Sermons

Second Sunday in Advent
Sunday 10 December at 8am and 6.30pm

Simon Cowling
Readings: Malachi 3. 1-4; Luke 3. 1-6

I learnt a few days ago that the first Christmas Carol Service at Leeds Parish Church this year took place before Advent Sunday - in fact it took place before their Advent Carol Service. I understand the reasons for this, and it is good that so many organisations look to the Church at this time of year for support with their Christmas celebrations. But there is a large part of me that regrets the extent to which, even in the Church, the primary focus of the first part of Advent has been lost. Up until the week or so before Christmas, when the focus of our readings finally shifts to the incarnation, Advent has traditionally been the time when the Church encourages her faithful to reflect on the so-called last things: on the coming of Christ in glory, on our mortality, on God's judgement - and on what lies beyond that judgement.

So you'll forgive me if I spend some time today reflecting on the Gospel, for thoughts of God's judgement and John the Baptist go naturally together. John strides into history through the Gospels with a confident proclamation that his task is to turn the people of Israel away from their sinful behaviour and to make them ready for the salvation of God of which the prophet Isaiah spoke, words which John quotes to startling effect. The significance of John's ministry is amply attested in all four Gospels, and even if his precise relationship to the ministry of Jesus is not entirely clear we can be certain that John reflected and responded to a national mood in Israel that God was about to act decisively in some way.

We know, as John's original disciples did not, that it was to be in and through Jesus that God's decisive action was to be shown. The ministry of the austere and troubling John, baptising in the river Jordan, bringing to life the words of a long dead prophet, culminates in his pointing God's people towards one who is greater than he is. So we have an awareness of someone waiting in the wings, as yet unknown to the crowds in Palestine, yet known to us as God's anointed, the fulfilment of Isaiah's confident expectations.; and we have the challenge, two thousand years later, of recognising that the repentance to which John called his disciples is one to which we are called as well.

The Talmud, that treasure-chest of rabbinical writing, tells the story of Honi the Circle-Drawer who lived a hundred years or so before Jesus. One day Honi saw an old man planting a carob tree and asked him how long it would take for the tree to bear fruit. 'Seventy years' the old man replied. 'But you are already old!', exclaimed Honi, 'you will never live that long'. 'I know', replied the old man, 'but my parents and grandparents planted fruit trees for me, so I am planting fruit trees for my children and grandchildren.'
The old man had recognised a truth that can so easily elude us: human beings are connected, joined to each other. Planting a carob tree that he would never see bear fruit was that old man's way of sustaining and affirming his relationship with those who would come after. And they would be connected with him in a way that they, too, would come to recognise. But we are not only connected with those who came before us and who will come after. We are connected, too, with people who are alive now - those whom we know and those whom we do not know. By sustaining and affirming out relatedness to each other across and between generations we are, at the same time, enabled to repent of all that prevents our relationships being wholesome and life-giving. And through our repentance we are then able to draw nearer to the God who is at the heart of all our relationships with each other, who loves us, and who calls us to a relationship with him through Jesus Christ, his Son and our Lord. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay