Sermons

Second Sunday in Advent
Sunday 4 December at 10am

Geoff Ellis
Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11,Mark 1:1-8

Good News!
Proclaim the Good News!
"Get the road ready for the Lord; make a straight path for him to travel!
Clear the way!

But just how straight is the road ahead, and which direction will our God take?

This raises some challenging questions to try and answer this Advent.
How will it happen?
Which way shall we go?
How shall we know the path to take?
How will we prepare a way for the Good News of Jesus to be heard and received?

I suggest we will begin to find answers in those closing words in today's extract from the introduction to St Mark's Gospel.
As John the Baptist prepares the way for Jesus, he announces to the people, and reminds us now, that whilst John will baptise with water, Jesus will baptise with the Holy Spirit.
"I baptise you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit" Mark 1:8

The one who comes - the Immanuel
- "God is with us" - Jesus the Messiah - will proclaim and initiate the coming of God's kingdom of love and justice.

It is about baptism, and turning from sin and receiving forgiveness,
but it is also about believing the Good News.
It is about accepting an invitation into a relationship with God where the power of his Holy Spirit can work in us
- and change us from the inside.

For God reveals his true nature in Jesus and that he wants to be intimately involved with us in choosing the right direction for our lives.

He wants to work through us to make the kingdom of love that Jesus lives and died for a reality for other people.

For who else today will comfort God's people?
"Comfort my people" says our God. "Comfort them!"
"Tell them they have suffered long enough and their sins are now forgiven"

But what a task!!!
What a task!

In our own context in Beeston Hill, one Sunday morning in July towards the end of worship a man unexpectedly walks in off the street looking for help. Later over a cup of tea this former resident of the now closed Shaftesbury House (which was just down the road from the church) tells me of a chance he has for a room for the night in Wakefield - if only he could get there. It's five years since we last saw him our Boy Brigade leader tells me. Then he had invited him in out of the cold of rainy evening, made him a cup of tea and helped him on his way.

Then a member of our church who is an asylum seeker tells me about needing funds to start studies at Leeds University.
In the last three weeks he and his whole family - three young children and their mother - have failed their last appeal for asylum and now face at any time deportation back to Angola.

Later that July afternoon we visit the leaders of the Congolese / Angolan - Lingala / French speaking church that meets in our building. We learn of two whole families from their church unexpectedly sent back to Angola. They tell of the children who only weeks earlier had been in Beeston schools continually questioning why they are now living in an Angolan hostel.

And what about the hundred or so kids that come into Beeston Hill's church building on a Tuesday night whether for the Kidz Klub or later on for Boys Brigade. And what about their families?
The hunger in their eyes is not just for material things but for a sense of needing to belong and to know they are loved and cared for. I listen to the Kidz Klub leaders drawn from many churches and hear the stories of the needs they see on their weekly rounds when they visit their 300 contacts.

"Comfort my people" says our God.
"Tell them they have suffered long enough and their sins are now forgiven"

But how do we do it by ourselves?

You'll have your own personal stories - and like me may feel overwhelmed at the magnitude of the task.

How do we cope when there are so many needs?

Yet there is so much love and power that God has shown us in Jesus.

In the great commission that God gives each of us through Jesus there is both a call to action and the means of achievement.
He calls us to go to all people.
To make disciples
To baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
To teach them everything (about the Good News) - and to know that Jesus - "will be with you always" to the very end.

Whether in Matthew's account (Matthew 28:18) or in Luke's, where the Holy Spirit will give us the power to be witnesses (Acts 1:8), or in John's account where Jesus breathes his Spirit into his disciples :
"Peace be with you, " Jesus says "as the Father sent me, so I send you" (John 20:21-22)
there is a common thread - - that God by his Spirit can give us together such a unity of purpose with Jesus that we can indeed achieve things that we would not otherwise have dreamed possible.

"I baptise you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit"

We can be the means by which the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled.

For through us:
"He can take care of his flock like a shepherd
he will gather the lambs together and carry them in his arms;
he will gently lead their mothers."
(Isaiah 40:11)
~~~~~~~~

The incarnation is about how God's Spirit is at work in Jesus.

It is also about how God's Spirit can work in us to change us into the people he would have us be.

The Spirit that descended on Jesus at his baptism, is the same Spirit that drove Jesus into the wilderness and was still with Jesus as he resisted all the temptations that this world can bring.

It is the same Spirit that God offers us through Jesus today.

It is God's way of keeping us on track and continually reminding us of what he has done for us in Jesus.

It is God's means of opening our eyes to the way ahead.

It is God's way of working through us to mark out that straight path for him to travel along

so that other people may know and follow Jesus

and so that people may discover for themselves the God who loves them and is with them

"Good News!
Proclaim the Good News!"

May God's Holy Spirit help us to come to know all that this Good News can mean for us this Advent.

Amen.!

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay