Sunday 7th December 2014, Advent 2, evening
Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 11:2-11
by Revd Kate Tuckett
Advent is a time when we look for
pointers, people and things who will show us the way to Christ. This morning we
heard about John the Baptist, the not particularly attractive man, storming
around the place, speaking harsh and angry words of judgment, telling anyone
who would listen the need to repent and to be prepared for the coming of the
Lord, the Christ, the one who is mightier than he and who will baptise with the
Holy Spirit and with fire. He doesn’t display what we might describe as
pastoral skills. And yet tonight, here we meet him again, this time in prison,
his faith wavering, dejected, and sending his disciples off to ask Jesus if he
was indeed the Christ or if they should keep looking. And I want to suggest
that this experience of dejection, of questioning, is just as much a pointer to
Christ as his earlier rhetoric.
It’s so easy to relate to this story.
When all is going well and life is good, we may have no problem in seeing and
naming Christ in our lives. But when we find ourselves sitting in our own
prisons of darkness, disappointments, addictions, and personal losses we may
quickly begin to ask where is God.
John goes from being a prophet with
all the answers to a prisoner with a lot of questions. His may be the story of
faith. And Jesus’ response – so frustratingly enigmatic – may be the story of
where we meet God in our questions.
I suspect that most of us have
probably had a time in our lives where we feel that we no longer make sense to
ourselves, or things no longer make sense around us, or the God we thought we
believed in no longer makes sense to us. And we might ask, as John the Baptist
did, for some help, or some clarification, or some direction.
And although I am generalising
freely from my own experience, I suspect that almost always nothing happens. We
don’t get even an enigmatic response from Jesus. We just get a bit fat nothing.
No answering voice into our heads. No immediate word of comfort. The morning
you couldn’t face comes anyway. Night falls, and the darkness of your guilt or
sorrow or bereavement comes round again. The thing that is stressing you is
still stressing you. You still find it impossible to forgive. You still feel
lonely.
Well perhaps we’ve arrived at God,
or rather at God’s absence. We may ask with John the Baptist, are you the one
who is to come, or are we to wait for another? We here are faithful
churchgoers. And we may ask why we struggle to recognise the face of Jesus. It
may be because we have distorted images of God and of Jesus – as John had his
own expectations of who the Messiah is and who the Messiah should act. He’s
heard all about what Christ is doing, but where is the axe, the hellfire, the
winnowing fork? Where is the wrath in the midst of cleansing lepers, giving
sight to the blind, raising the dead? So some of the things that get in the way
of us recognising Jesus are confronting our own expectations.
But I think there’s something else
as well – that God’s love in Jesus can simply be very hard to know. God can
feel very absent. I never quite know whether to believe those who reflect that
Jesus is their friend, someone who they can feel with them through thick and
thin, someone they can feel walking alongside them. If they are telling the
truth, it is something I deeply envy, and if you have they relationship with
Jesus, then I envy you too.
I find it deeply comforting that
the experience of doubt, of absence, of wondering where and who God is has a
biblical precedent. We see it in our story of John the Baptist today. And
throughout scripture we see faith and absence being part of the same journey,
going hand in hand. Those of us who feel doubt now are not the first to face it.
In the stories of Abraham, the prophets and the Exodus we all see people
questioning where is God. In the disciples we see it in the way they start with
a simple faith which is led then by Jesus into confusion and crisis. From here
they are built into the first Christians seeking to live in a complex world
with a complex faith. Faith is not about black and white proof of God, it’s
about knowing God through our experience and of course our experience and our
faith can often find themselves in tensions.
Faith may be become less exciting,
more grey as it becomes more considered, but it can grow when it is linked to
our experience of doubt, absence, of loss. Even Jesus models this struggle in
his own life, where we see the cycle of incarnation, testing, crucifixion and of
resurrection. But if we can seek faith passionately, and with integrity, while
remaining honest, we are open to learning from God and from one another.
The poet R S Thomas notices the
paradox of absence and that it can effect a more powerful way of being present.
He says that:
‘it is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just gone…
what resource have I
other than the emptiness without him of my
whole being, a vacuum he may not abhor?’
Waiting on God, longing for a sign
of God’s presence, keeping going in our faith when there seems to be hardly a
sign of response -- these are things we probably all know about. But a sense of
God’s absence or questioning is a completely different thing from the sense
that there is no God. And this theme of waiting, of longing for God who is
always beyond our grasp, is at the heart of what we do at Advent.
Advent faith is grown-up faith. It
requires some humility. It requires us to step aside from the dazzles and
distractions and the glitter of our electric light world that leaves no room
for the longing and the waiting that is a part of the reality of being human.
It’s interesting that in the gospels Jesus often doesn’t seem to be that
interested in what people believe. Jesus’ frustrating answer to John the Baptist
says nothing about his person, beyond the effect of his work. This doesn’t mean
that our thinking doesn’t matter, but it does mean that we can’t presume that
we have all the answers about a God who is so beyond human imagining. If our
faith isn’t humble, we can end up doing far more harm than good.
John the Baptist in prison is a far
more human and attractive figure than the rather dogmatic figure we encounter
earlier the gospel. My experience is that those people who one senses are truly
holy, who one can see are close to God, are always humble and often quite unsure
of their faith, and those who one suspects are rather more distant, are usually
very sure of themselves.
Advent is all about looking for pointers
to God. And maybe the best language we can use about God is that of metaphors
and pointers and mystery. It allows for some humility in the face of the God
whose life extends beyond all human comprehension.
I find it very helpful to think of
Christian faith as a quest rather than a package of certainties. If we have
struggled with God, or lost sight and sound of where and who God is, perhaps
it’s worth stepping back from wanting too much certainty, and sense of
‘arrival’ and know that the searching, the longing, the waiting is what faith
is. The honesty of a humbler path means that we can always be open to
encountering God who, as we hear in Romans, calls and welcomes us, if we only
we can hear it. And we can step back from a less assertive position and turn
our longing gaze to a God who is probably gentler and more compassionate that
we first imagined.
And we may find that when we look
back at the times when we have longed and nothing has happened and we have
crashed into the wall of the absence of God, that help did arrive after all,
though not in the way we were expecting it to. It’s not that our stories are
rewritten; but we may begin to recognise that the times of longing are times
when we recognise something that was happening already.
Advent in church takes 3.5 weeks
before the joy of recognising Christ born. In our lives it can take weeks,
months, years and we never know for sure whether it’s going to come. But the
promise of this time is that God will reach into the very darkest places of our
lives and of our world. So may the God of hope fill us will all joy and with
peace.
Notes
This sermon uses material from:
Pritchard, J (2011), God Lost and Found, London: SPCK
Spufford, F. (2013), Unapologetic, London: Faber and Faber
