response is timid, hoping for reassurances. David’s response is repentant, willing to significantly adapt his plans, for a better vision. Asa’s response is full of zeal, if somewhat misguided, simultaneously taking things too far and not quite far enough. And Mary’s response is, ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ What word? The Lord is with you.

And here we are, in the days before Christmas, at the tail end of a year in which our lives, communally and personally, have been deeply disrupted by a global pandemic; in which our political leaders are playing the kind of brinkmanship, with our neighbours in Europe, that turns friends and allies into enemies; and, to the West, a polarised United States totters on the brink of civil war. May it not be so. Gideon, David, Asa, and Mary are given to us, to learn how (and how not) to orientate and reorientate our lives, as a people set free by the Prince of Peace, not at war with one another but reconciled to God, our neighbour, and one another. Even in the most unlikely circumstances.

This Christmas, despite everything, may you know peace. The Lord is with you.

 

Third Sunday of Advent 2020

 

Joy

Lectionary readings: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 and John 1:6-8, 19-28

Cousin John came as a witness to testify to the light. Note that when another John, the gospel-writer, tells us this he repeats it, underlines it for emphasis: he came to testify to the light.

Writing to the church in Thessalonica, Paul exhorts them: rejoice always…give thanks in all circumstances…hold fast to what it good…

Testify to the light. To our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we rejoice, whether the circumstances we are living through are desirable or undesirable; for in him we see goodness and beauty, and in him we share in that goodness and beauty even as we are being made like him by the God of peace.

Our theme for Advent this year is Comfort and Joy. Last Sunday, we thought about the comfort that comes from God, and today we reflect on the joy that comes from God. And the question is, what is giving you joy, in these days? Where have you seen the light?

I have been walking the streets of the parish, dropping Comfort and Joy baubles through every letterbox. Several of you have helped in this, along with several friends of mine from the running club. And it has been joyful to hear back the responses of so many people who have been profoundly moved at receiving their bauble, a small gift with a disproportionally large impact. It has been a joyful thing to go from letterbox to letterbox, and a joy to see the willingness of those who have given of their time to get this giveaway complete. In a dark year, I testify to the light, to the light of Christ illuminating hearts and reflecting back from feet and hands and faces.

 

Second Sunday of Advent 2020

 

Comfort

Lectionary readings: Isaiah 40:1-11 and Mark 1:1-8

What a year it has been. Relentless. We’ve reached the environmental tipping-point into another mass extinction; the perfect unbalanced conditions to unleash a new viral strain that has impacted all our lives, taken loved ones from us and left others with life-long health issues, and hit our economy harder than anything for four hundred years; and we’re about to find ourselves an island nation with no trade deals with our neighbours. And our theme for today is God’s Comfort. Are you having a laugh?

The first people to hear these words from Isaiah knew what it was to live through multiple crises. Within the space of a generation, they’d lived through the siege and fall of Jerusalem (not the first siege they’d lived through, by the way), the destruction of the temple, the removal of the royal court—of the monarchy and government and civil service—into exile. Those left behind found themselves in a ruined land, vulnerable to raids on whatever remained by surrounding peoples. The institutions that formed and sustained identity—the temple, the nation, the land—not just places, but beliefs about those places and themselves as a people—were stripped away or fallen apart. This was a people who had experienced, and were still experiencing, trauma. And into this moment, God speaks: Comfort, comfort my people.

To whom is God speaking? Not to Isaiah, the prophet, who is simply reporting what he has been permitted to see and hear. No, Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, the god of a people in exile in the territory of other gods, is addressing the assembly of the gods, the angelic and demonic beings. It is Yahweh who has permitted his people to be humbled, in judgement for their dogged commitment to injustice. It is on account of Yahweh’s justice, not powerlessness, that these things have come to pass; and it is on account of Yahweh’s mercy that now he decrees, ‘Enough!’ Enough, now. It is time to rebuild.

It begins in the wilderness, in the place of encounter with God, in the place where corrupted institutions are stripped away. In the place of exodus from slavery in Egypt. In the place of exile from captivity to self-deception and false security in Jerusalem. It begins, as it always begins when God is doing a new thing, in the wilderness. And it proceeds with a levelling of uneven ground, in order to achieve a uniting of all peoples on equal standing which goes hand-in-hand with the glory of the Lord being made visible.

This is not yet achieved, in Isaiah’s vision, or in ours. There is a tension, a paradox: that it shall be achieved is inevitable, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken; and yet, its fulfilment also requires the active participation of the gods and mortals. Our God does not work alone, nor by coercion.

What, then, is the comforting message? All people are grass. Excuse me? That’s it? That’s what you’ve got? All people are grass? How is that good news? Well, when you are already withered and faded, and you see others in all their glory, here is a reminder that this is not blind chance, nor the inevitable outcome of human initiative or lack of initiative, but God’s agency, God’s generative and ongoing sustaining activity within the world; and, therefore, we ought to view ourselves and others with humility and appreciation, perhaps even delight. All people are grass…and grass is actually incredibly resilient; it grows back; it also binds the earth (soil) together to prevent erosion, to prevent further loss. Individual blades of grass may be small, but grass is nonetheless significant; it feeds, well, directly or indirectly, everything.

The angelic beings are called to comfort God’s people. And, in response, God’s people are called to be the herald of good tidings. God’s people in exile; God’s people who have come through crisis and are yet to experience the return, the building back. God’s people, in the midst of all the peoples, in God’s world. Tidings of Comfort and Joy. To proclaim the good news that God comes to right injustice and embody mercy.

What, then, is the word for today, the word to us and the word for others through us, on this Second Sunday of Advent at the tail end of 2020? It is, surely, that in Jesus, God is with us, to feed, to gather up, to carry, to gently lead. To fill empty stomachs and hunger for justice; to hold anxious children in the emotional security of reliable love; to carry the exhausted and hurting ones who just can’t carry on; to walk with parents and teachers and employers and the self-employed and those in positions of responsibility who feel lost and alone right now. This is what the Church should look and feel like.

And what is the word for tomorrow? That crises reveal judgement on injustice and inequality, on disregard for the most vulnerable; and, once the crisis is over, what emerges must be more just, more merciful. The vision begins from the margins, the grassroots. We have a world to rebuild, and a role to play, not alone, nor by coercion, but alongside comforting angels. John the baptiser—not an angelic messenger, but a human one—took God’s imperative to the divine assembly upon himself. Will we?

 

Second Sunday before Advent 2020

 Audio file

Lectionary readings: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 and Matthew 25:14-30

Our Gospel reading today is commonly referred to as the Parable of the Talents. It is, I think, a relatively well-known parable, and it is usually taken as a story to illustrate that God has given talents to each one of us, and expects a return on his investment. I do believe that God has given each one of us gifts with which to play our part in making the world more harmonious, or at least no more chaotic than we found it. And I do believe that God does, and will, hold us accountable, and that it will not do to say, “we never asked for such responsibility in the first place”. I believe these things based on all manner of stories that I read in the Bible, but not on the basis of this parable of a harsh and unjust ruler who sees people as fundamentally wicked, lazy and worthless unless he profits from them. I want to suggest, instead, that this is a parable of the darkness of the world into which God is about to act decisively. It is preceded by the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, in which the bridegroom is delayed and some of those awaiting his arrival find themselves unprepared; and followed by the parable of the sheep and the goats, a parable of judgement on the nations surrounding Israel for how they have treated God’s people, who are identified as the marginalised (though note that though the relationship between the symbol and the signified is not wholly arbitrary, they are not interchangeable: those who are marginalised are not, automatically, the people of God).

There is, in these three parables, a progression or development of idea: prolonged unfulfilled expectation, set against deepening darkness; the apparent rewards of pursuing wealth and power, or deeds done in the darkness; and a coming light that brings judgement to the deeds done in the darkness. The parable in the middle is a parable told to encourage those who are fearful—who are afraid of the dark—to hold on a little longer, because divine judgement and, crucially, their divine vindication, is now imminent.

This is the good news: that we are not forgotten, even when the powers of this world have written us off. As the story continues to unfold, we discover that God, who in Jesus will identify with the discarded, will, in this same Jesus, establish a reign of justice and mercy. But that is to jump ahead of ourselves. Here, with this parable, Jesus, the master storyteller, is building up the dramatic tension. As we pause at the end to catch our breath, we want to know what happens next: what will happen to the man removed for disloyalty? and who, if anyone, can outsmart the tyrant?

Advent is an annual season of preparing our lives for Christ’s return, to judge the living and the dead. Today is the Second Sunday before Advent: a moment for adjusting our eyes to see in the dark. Stand outside in the evenings at this time of year, in a place where there are no streetlights, and you will know that after some minutes what was pitch dark and disorienting becomes more recognisable and, with care, navigable.

In light of this reality, Paul writes to the saints in Thessalonica, ‘therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.’ Specifically, he speaks of putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of hope of salvation. Choosing to respond to the state of the world in faith and love protects our hearts, our choice-making. Choosing to hold out hope protects our minds, the thoughts and feelings that affect our choice-making.

In light of the story by which Jesus locates us, in which light Paul invites us to orientate and reorientate our lives, I shall end on this: what would it look like, to ‘encourage one another and build up each other’ today? Discuss.

 

All Saints' Day 2020

 

Lectionary readings: Revelation 7:9-17 and 1 John 3:1-3 and Matthew 5:1-12

By now I am sure that you will have heard the news that, as of one minute past midnight on Thursday, we will be going back into a lockdown. As in the first time around, it looks most likely that church services will be suspended, and we must prepare ourselves for that to happen.

This has been a hard year, and Lockdown 2 comes as a bitter, if not entirely unexpected, blow. If lockdown heading into summer was hard, lockdown heading into winter will be harder. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Based on her observations of people experiencing grief, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified five emotional stages. These have since been somewhat discredited, in that there is no empirical evidence that everyone goes through all of them, or in any particular order, or that we ever get beyond loss. Nonetheless, they are recognisable to us. Denial: don’t worry, things will have changed again by Thursday, it won’t happen. Anger: the students are to blame for this! Yet more incompetence from the government! Bargaining: we should be recognised as an essential service; perhaps there is a loophole we can exploit? Depression: we know mental ill health has risen this year, due to sustained uncertainty exacerbated by isolation. Acceptance: or at least resignation, though they are not the same. Perhaps you recognise some or all of these emotional states, in yourself or in those around you.

William Worden focused not on the emotional responses to grief but, rather, on the four tasks of grieving. These four tasks do not necessarily follow on one after the other, but they may give purpose to mourning. The first task is to accept the loss. Whether the death of a loved one, or being made redundant, or retirement, or the empty nest when children leave home, loss is an inevitable part of life, and something we need to wrestle with God through the night if we are to receive blessing.

The second task is to acknowledge the pain of the loss. All loss involves pain, even if little losses are less painful that major losses. The biblical template for acknowledging the pain of loss is lament. Our Scriptures are full of lament. There is no place for the English stiff-upper-lip holding back of tears. If the doors of our churches are to close, even for a month, even if they will then reopen, there is a pain to that, which it is right and proper to recognise.

The third task of grieving is to adjust to a new environment. What does it mean to be the church, when we cannot gather together in this place and share holy communion? The newspaper headlines are speculating that Christmas could be cancelled this year. Well, it won’t be. But, yes, we won’t be able to mark it the way we have become accustomed to. We will need to adjust to a new reality. Likewise, we won’t be able to mark Remembrance Sunday as we have become used to. We can expend energy on outrage, or, we can choose to remember; perhaps, get back to the heart of remembrance, which is to move towards reconciliation and peace.

The fourth task of grieving is to reinvest in the reality of a new life. And right now, to be honest, we might not have the energy to do so. One of my deepest regrets of 2020 is that earlier in the year our church buildings were only closed for three months. You see, across the country, we just buckled down to ride it out until we could return to business as usual. But there is no going back, only pressing onward.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. What does that look like? Well, in part, it looks like holding on to the hope that there will be a reckoning beyond this life, beyond what we see now, when God will wipe away every tear. But what about the present? For now, the Church is called to be a foretaste of that hope, a testimony to what—and who—we hope in. We are called to be those who comfort the mourning; and those who, in our own mourning, know ourselves to be blessed, to be the happy ones. What does it look like? It looks like participation in the tasks of grieving, the conspiracy between the circumstances of our lives and the God who loves us beyond measure to draw us ever deeper into the mystery of knowing life in its fullness, its richness.

If All Saints’ Day reminds us of anything, it is that we have a long history of doing this. This might be the first pandemic you and I have lived through, but it is not the first time that the Church has been here. As we look to the men, women, and children whose faithful lives inspire our own, we are challenged and invited to step up and do likewise.

So, our doors will shut, and what we will be won’t look like what it has done, on the outside. But now is a time to press into our identity as children of God, to purify ourselves, that just a glimpse of what we hope in might be seen by those around us. That, as we say in Durham Diocese, we might bless our communities, for the transformation of us all.