Fire and Good News

Sermon for St Mary’s Sanderstead ,

3rd Sunday of Advent, 13th December 2009

Fire and good news

Readings:

Isaiah 12:2-6 (Canticle)

Philippians 4:4-7 Luke 3:7-18

May my words and our thoughts lead us further into the peace of God which passes all understanding.

Do you remember Martyn Lewis, the newsreader who said we ought to hear more good news?

He was thought a bit odd for that. And the headlines on the BBC news website yesterday were about the Iraq war, arrests at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, and the charging of the estranged husband of a mutilated woman with her murder. So they haven’t taken his advice. No good news there.

We might face a similar struggle, at first hearing, to find any good news in the fiery warnings of John the Baptist. Luke, at the end of today’s gospel, tells us that, ‘with many exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.’ But where is the good news?

This story might more readily conjure up fearful scenes of hellish medieval art, or cold, harsh, judgemental pseudo-Christians we have known.

Certainly, John, living up to his billing as the last of the Old Testament prophets, is a long way from the warm, nice, ineffectual English clergyman offered to us by the comedians of the last generation.

Not for John ‘Good morning and welcome’ to the people who came out to him; no, he gets straight in there with

‘You brood of vipers!’

[St Mary’s Church council will be considering a new welcome strategy at our January meeting with this title – do give your feedback to members please, as to how you think this might go with the church and wider community ]

What is John saying? Don’t hide behind being children of Abraham, that won’t help you. Don’t hide behind our being churchgoers, he would say to us. Bear good fruit, he says, through what you do in your daily lives. Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk.

Tax-collectors are not to abuse their legitimate authority, soldiers are not to exploit their powers, and those well provided for are to share their resources – this is part of the strong social concern which is so evident in Luke’s gospel.

John is a forerunner for Jesus and begins to make the demands of the kingdom of God. It’s not very comfortable, but the people are drawn to his word and filled with expectation.

So where is the good news?

Well it’s not comfy good news, it’s challenging good news.

I sometimes hear people saying how they draw comfort from St Mary’s, and that’s lovely. We need that. But it’s only half the story, because we need challenge as well as comfort to be a healthy church.

And we certainly get it from John the Baptist today. It is good news, but it’s fiery good news.

Not cosy log fire good news, but searing, purifying fiery good news.

The fire that Moses turned aside to see at the burning bush; the fire of the presence and power of the Lord which, in the Old Testament, was dangerous to look upon; the fire of the face of God with which Jacob wrestled, and which made Moses’ face shine.

John is calling us to get down to brass tacks with God, basically, and not to hide behind anything else. And certainly not to hide behind ‘I’m a good Jew’ or ‘I’m a good Christian’ or ‘I’m a faithful church-goer.’

This is the repentance, the admitting our need and turning back to God, to which we are called week by week, day by day, and which bears fruit in our lives.

So does that make us wheat, or chaff?

Well if we’re chaff, you might hear, we will be burned with unquenchable fire; if we’re wheat, well it doesn’t really do to consider ourselves as wheat, since the one thing that Jesus really can’t stand, the gospels tell us, because it takes us a long way from God, is people who are self-righteous.

Sounds like a lose-lose situation, perhaps?

Perhaps the truth of the wheat and the chaff is this:

We know something of our need of God, but readily and often turn away. None of us can yet take the full fire of his presence, but we are getting ready, turning back, and bearing some fruit. This is the wheat.

The chaff is also still with us and in us; turning back to God helps to burn it away. Facing up to the grubby stuff in us, whatever it is, is challenging and uncomfortable, but much better than pretending it’s not there. And one day, beyond this life, it will all be burned away, to glory.

So, in both the wheat and the chaff, John proclaims the good news to the people.

Where that leaves us, in the now and the not-yet that is the stuff of Christian life, is needing to come humbly before God, and to continue to walk in faith, letting God be God in producing our wheat and burning off our chaff.

Plenty of people in the world would think this nonsense.

Ours is a doubting, sceptical age. But as Diarmid McCulloch identified this week at the end of his series on the history of Christianity, our sceptical age can’t escape the oldest questions at the heart of the messy business of being human – questions of right and wrong, purpose and meaning, questions of life and love, being and truth.

The great medieval catholic theologian St Thomas Aquinas wrote: ‘God is not the answer, he is the question.’

We need to face the question, warns John the Baptist.

If we go on trying to ask the question, in the midst of fire and doubt and mess, our own and other people’s, that is prayer. Prayer is the lifeblood of our relationship with the one who made us and is bringing us home.

Don’t worry, Paul teaches the church at Philippi, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, turn to God.

So don’t hide behind anything. Face your need of God. Repent, turn back to God, and show that by how you live in your day to day life.

Put your trust in God, Isaiah teaches us, and with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Then, in the midst of the fire and beyond it, you will know something of the joy and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.

That’s good news. And a sign of the coming of God’s kingdom with us which we will celebrate in the infant Christ.

I have one more thing to ask of you as we wrestle with John the Baptist’s fiery preaching. The great French 17th century preacher, Bishop Bossuet, spoke about the preacher’s awesome responsibility towards his people. Then he turned to his hearers and asked how they saw their responsibility. He said: ‘Perhaps you are here to sit in judgement on my sermon – but at the Last Judgement you will have to answer for your part in it.’

The sermon is an event shaped in both the pulpit and the pew. I am deaconing today, and that’s a timely reminder that I am here to serve you, as well as to shepherd as your parish priest and vicar.

I don’t need any idle ‘nice sermon vicar’ encouragement; but I do need to hear something of what does serve you and will serve you in preaching, and that we are genuinely in it together as God’s people seeking God’s word to us.

So please talk to me about it over coffee. Thank you.

Revd James Percival,

Team Vicar of Sanderstead for St Mary’s