Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – James 5: 7–10; Matthew 11: 2–11
“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”
The other day, I tried to order one of those little plastic ice scrapers for the car from Amazon, partly so that I could be sure of getting here to take this service this morning! Given the pre-Christmas rush, I couldn’t get one to arrive before the middle of next week.
“How dare they”, I fumed inwardly to myself, “I’m an Amazon Prime member specifically so I can get deliveries of almost anything I need overnight. Just because they’re busy, and just because half the factories in China have been shut for most of this year, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have nearly anything I need within 24 hours!”
A snowy scene as I left St Peter’s, Poulshot, after preaching this sermon.
Patience is a virtue: but not one I have ever been much possessed of! The structure of modern society doesn’t help, with its promise that it can satisfy any of our wants almost instantaneously. Yet fulfilling most needs more significant than an ice-scraper or a case of wine demands patience, and can’t be done with a few clicks on a website.
By the time John the Baptist came along, some strands of Jewish opinion were waiting with impatient fervour for a Messiah, a religious-political leader who they believed would remove the Roman occupiers and usher in a new political order of justice and righteousness in a godly independent state.
Now, Matthew’s Gospel identified Jesus as the Messiah in its very first sentence, and it does so again in this morning’s Gospel reading. But that is something intended for those, like us, reading the story much later: in the action of the story, even Jesus’ closest followers have not worked out his true identity by this point. When, shortly afterwards, Peter does work out that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus orders the disciples “sternly” not to tell anyone. The time was not yet ripe.
The messages that pass between John and Jesus here are interesting in that light. Firstly, John the Baptist, in prison at the hands of Herod Antipas, asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” So, despite the fact nothing could possibly be better news for John in those terrible circumstances than to hear that Jesus, the man he baptised in the Jordan, is the Messiah, he is prepared to wait if the time is not yet ripe for God to send it.
Another interesting thing is that Jesus doesn’t simply say that He is the Messiah. Instead, he asks John’s messengers to relay news of his miracles and says “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” Jesus presents the evidence of what he is doing in the world, but respects John’s right to make up his own mind about his nature in good faith. Whether or not he accepts that Jesus is the Messiah, he will be blessed if he takes no offence Him.
There is a lot in this exchange that chimes with our experience of how God interacts with humanity in our world. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. Maybe it is possible, in the vastness of the universe, that some lengthy sequence of random events led to the existence not only of life, but intelligent, self-aware life, with a sense of morality.
Maybe: but do you remember that old canard that if you had enough monkeys hammering randomly at typewriters for long enough, that one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare? Well, the maths on that have been done repeatedly, and if you had enough monkeys to fill not just the world, but the entire observable universe, and let them type for the whole time until the protons that make up all matter began to decay, then the chance that one of them would produce Hamlet is so low that we don’t even have a name for the number. It’s not one in a billion or one in a trillion, but one in one followed by hundreds of thousands of noughts.
The journey from the Big Bang to a universe where complex multi-celled life exists is one that involves precise fine-tuning of the physical laws of the universe, such as the strength of gravity and the strong and weak forces, and then countless low probability reactions. That’s even before we get to the questions of why human beings, across all their cultural differences, have an instinctive sense of beauty and awe, and a sense of right and wrong.
But as was the case with John, it’s up to each of us to make up our own minds, about God and about the related questions of whether or not Jesus was the Messiah and was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Whether or not people believe in God or in Christ, we all are children of God, loved by God, sustained by Him, and worthy of respect and value. Blessed is he who takes no offence at the Saviour who heals and brings good news to the poor.
Even for those of us who accept Jesus as the Messiah and God incarnate, it can be hard to square that faith with a world that is full of suffering, and hate, and random events that are terribly cruel to frail creatures of flesh and blood like us. This is particularly the case at a moment like this, when it feels like much of our common life is at a low ebb. Gone is of optimism of the 1960s, or the post-Cold War Golden Age of the 1990s. The calibre of leadership in our country and in many others seems unusually poor, not only in politics – although certainly in that sphere – but also in business, our public services, the arts and culture, and popular entertainment. Nor is it exactly a vintage moment for Christian leadership and proclamation of the Gospel, not in this country or across this continent, anyway.
Like John, we need to wait patiently for God to move in God’s own good time. What makes that hard is that waiting for God to move doesn’t exempt us from working hard in the meantime. James, in our epistle, reminds us that the farmer needs to wait for the rains. At the same time, the crop doesn’t come unless the farmer plants and weeds and hoes as well as waits. The bounty of the summer won’t come if we haven’t done the necessary preparatory work during the winter.
The Church of England and the churches more generally are in danger of driving themselves to distraction because this is proving to be a barren season for the Christian faith in this country – a long, dry, winter of the soul, if you will. Yet each season has its tasks and its challenges. It may be that God will bless us with some great renewal of the Church in our own time – that usually comes when people are least expecting it. But at my ordination, I was charged by the bishop to unfold the Scriptures and preach the word in season and out of season. Our job is, like John’s, to be faithful and patient while waiting for God to move; to trust that when we meet in Christ’s name, and listen to God’s word, and celebrate the Eucharist as Christ commanded, and go out into the world to work for His kingdom, we are doing our jobs as Christian people, and that God sees this. We are preparing the way for God to move in His time, according to His will, in what is His world. God is working His purposes out, largely in ways that we cannot perceive.
“Be patient therefore, beloved…”, as we heard from James’ letter this morning, “Strengthen your hearts, for the coming for the Lord is near.” It is indeed near, just as it was while John waited in his prison cell. Strengthen your hearts in this unusually cold Advent, and prepare to celebrate the Lord’s coming into the world at that first Christmas, when nobody could have guessed that the baby born in the stable would be worshipped as God incarnate by billions of people a hundred generations hence.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen
