So here we are in Advent, a time of waiting.
What are we all waiting for?
I’m waiting for the end of this talk – so we’ve got that in common. Write a sermon about waiting, they said, and about a cradle, about expectation, and about hope.
How will you judge it worth waiting for? Do you require some traditional reverence for Jesus and Mary or a popular culture dash of Homer Simpson and Bruce Forsyth?
Who will be judge?
In Psalm 146 the Creator of Heaven Earth and Sea is doing all the judging, and we are told not to put our trust in human leaders. So you have Biblical permission to stop listening to me now.
But just in case you are still with me, in Isaiah, texts which we read during Advent we again hear much about God’s judgement.
But is God’s judgement something you’re hoping for?
Would you like Christmas presents with cards reading: “Happy Judgement day!”
Nowadays you’re as likely to get “Happy Crimbo” or even “Happy Xmas”.
Because we live in a world where Christmas is experiencing a divorce from Christ. People accuse the church of trying to get in on the act.
I remember producing a radio programme in the 90’s, when there was surprise at proposals by the council in Wolverhampton to publicly rename Christmas as Winter-val. Fast forward to 2007 and in Glasgow and Aberdeen it is already called Winter-fest.
I don’t begrudge us a Happy Winterfest but I do wonder about this public divorce of God from his world.
It’s seems such an articificial and enforced break with reality that it reminds me of Homer Simpson when he’s been kidnapped and is desperately seeking money to secure his own release – he telephones Flanders and says: “Flanders I’ve been kidnapped and I need $50,000."
‘I’m not sure I have that much money Homer, but I can pray for you if you like?’
‘Oh go suck a Bible!’ Homer says.
But his expectations of a good release would have changed in prayer. In the same episode, Homer and Lisa are looking for a missing orphan. The people who run the orphanage try to reassure them: “Don't worry, we have lit a candle and said prayers for her every day.”
“MMM” says Homer. “But have you tried looking for her?”
Is there a point of action without prayer? What is the point of waiting without expecting? What is the point of Christmas without Christ? I wouldn’t blame you if you also asked yourself is there a point to this sermon in the absence of me telling you? But keep waiting.
All of us here grew from babies, and we all absorbed many stories on the way here, for better or worse. One of these stories tells us how God also grew from a baby, but did not just absorb the world.
He also transformed it, healed it, gave us hope for a spiritual life within it. I don’t know if you have ever tried to imagine life without the story of God’s becoming a human being, but ask yourselves who passed this story onto you, and how has it made a difference to you?
There was a Breakfast news report recently claiming that 4 out of 5 primary schools no longer tell the nativity story. So how might you be able to pass this story on to another person in a way they can accept it, and what difference might this make to them. Ask yourselves this now in the silence of expectation…..
In our childlike helplessness, the uncreated spirit is with us. One of us. We are in him. We allow self-judgement other judgement and fear of other judgement to be replaced by mercy and acceptance for ourselves, for others, and for the Other of all. In this story Christ does not arrive as physical might or temporal power. As a baby God is not independent, he is dependent, interdependent. Just like us he has been conceived helpless, just like us he will die helpless. But that can be good.
St Gregory of Nazianzus puts it like this: The very Son of God, older than the ages, invisible, incomprehensible, incorporeal, beginning of beginning, light of light, fountain of life and immortality … perfect likeness … he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like ... He takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty … that I may share in his fullness ... What is this mystery that surrounds us?
This mystery is Abba, intimate enough to be called Daddy, but in our emptiness he is greater than our abilities, our companions, our mid-winter, and our universe. His best things are not things. He suffers nature, but nature cannot explain his existence. The best thing in our nature is no-thing, but One supreme spirit who holds all things together, silently, eternally, expectantly.
We need to communicate to Homer Simpson that to pray is to act, to expect and be expectant, to pray for others is to act from God’s motives and to lose ourselves - and therefore find ourselves. To pray is to act in the hope that actions work out, despite their looking like they are not working out, and even though it does seem like a very long wait indeed.
On Strictly Come Dancing Bruce Forsyth can regularly be heard to tell us “and now the moment of truth!” I take this on trust as I can’t get near the television for writing essays.
But the moment of truth is now – because the place where our sustainer is born is not in a stable, not in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, not in the Bible, but here in us. The Mind of God in our minds and the birth of God in ourselves.
We haul trees into our houses and wait for the day on which we celebrate the birth of God in us. The true cradle is our life, as we helplessly allow Abba into the world around us.
We can never divorce ourselves from this incarnate reality because it is not ours. Christmas is not about buying and receiving the God of presents we can afford – but about freely accepting the presence of God who we can’t escape.
As Psalm 146 says, no human being can save you. When they die, they return to the dust, and all their plans come to an end … We are helpless, like a labour coming on, but helplessness is good if it is giving birth.
At last then, the point of my sermon. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place but does not take place in myself? What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and I am not? What good is it to me for the creator to give birth to his or her Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
Awaiting in childbirth is a crisis but when we cease our labouring, this is Christ’s best opportunity to appear, and then to smile.
And this then is the fullness of time, when the Son of God is begotten in us.
Amen.
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