02/01/22 All Saints Southport Christmas 2
Ephesians 1:3-14 John 1:10-18
If there’s one thing that living in a pandemic has made pretty clear it’s that all our plans are provisional. For example, in February we hope to go down to Surrey to look after two of our grandchildren allowing our son and daughter in law to have a week end away. Will it happen - we hope so and think so but have learned to keep a little way this side of complete confidence.
The reason I mention this is that in this sermon I am going to make a very modest proposal which should see us through this year and beyond - I have every hope it’s Covid proof and government proof, but I can offer you no guarantees.
Further, my proposal is manageable whatever our starting point and will improve the quality of our life whether we are great saints, great sinners or somewhere in-between. At this point you’re probably wondering when will I bring out the bottles of snake oil and what the catch is, but in fact we are going to look at the passages.
Our readings are very different from each other - Paul is exuberant, he is overwhelmed by what God has done for us and can scarcely pause for breath, the gospel is comparatively dour it has a greater sense of buckling down to a difficult but necessary task - nevertheless they have at least two things in common.
The first is that neither is satisfied to simply say that Jesus came that we might be forgiven in the sense of having been given a get out of jail free card, an ‘off you go and don’t do it again’ approach they go further, we are not just forgiven we are reconciled to the Father ‘God and sinners reconciled’ - the relationship has been healed, made good, Jesus came so we might be welcomed into the family of God ‘Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth.’ - if I’d been thinking we could have sung Hark the Herald Angels. Forgiveness is only the starting point of what God has done for us, what he wants, intends, looks forward to - is our adoption into his family.
Now before telling you the second thing they have in common I’ll give you my modest proposal.
I am going to introduce it with a paragraph by Rowan Williams which I very often use during a eucharist.
For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests - that they have been welcomed, and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that He wants our company.
My proposal is simply that we should take this last phrase seriously - ‘Jesus Christ wants our company’ and so over this next year we should aim to keep him company, walk where he is walking, enjoy being with him..
If this is the proposal what is the catch?
One reason is that often - and I speak personally - we’d rather have a get out of jail free card than family membership. We suspect - often rightly that if we stick too close to Jesus we may be taken ever so slightly outside our comfort zone.
However there is another reason - we find it hard to believe that God might enjoy time with us ‘Jesus Christ wants our company? That must be nonsense.’
Writing about Christmas Rowan Williams puts it rather more elegantly , ‘We are dealing…with a God who doesn’t have to be persuaded to be interested in us….what relics are there in our mind and hearts of an approach to God which still believes that God is essentially rather bored with us, rather removed from us and always in need of being kept sweet.
However long you’ve been a Christian, or however long you’ve been looking wistfully at Christianity from outside, that’s something that obstinately keeps coming back. That something is deeply etched in our mind, the mythology of a God who somehow has to be persuaded to be on our side.’
We expect that God is bored with us or that we’re just not his kind of people. Rowan Williams gives this idea short shrift
‘Persuade God to be on our side? You might as well try and persuade a waterfall to be wet.’
We can have a blind spot about God’s love for us - the idea is so odd we can distance ourselves from it. Yet he could hardly have done more to try and get us to take it seriously. And this is the second thing that our epistle and gospel have in common. Listen to what Paul wrote Read extracts from Ephesians to emphasise God's agency , God sent his son so that we would be brought into his family Similarly read from the gospel. Preparing this sermon reminded me that the incarnation wasn’t inevitable; it happened because of God’s active choice, it is his idea, our relationship with him is not one of the byproducts of his Creation, the word being made flesh is not an afterthought, it’s the focal point of his intentions. Adopting us as his children/ giving us the power to become the children God wasn’t a business decision - ‘how can I make the very most of this universe’, or a reluctant rescue ‘they’ve made a complete pig’s ear of things, I’d better hit the plan B button’ - he did it because us in his family is what he had wanted all along.
My proposal is about accepting we don’t need to be defensive with God - he enjoys our company - but it will change us, if we have his ear he has ours - and he is different from us, our understanding will not be perfect.
We will have questions about faith, the world, the way people are for which we have no answer Life comes to us, not always straight forwardly or comfortably and we have to find our way through it - part of our keeping company with Jesus will involve asking the awkward questions - we may not get a full answer but we can still be left with hope.
C. S. Lewis’s friend Austin Farrer wrote this
we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; He gives us a Son. Such is the spirit of the angel’s message to the shepherds: ‘Peace upon earth, goodwill to all..... You shall find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.’
The Saviour the angels sing of is not an abstract idea, He has been born to us
... flesh and blood, fully human - and he is going to live in the world we live in and provide God’s response to our questions in that flesh and blood.
‘A Son is better than an explanation.
From the gospel ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’ Sometimes alived example or an image is worth a thousand words
Desmond Tutu’s funeral was yesterday so one example and one image from him. The example wasn’t his but touched him The first time he met Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican missionary he doffed his hat to Tutu's mother, a gesture almost unheard of in apartheid South Africa. When Tutu spent 18 months in hospital with TB Huddleston regularly visited him and later supported him as went forward to ordination. Huddleston knew all people have the dignity of being made in the image of God so he did the simple things that changed a life and eventually a nation.
An image Desmond Tutu at a sitting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his head is bowed While listening to the testimony of victims, Tutu was sometimes overwhelmed by emotion and cried during the hearings. Firmly believing that that the conclusion of forgiveness is reconciliation meant he didn’t try to armour himself against the pain of those who had suffered, but this was a very hard road to walk.
Trevor Huddleston and Desmond Tutu - immensely different characters - both Godly people who gave time to keeping God company - following Jesus led them along difficult paths but they were more fully themselves as his companions than ever could have been otherwise.
A modest proposal for the new year ‘For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests - that they have been welcomed, and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that He wants our company.’
Day by day, spend a little more time with him in the give and take of companionship and it will change your life.
