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Sermon: The Second Sunday in Advent (B) - 4th December 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 and 10 am
Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
I always find December a confusing time of year. Everything seems to change for December. Many of the things I usually do stops in December. Things I never do at any other time of year, like writing many cards to many people is one job that has to be done at the very beginning of December. Like no other time of year I rely on my diary for my day to day survival. I would never get through without it.
And then there is the shopping. I don’t normally shop very much but December seems to be all about shopping. And so I wonder what is it all about, this strange December behaviour. After all, we should be preparing for Christmas, that is, the birth of Christ but that seems to be the very last thing on anyone’s mind. Its lucky if it gets on the cover of our Christmas cards.
So that’s why one person’s protest of some years ago stood out in my memory. He stood in the Pitt St shopping arcade with a sign which simply said, “Free hugs.” When I first saw this man’s protest my initial reaction was to smile, and I could see that just about everyone did the same. My next reaction was to wonder whether his behaviour conformed with child protection rules. Then I wondered whether anyone would take him up on his offer.
They did. Men and women. Loads of them, often wordlessly. One group of ladies demanded he stop in the street, each hugged him flamboyantly, and all had their photo taken with him. Underneath the surface amusement I permitted myself to wonder if this was not some kind of prophetic sign; that in the middle of driven consumerism, in the madness of this shopping season, one young man was declaring that the human condition will not be advanced ultimately by buying things, but by community, and vulnerable giving.
This event contrasted sharply with a decision of one of my friends not to send Christmas cards one year. Now I know that sending cards is not that important an activity. But there is something about sending a greeting and being a friend which declares community and shares humanity. What was my friend saying about how he valued his friends. Did he really mean to communicate this lack of care.
Just recently another boat load of refugees perished at sea in their desperate attempt to come to Australia. If you’ve read the chilling SIEV X story you will know something of their desperation to leave their homes of turmoil, to board leaky boats and then take this dangerous voyage in a desperate hope of finding freedom and safety for themselves and their children. Yet like the SIEV X, this boat too failed in its attempt and many were drowned.
Yet even in this country of prosperity, there are still far too many who suffer, too many who are homeless, too many who are under-employed.
As we look at our world it is not a difficult to find evidence of dislocation and suffering, either in the faces of people in the street suffering in the church, communities mourning their lost ones, nations dying because of the vile action of their leaders with thousands afflicted by cholera, peoples living in the middle of war and with its aftermath, tribes revisiting genocide on each other.
It may sound odd to say that I was thinking about all that as I watched that man give out his hugs.
When Isaiah the prophet says “Comfort, O comfort my people… speak tenderly to Jerusalem” he was declaring to a shattered people that God cared enough about them to stoop down and touch them as tenderly as a shepherd with a new-born lamb. Of course it went far beyond giving them a hug, but it starts there. These words were probably spoken to the exiles from Jerusalem, who for seventy years had formed a refugee community in Babylon. These are the children of the children of the first exiles, who kept an increasingly faint hope alive that they were still the people of God, and that they would one day make a journey to a place they knew only by faith.
Now, says God to his prophet, speak tenderly. Speak comfort. Convince this people in their heart and soul that they will be made whole again. This is the kind of comfort which overturns the world order, changes relationships between peoples and nations, restores power to a deposed authority, rebuilds a shattered land crushed to pieces by invaders. This is God restoring whole lives. Comfort is spoken here by the God whose voice withers all in its path. Just as spring flowers in the Middle East shrivel and die at the breath of the sirocco, the hot wind, so people will wither when God speaks. True comfort is only offered by the God whose power shatters mountains and reshapes the earth’s crust.
They need all of this comfort. They had brought calamity on themselves. They had worshipped Gods other than their own, they had trusted in political and military alliances rather than in the God who gave them the land in the first place. Isaiah regards this as a punishment, as a jail term, and the only one who can deliver from it is the one who imposed it in the first place. True comfort comes from the one who can overturn everything. The church will speak comfort when it speaks the words of God. That will mean recognizing where people have brought judgment upon themselves. At times we must have courage to say that there is good and bad, right and wrong – that people do evil things. God is in the public domain here, and we must speak to people who know their need of forgiveness, and tell them that it is a God of forgiveness whom we worship.
And to those whose calamity is beyond their capacity to bring it on themselves, those whose life has struck down, we must also speak comfort. We shout, we cry, about the God who made the earth and tenderly carries his sheep, who burns up the land and whispers to the heart. We lift up our voices, in a world of judgment and calamity, and say that the birth of a child, to which we look at this time, can make right all that is wrong and make clean all that is dirty. Comfort to the condemned, comfort to the stricken down. There are no finer words, and all Christians, like the prophet three thousand years ago, should be humbled and exhilarated that we are called to speak them.
When we do, we prepare the way for God to comfort and to restore. When we do, we make straight the way for God to overturn events and peoples too great for us to contemplate. We speak comfort in tiny ways – by the greeting on a heartfelt card, by a generous gesture in a crowd of consumers, by a hug, free and for nothing, by knowing our neighbours and helping them in their distress. We declare comfort by refusing to rest until Zimbabwe, and the Congo, and Afghanistan, and wherever else, are places where lions and lambs lie down together.
This is Advent stuff, and we are Advent people when we cry for Christ to come and bring forgiveness and healing. We are Advent people when we allow the tenderest touch –of bread and wine – to restore our souls. We are Advent people when we offer that restoration to someone near and someone far. And that, it seems to me, is the beginning of Good News. It is what we do. It is who we are.
POST COMMUNION:
Father in heaven,
who sent your Son to redeem the world
and will send him again to be our judge:
give us grace so to imitate him
in the humility and purity of his first coming
that, when he comes again,
we may be ready to greet him
with joyful love and firm faith;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
AMEN