Articles

Some years ago, a celebrity was asked this fatuous question by a TV interviewer:

“Have you always been a comedian?”

To which he made the instant and withering reply:

“No. I used to be a baby.”

Today’s Gospel has, at its heart, the truth that we are celebrating today. The truth that God in Jesus Christ used to be a baby. The Council of Nicaea expressed it in these words, 1700 years ago this year:

“For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven;

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary...”

And that involved being a baby.

Charles Wesley, whose Christmas hymns are well-loved, tried many times to express this idea in words and even he had to acknowledge their inadequacy:

“Our God contracted to a span,

Incomprehensibly made man.”

Incomprehensibly. We are here to celebrate a wonderful mystery and whatever words and metaphors we use, they won’t be up to the job. But here goes…

It is often said of boy babies that “He’s the image of his father” and that is profoundly true of the baby whose birth we celebrate today, God in Jesus Christ visible, touchable, audible and therefore imaginable. 

We all make images of God, even those of us who never pick up a chisel or a paintbrush. We make them in our heads. They can be unhelpful, even toxic. They might make us think of God as a demanding disciplinarian who must be obeyed, an almighty version of Mr Clark, the PE teacher who, sixty years ago, frequently said “Warnes, you’re not trying hard enough.” Authoritarian images of God can drive people to acts of cruelty and violence because they believe that God’s approval must be earned by their actions and efforts. 

God desires to be in a loving relationship with all of us. God desires us to be in loving relationships one with another. God well understands our human tendency to foul up and the ways in which we separate ourselves from the love of God and separate ourselves from other people. Christmas is all about how God seeks to end those separations. 

At the heart of the Christmas Gospel is a baby and that flesh-and-blood image of God is challenging because it is so very different from many man-made images of God. We might prefer a God who would instantly solve our problems and make everything right, Superman on steroids. Instead, we get a baby, obscurely born, temporarily homeless and soon to become a refugee, seeking asylum in Egypt. The Word made flesh and yet, for a while, unable to utter a word. The baby grows up to be a very challenging adult, bearing love and forgiveness into the darkest places, and inviting us to love Him and one another. The Christmas good news is that God desires us so profoundly as to come among us, lovingly, approachably, vulnerably; comes among us to share our experiences of joy and pain, celebration and bereavement, even death. 

At Christmas, we begin to see the true image of God’s nature, an image to replace those confused and dangerous human fantasies about what God might be like. As we follow the Church year in the coming months, we will see that image develop and enlarge. And every development will be evidence of God’s nature and God’s love. And the whole story is a reminder that even in our darkest times, and Christmas is not an easy or an unclouded time for many, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. 

I mentioned Mr Clark a few moments ago. It was another of my teachers who pointed me in the direction of another understanding of Christmas which you might find helpful.                  Mr Greeves was an inspirational teacher of English Literature and directed school plays. It was from him that I learned that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright. There must have been times when Shakespeare the writer was watching a rehearsal of one of his plays and things weren’t going well. Easy to imagine him jumping on the stage and saying to whichever colleague was making a hash of Hamlet or King Lear

“No, this is what I intended. This is how you can and should act.” And then giving the performance for which he was hoping. That’s a helpful word picture of another important part of what God is doing by coming among us in a human life, coming among us as the loving creator who says.

“…this is what I intended. This is how you humans can be.”

One of the many treasures that Christians share with our Jewish brothers and sisters is the belief that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. That was true of the shepherds is today’s Gospel, though they were poor, marginalized and widely regarded as disreputable. They took up the angel’s suggestion and went to Bethlehem. They saw the baby lying in a manger and they recognised the truth of what the angels had told them. We are called to live lives of recognition, to see the perfect image and likeness of God in Jesus Christ and, to see the image and likeness of God in one another, despite all our failings and shortcomings. 

A moving example of that springs to mind. Hannah Routledge was the wife of a sheep farmer in the South Tyne valley, a few miles north of Alston. Back in the 1940s there was a prisoner-of-war camp close to the farm, full of German officers. Once the war was over, they were allowed out for walks and local people were permitted to have contact with them. One day a prisoner of war knocked on the farmhouse door and asked for a drink of water. When she told me about this, decades later, Hannah said that she wasn’t sure how to respond. He was a stranger and had so recently been an enemy. She asked her husband what she should do. “It’s your kitchen” he said. “It’s up to you.” Hannah reflected briefly and then had a moment of recognition. She said to herself : “He’s some mother’s son” and invited him in for tea and home bakes.

“He’s some mother’s son.”

Or, to put it another way,

“He’s made in the image and likeness of God.”

And also

“He used to be a baby”. 

As did Jesus Christ who came among us to bridge the man-made gulf of sinfulness between humanity and God.

Who came among us to show us what God is like.

Who came among us to show us how to live.

Who came among us to invite our loving response to God.

Who came among us to inspire our loving response to one another. 

Now that’s cause for the kind of celebration the shepherds had, as they went home

“…glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”

  The Rehearsal 

One of the kings has stage fright,

An angel has broken her wing,

And Mary has just dropped the baby,

Thank heavens it’s not the real thing!

Two of the shepherds are fighting,

The innkeeper’s never on cue,

And Joseph keeps disappearing,

They say he’s gone to the loo!

Tomorrow it should be better

Or it could be worse than today!

Still everyone’s going to love it

The Nursery Nativity Play!

                                  Anonymous

What if it hadn’t been a rehearsal but a real life situation and that Joseph had just got up and left when Mary told him she was pregnant?

“What do you mean? ‘I’m pregnant?’ We’re not married yet, come on tell me who have you been sleeping with? You ..... !!!!”

Such might have been the reaction of a fiancé to his partner telling him that she is carrying another man’s child. I suppose Joseph must have felt somewhat similar when Mary told him that she was expecting. Joseph must have felt cuckolded as Shakespeare would say. St. Matthew hints as much:

“Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”     Matthew 1:19

Joseph in actuality must have been devastated, nay ‘gob-smacked’ at Mary’s announcement and the fanciful tale of how she became pregnant. Angels, the Holy Spirit, messages from God, it all sounded a bit too fanciful to be true. Did Mary take him to be a fool? And why should she wish to make him look stupid when she was the one at fault? He hadn’t been unfaithful? It was no wonder that Joseph sought to release Mary from the betrothal promises. Let alone her seeming lack of chastity she had also broken the Sixth Commandment and committed adultery and as such she should have been cast out of Hebrew society.

Under Hebrew Law only freeborn males were deemed to be members of God’s chosen people. Women, children, foreigners, slaves and such like were outside the covenant. All freeborn Hebrew men had to be assured of one thing; that any sons born to them were of their flesh and blood because they were charged with building up the number of the chosen people. Mary’s illegitimate pregnancy flew in the face of convention and Joseph had to divorce her because her child could never be a member of the chosen race.

When you consider the laws and attitudes of the time the fact that Joseph eventually accepted Mary and raised Jesus as his own son is quite remarkable. Joseph was brave as was Mary. To accept that the angel’s message was true and to agree to have an illegitimate child took guts. Because life as an outcast would have been very unpleasant. Both Joseph and Mary took a big risk with God. They chanced everything by saying ‘Yes’.

But, by saying ‘Yes’ both Mary and Joseph show how selfless they actually were. Whatever they may have wanted personally was less important to each of them to what God wanted of them.

Try to imagine if Mary had said ‘No’ or if Joseph had rejected her? As the opening poem says; ‘it could have been worse than today’. It certainly would have been worse for humanity if they had said ‘No’. Two very ordinary human beings, however, said ‘Yes’ to God and changed the world. 

Sometimes we may be called to say ‘Yes’ to God as well. But saying ‘Yes’ can be difficult and scary. It took me years of running away from my vocation to the priesthood before I could say ‘Yes’ but once said I have never regretted it despite the pain it has sometimes caused me. It is always easier to say ‘No’ but just sometimes God just has to have his way.

Remember with Christmas day soon to be upon us that if Joseph or Mary had said ‘No’ we might not be getting ready to celebrate to birth of Christ nor would we know his Good News of love and acceptance. This Christmas give thanks to the parents of Jesus and try to follow their example in the coming months. Say ‘yes’ to God and see where it takes you!

7 Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. ⁸You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. ⁹Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! ¹⁰As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.        James 5:7-10

Gardeners, like farmers, plant seeds and bulbs in the hope that they will grow and explode into their destiny. Many of you may have bowls of ‘Ecudare hyacinths’ ready to burst into flower sometime soon. Bulbs that you planted in the hope of scent and blooms for Christmas. Bulbs in which you have placed your hope that they will grow into something you expect. Well, some of them might fulfil your expectations but others may not. They may disappoint you or perhaps surprise you. They may not flower at all or they may not be the colour you thought they were. They might be an unexpected double or more amazingly a throwback, looking more like a bluebell than hyacinth. We may think we know what those bulbs will do BUT we can’t always guarantee that they will do as it says on the packet!

Waiting for something is not always easy. Some of us might get impatient that things are not happening fast enough. Others, a bit like myself, quite enjoy the anticipation of waiting for something but are often disappointed by the eventual outcome. I used to be like this but have trained myself over the years to enjoy the anticipation and to be ‘surprised’ by the longed for event. That way one is not left disappointed but able to find enjoyment or satisfaction as the event unfolds. 

Advent is a time of anticipation. A time of waiting and pondering on the call of the prophets like John-the-Baptist or Isaiah, who point the way to something miraculous and almost beyond our comprehension; the birth of the Christ. 

The Hebrew people of the days before Christ, longed for his birth and their liberation from slavery and hardship, oppression and guilt. Jesus was born into that race and followed its teachings but from the point of view of the one who came to save his people. Many ignored or rejected him and still look for his coming among us today. Others believed what he said and we are their inheritors - the people of the way. Those who have seen the Christ light shining in the darkness. Others still have yet to see or hear anything about the Messiah, promised or among us, even if they celebrate Christmas they do not know who the Christ in Christmas is. 

The duty of those of us who call ourselves Christian is to talk about the Christ, to say why we follow him and what worship brings to our lives. We don’t need to stand on soap boxes and shout; or take to wearing camel hair and ragged clothes like John-the-Baptist. We simply need to live joyfully as redeemed individuals grateful for what Christ has given us and continually brings to our lives. Like the farmer or the gardener we need to sow the seeds that can germinate in others and surprise them when they flower or fruit. We do this by simply living our lives inspired by the ways of Christ. Following his commands to love one another and to treat others as we would wish to be treated. A good example is often worth a 1000 words and as St.James tells us don’t grumble at each other but be patient with each others short-comings; your own as well as theirs! ‘Freely love and pardon’. 

“Long ago, prophets knew

Christ would come, born a Jew.

Come to make all things new;

Bear his People s burden,

Freely love and pardon.”

In the sermon last week, we were reminded that in the early Christian centuries, Advent had four themes – Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. Nowadays other themes are emphasised, including Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. So today, the Second Sunday in Advent, can be thought of as about Judgement but also as about Peace. Our readings reflect those themes – Isaiah speaks of judgement and of the peaceable kingdom it will make possible. In our Gospel, John the Baptist comes across as a very judgemental person. He doesn’t mince his words. The Pharisees and Sadducees who have come to be baptized by him, presumably because they feel the need to repent, are addressed as: 

 “You brood of vipers!” 

So what’s the link between Justice and Peace? 

On Friday morning, the Psalm at Morning Prayer using the 2006 version was Psalm 94, which begins with a passionate plea for justice. 

O Lord God of vengeance,
O God of vengeance, show yourself.
Rise up, O Judge of the world;
give the arrogant their just deserts.
How long shall the wicked, O Lord,
how long shall the wicked triumph?

Victims of crime have a natural longing to see justice done and the pain of those to whom justice has been denied or for whom justice has been delayed is very real – think, for instance, about the Hillsborough families whose yearning for justice was once again in the news last week. For them, peace of mind will only come if justice is done. 

That said, I think that there’s a danger that when we think about divine judgement, we project onto God our human inclination to think of judgement only or mainly in terms of punishment and revenge. Today’s Gospel challenges us to think about the nature of judgement, about the divine judgement we shall all face, and about what sorts of judgement are compatible with Christian discipleship. 

“You brood of vipers!” 

On the face of it, John the Baptist’s words to the Pharisees and Sadducees sound like the kind of abuse that is all too common on social media. Dig a little deeper into what it would have meant to that group of religious leaders, and the shock value increases. John’s hearers would have been familiar with the way in which, when farmers burned back the stubble after harvesting their crops, snakes would emerge from hiding, escaping the flames. John invokes this in the final metaphor in today’s reading:

“…he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

The point that John is making so forcefully and emphatically is that his hearers will be judged not on whether they have been baptized, but on whether that has changed their behaviour. 

“Bear fruit…” he tells them  “…in keeping with repentance.”

When John said. “…he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

The “he” to whom he is referring is Jesus. Yet, as next Sunday’s Gospel will remind us, John the Baptist came to question whether Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus was hanging out with sinners, offering them love, acceptance and forgiveness. Remember Matthew the tax collector, the woman taken in adultery and the penitent thief hanging next to him on a cross. 

Any doctrine of divine judgement whose purpose is to frighten people into good behaviour by threatening them with punishment needs to be challenged because that was not what Jesus taught and not how he lived. He was sometimes every bit as trenchant in his criticism of powerful people as John the Baptist, but he didn’t confront individuals by saying sternly: “If you don’t mend your ways, you will end up in Hell”. Instead, he behaved to them in a way that, while challenging, was also loving, accepting and forgiving. It was that experience of the love and the grace of God which transformed the lives of some of the people whom he encountered.  That’s both a guide to us about the kind of judgement we should, as Christians, refrain from and the kind of divine judgement we will eventually face. 

I think the example of Jesus makes clear that Christians should refrain from the kind of judgement that has become known as cancel culture, the contemporary tendency to demonise people whose views on a given issue are seen as offensive. The Pharisees, those stern defenders of purity laws, had a very similar mentality and they sought to cancel Jesus. 

One problem with cancel culture is that it values ideological purity at the expense of grace and forgiveness. Another problem is that it assumes that the cancelled person is entirely vicious. This runs counter to the Christian insight that we are all flawed and in need of forgiveness, whatever our values or our social and political beliefs.

The divine judgement on which we reflect in Advent isn’t about condemnation. At the end of today’s Old Testament reading, Isaiah writes concerning the Messiah that

“all nations shall inquire of him” 

That’s very striking. Not “All nations will obey him”, nor “all nations will worship him” but “All nations will inquire of him” – the Messiah Jesus as the person in whom answers can be found. 

God’s answers to our questions about what divine judgement is like are to be found in those stories of forgiveness in the Gospels. God seeks lovingly to transform us. That won’t be a painless or an easy process but it offers the possibility of that true and lasting peace which can come, as Isaiah tell us, if we are full of the knowledge of the Lord because we have encountered God face to face, accepted God’s judgement, love and forgiveness and been reconciled with those whom we have wronged. Now that’s something to anticipate in this season of anticipation.    

Advent 1 - Year A – GS 2025    The Four Last Things

Advent is a time of loitering – well that’s what the Rector told me a few weeks ago when I asked his thoughts about Advent. A time of loitering. But loitering is hanging about with no real purpose or aim – unless that is, it’s loitering with intent. And loitering with intent used to be a criminal offence connected with vagrancy.

I’m sure Dean wasn’t encouraging either aimlessness or criminality during Advent. But he certainly got me thinking. 

We begin Advent, and the first day of the Church’s New Year, with Isaiah’s great vision—all nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, swords hammered into ploughshares, spears reshaped into pruning hooks. It’s a beautiful picture, a picture of peace, justice and hope. Beautiful and at the same time it hurts when we realise hundreds and hundreds of years later his vision is still not a reality, and we humans have yet to respond to the call to live in the light of the Lord. 

St Paul tells the Roman Christians that they know the time and it’s the moment for them to wake from sleep. Wake up. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Get up, change the way you live, the day is near.

What day? 

The day when the Son of Man returns – and it’s near. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us that the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah: people eating, drinking, marrying—life going on as usual—until suddenly everything changes. Be awake, be ready for the Son of Man is coming when you least expect him.

During the early Christian centuries this was the focus of Christians and the Church, and its particular focus during Advent. They believed firmly that the coming of Christ in glory was near and could happen at any time and they had to prepare for it. The time when all will be made new, a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem. When all shall gather at the mountain of the Lord.

The Advent of the early Christians had four themes: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. Not cheerful, certainly not the stuff of mincemeat pies and mulled wine and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. They are known as the Four Last Things and contemplating them was central to their Christian tradition. 

I’ve rarely contemplated the Four Last Things and never preached about them, but I’m determined not to loiter. 

We could fall into the trap of thinking about these in terms that have been generally received wisdom for a very long time – in the sentimentality of the secular world and the complacency of those Christians who might describe themselves as ‘saved’, but these ideas really don’t have their origin in the Hebrew and New Testament Scriptures. 

Death – come on we don’t want to think of death as we decorate our trees and roast our turkeys. But wait. What does the New Testament say about death? St Paul is absolutely clear: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4) 

Walk in newness of life. Paul reminds us that we have died to sin - and St Peter that having died to sin we live to righteousness. New life has begun!

Judgement 

Jesus teaching on judgement was clear and specific. The sheep will be separated from the goats. The judgement will be made on how they treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. This judgement is about justice. What have they done to bring justice to those trampled down by inequality, cruelty, intolerance? Jesus tells us that it is not for us to judge others, but to follow him in bringing justice and if we face persecution or ridicule for doing so, we, like the poor, will be blessed. Judgement is about righteousness, not the kind of self-righteousness Burns describes in Holy Willie’s Prayer – or the Pharisee who proudly follows law and ritual to the letter - but the simple righteousness that’s about putting wrongs right. 

The sheep, who were righteous in that sense went to eternal life. The goats who did not, were sent to eternal punishment. 

And yet… How often do we read in the New Testament that not one will be lost. God’s mercy, God’s unconditional love, God’s forgiveness seeks out the one lost sheep.

We equate eternal punishment with hell. There are different words and concepts in the Scriptures that are translated as ‘hell’ – and certainly one of them is the pit of fire outside Jerusalem. I reckon the life of medieval priests was made easy by the murals in even the smallest country churches of people suffering in the eternal punishments of hell. But is that really what hell is? Traditional theology has developed that understanding – but many theologians question it. Think about the way we talk of hell – we use it as an every-day description of people, places and events. Princes Street yesterday was hellish, my journey from Leamington Spa on Friday was pure hell. What of the hell so many face because of war? The hell created for minorities by the way they are treated by those who see them as the’ other’, the ‘enemy’?  The rise of populists who encourage us to think that way terrifies me – they are creating hell. I’ve been reading an Advent book by Paul Dominiak who writes that both C S Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre, in different ways, picture hell as a spiritual condition that misshapes human relationships and closes them off from one another and from God.

This alienation is disrupted by Jesus – he breaks through bringing hope and love. He descended into hell, and on the third day he rose again. Dominiak writes: At heart, the hell that should trouble Christians was the one that humanity created, in all its manifold and insidious cultural, social, political and economic forms. Christ came to empty those hells by the saving act of his life, death and resurrection.

We generally regard heaven as the opposite of hell and yet: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…

Heaven, in the Scriptures, is not a place of eternal reward for the faithful – it’s part of creation and was regarded as being above the earth – the place where God dwells without losing contact with the earth. Earth thy footstool and heaven thy throne. Earth was down here and heaven just above us. Of course we now know that is not the case, but that doesn’t give us permission to separate these two key parts of creation. Over and over again in the New Testament the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven mean the same thing and we pray that God’s will be done and kingdom come on earth as in heaven. They are inseparable. We who are one with Christ through the power of the Spirit and through the waters of baptism live in both. We long for the time when heaven and earth are completely indistinguishable. How then can we stand by and watch as the earth is being destroyed. How can Christian extremists declare that it’s ok because it will hasten the time of the second coming. The way we treat our planet is the greatest immorality and evil of our time. 

I love the words from the 17^th century priest and poet Richard Crawshaw: 

Heaven in earth and God in man. 

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth

Heaven is a present reality in which we share and which we will experience in all its fullness at the second coming of Christ. As we loiter, preparing for that, is what Advent is all about. 

So to loiter or not to loiter? I come down on the side of loiter – and loiter with intent. Please, not criminal, but with the intent of contemplating the Four Last Things – death, judgement, hell and heaven – and think what it means to live now in the Kingdom of God. Isaiah’s image is beautiful, but also practical. Hammering a sword into a ploughshare is not an abstract idea. It’s metalwork. It’s muscle. It’s craft. It takes time, sweat, skill.

Sunday 1, Candle 1. What does it mean for us to have died to sin and live to righteousness?

Sunday 2, Candle 2. Recognising that God’s judgement brings justice and restoration, is there anything we can do living as the Spirit filled people of God, to bring that justice and restoration to our broken world?

Sunday 3, Candle 3. Hell, not a place, but of disrupted and distorted relationships; separation from other people and from God. How can we who live in unity with the Risen Christ give hope and bring reconciliation to those in despair?

Sunday 4, Candle 4. Heaven, not separate from earth but created alongside and groaning together in the birth pangs of becoming the New Creation. What part can we play in stopping the terrible destruction of earth and work to reverse the damage, so that God’s kingdom, to which we belong, can indeed be seen and enjoyed on earth as in heaven.

And at Christmas as we light the white candle, the candle that signifies the light of Christ, the light that is not overcome by darkness, may we be ready to walk in that light, the light of the Lord. Christ is coming. Let us be found ready—not frightened or frantic, but awake, hopeful, and beautifully alive.