A sermon for the 3rd Sunday before Advent
Given by the Revd Jan Kearton
In the Church’s calendar we’re between All Saints and Advent, sometimes called the Kingdom season. The lectionary begins to head towards the crowning Sunday of the Church Year – Christ the King. Both our churches in their own way point to this – the east window at St John’s has Christ in glory as a crowned monarch and the east hanging at St Cuthbert’s has Christ is glory with the souls of the faithful ascending to him.
They’re both illustrations couched in the visual language of their own time – the Victorian Christ is a majestic though distinctly Western figure, seated on a medieval throne. The Christ of the late 1950’s is a transcendent, cosmic, mysterious and commanding figure, his hands outstretched in welcome and embrace. Today’s texts help us to think about the relationship of the powers and authorities of this world to Christ and Christ’s with the world that is coming into being – the Kingdom.
Job is wrestling with great evils - he’s lost everything: material goods, wife, children, and the goodwill of his friends. They think that Job has been punished for sin and that he should either repent or curse God. In all his suffering, Job refuses to curse God but still insists that he doesn’t deserve his present situation. In his society, one of his relatives would be expected to redeem him, to avenge the wrongs that have happened to him, but Job dares to believe that God cares so deeply about justice and God himself will act to redeem him because his cause is just. Job resists our human tendency to blame ourselves or God for our tragedies and hardships. Instead, he calls on God to act, to be God, to restore and heal the injustice.
Sometimes, nations think that they act on behalf of God and sometimes they act in defiance either that there is a God or that God isn’t made in their image. In his book ‘The Unsettling God’ the American Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann asks three very daring questions about the kingdom of God: did South African apartheid reach its limit because such brutality was beyond the limit of God?; is it possible that the fall of the Soviet Union happened because the state outran what could be borne in the world of God? And if we’re able to think about those things without resorting to the sillier kinds of beliefs about God’s intervention in the world, should we also ask what limits might be non-negotiable about American power? The Church prays ‘thine be the kingdom, the power and the glory’ and Jesus’ prayer faithfully reflects Old Testament thinking – God is sovereign. No human power should imagine that it can rule in the place of God. In the end, God’s own justice must rule.
The second Letter to the Thessalonians speaks to a church which is beside itself with fear. Whatever persecution is happening to it and whoever is causing it, the situation is so challenging that it feels like the disintegration and suffering that will begin the Day of the Lord, the day when Christ will return. The writer says that evil does exist in the world but that it’s being overcome as Christ’s rule takes hold. They are called to stand firm, hold fast to their faith and to draw strength and comfort from Christ’s sufferings which have led through his resurrection and ascension to the beginning of his rule.
The Church has a glorious and faithful history, but parts of its history have been dominated by fear. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation martyrs form part of a pattern of fearful responses. Fear of difference, the fear of wrong doctrine, fear of loss of control and authority, fear of change. In our fear, we snatch power from God and use it our own way. But human truths change and we look back on those times with shame. Only God’s truths are the same from age to age and that’s why the church must continue to pray ‘thine be the kingdom, the power and the glory’ and to mean it.
Change and difference are challenging but the church must resist the temptation to give in to fear and to panic. Issues such as women bishops, changes in the shape of mission and ministry, changes in the usefulness of church furniture and even of church buildings can trigger fears of disintegration. We feel like the church that we love is being swept away. But Christ loves the church far more than we can and we must trust that he will keep us true to his calling. We mustn’t cling to anything but him.
Resurrection is a huge change and challenge that’s difficult to get to grips with. It challenges logical thinking. It’s unknown territory, we don’t know what to expect and we can’t quite see what we’re being encouraged towards. Jesus knew that the Sadducees couldn’t get their heads round it - they used human logic to prove it was impossible. You can’t apply human logic to life that’s lived without most of the human structures we’re used to.
We’re Easter people, called to live his resurrected life. We live it now by recognising Christ’s authority over all human structures and political groupings and we try to live and to encourage others to live in obedience to the precepts he taught us. We trust that God is gradually overcoming evil and that Christ is daily conquering our deathly tendencies. Through Christ’s grace we learn to bear the suffering that is part of our present existence, and we ask that he will give us grace to come safely through change and challenge. In the sacraments, we lean on his strength and receive his comfort. With Christ’s help, we are gradually healed and made whole.
Easter people know that Christ’s kingdom extends beyond this life. Christ sits in authority over his whole kingdom in our east window and in the Colburn hanging he waits to gather us to himself, freed at last from the sin that disfigures our earthly life. To be resurrected beyond this life is to know God as the God of the living and not of the dead, to be perfectly healed, to be redeemed and to understand why we have prayed ‘thine be the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.’