Sermons
Sunday 8th December 2013, Advent 2, evening
1 Kings 18:17-39; John 1:19-28
by Revd Kate Tuckett
“Among you stands one you do not know.”
Some years ago I read a story that may or may not be true about the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. The story went that a rumour had circulated among the black population of South Africa that Nelson Mandela had promised that one day every household would have a washing machine. And after the elections, people lined up outside electrical goods shops ready to receive their washing machines.
President Obama paid tribute to Nelson Mandela last week, saying that ‘He no longer belongs to us, he belongs to the ages.’ It is right that over the past days he has been venerated as an icon of extraordinary goodness, an exemplar of courage, justice, wisdom, patience, strength, love, hope, forgiveness, grit. His legacy is monumental. But in remembering this legacy, we need to remember that he was a human being, a person like you or me with the same choices, the same weaknesses, the same potential strengths. He was not a superhero. He could not perform magic. Whether the story was true or not, of course the poor South African households didn’t receive their washing machines, and 20 million South African people continue to live on or below the poverty line. What he did do was show a different way of living.
In Advent, as we wait for the birth of Christ, the coming of hope, the quality of our waiting might be determined by asking ourselves what we wait for. Chris spoke this morning of the strangeness and unfamiliarity and offensiveness of John the Baptist and the strange and unfamiliar window he presents onto God and onto ourselves. And at the centre of John the Baptist’s ministry is the announcement that Christ’s coming is near – nearer than we think. The people who were listening to John were longing for political freedom, and their hopes rested on the promised Messiah. And it’s probably safe to assume that they were waiting for a strong and powerful person, a political firebrand, a charismatic leader, someone shipped in from outside their own context. And I suspect that most of us looking for a Messiah wouldn’t be looking for someone from our own communities. It’s much easier to believe in someone when all we see are their strengths, the careful spin they present to the world. It’s perhaps rather harder when you see them fall over in the playground, or dumped by their boyfriend, or when they lose their job -- or their temper, or cry, or mis-express themselves and say what they didn’t mean, or make mistakes, or just get it wrong. Once we’ve seen someone in all their humanity, with all the vulnerability that that brings, it’s much harder to believe in them as a superhero.
‘Among you stands one who you do not know’, says John the Baptist to the downtrodden people. What you are hoping for, waiting for, expecting, anticipating – it’s already here. But you can’t see it. The person they were hoping for was on their doorstep. Christ was living among them yet they didn’t recognise him.
Perhaps for us, too, the hope that we place in Jesus can prevent us from noticing him. Maybe God is with us and we haven’t noticed. Maybe our ideas of what a superhero looks like can stop us seeing God from who and what God truly is.
The episode with Elijah and the priests of Baal that we’ve heard from the Old Testament is traditionally it’s read as Elijah’s success in demonstrating the power of God. And yet it is problematic to say the least. Baal was a pagan God. Elijah taunts his priests making sacrifices to their gods. He calls on God for a sign – which does indeed come in a flash of flame which consumes the sacrifice Elijah has made, the altar upon which it stood, and the priests surrounding it. The lectionary conveniently stops before Elijah seizes all of Baal’s prophets and kills them in the river.
There is Advent imagery that is beautiful and poetic and full of hope and longing, but there is also Advent imagery that is violent and frightening. And perhaps we need to remind ourselves that God’s revelation of who God truly was, in all the fragility of a human baby, was not what the ancient writers were expecting. And this Messiah who would go on to declare the leper clean, refuse to condemn the woman caught in adultery, cause a scandal by eating with those condemned as sinners would put an end to all triumphalism, all images of machismo. Because we know where this all led. Not a dance round a bonfire, or a vengeful god demanding sacrifice. But to unthinkable pain, to a cross on a rubbish dump, to matted blood, to a crown of thorns. And then some strange events two days later, and a breakfast of bread and fish on the beach.
The story of Elijah goes on the famous scene straight afterwards, where Elijah will wait on the mountainside, and discover that God is in fact not in the fire, or in the earthquake or in the wind, but in the sound of sheer silence. Elijah has perhaps been looking for the wrong kind of God in the wrong kind of place.
It is human instinct to look for Messiahs who are powerful kinds of people and removed from our realities. But the story of Christ’s birth is anything but that. It invites us into the wilderness. The wilderness is a long way from the temple where God was believed to be at work. In every way it’s a place on the outside. Of course Christ will be born on the outside – in Bethlehem, far from Jerusalem and the temple power. And that will be a story of burly shepherds, farm animals and a single mother. But that’s a story for another time, and for now, we stay in the Judean wilderness.
There’s a lot of wilderness in the Bible and there’s a lot now. It takes someone unusual to go there deliberately as John the Baptist did. It’s a place of separation from the comforting safety of community, be that city, nation, family, or church. There are plenty of paths into it – judgment of others, suffering so private and deep that others can’t comprehend; fear; failure; guilt and shame; poverty; crippling illness; loss of freedom; loneliness. We’ve all been in our own wildernesses in some form or other. And yet it seems to be in the wilderness, in the darkness, that we are given a strange knowledge that God will come and are invited to work with God to create a path, to create space where God can be known.
I’ve just been on retreat, and I went to retreat house on a hillside in North Wales. On the first afternoon I went for a walk, and I climbed the hill behind the house. There was a major dual carriageway close by and my first thought was how much that spoilt the otherwise very lovely and peaceful view. But during my time there, the road became an important metaphor for me. Every day I went for a walk, always walking in the other direction from the road, finding my way along sheep tracks and little paths through woodland, and across fields where I wasn’t always quite sure where I was going. While I was there I read a lovely book by the spiritual writer Margaret Silf which contained the following: ‘The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating; the paths to it are not found but made, and the making of those pathways changes both the maker and the destination.’ We are part of the story of God. We are called to make space, to make the paths for God to be known, we are called into work of co-creation with God. And those paths may be a track across the fields, where we don’t know quite where we’re going, as much as a major dual carriageway to God.
When we look at Jesus, at God incarnate, our understanding of a Messiah is redefined. The story of Jesus’ birth is not about being rescued from the world but about being taken into its fragile places -- into the wilderness. We like to think of God as being able to fix the world like magic. But it might take rather more faith to believe that God relies on humanity to do God’s work, to bring love and peace, to restore justice.
And so when we think of how God comes to us, we might look at the bits of us that want the cavalry galloping to our rescue, a celestial and cosmic sort of presidential figure. I know there are plenty of bits of me that want God to be like that. In Nelson Mandela we did see a life that was deeply Christ-like. But I also believe that Jesus comes in so many ways, through so many people, wherever love and kindness are shown, wherever forgiveness is offered, wherever justice is worked for, and however small and clumsy these acts, there is God. ‘Among you stands one you do not know.’ Jesus is coming and there is hope for the lost and frightened and marginalised. Make straight the path that he may be known.
Notes
This sermon uses material from the following resources:
Dawn, M. (2007), Beginnings and Endings, Oxford: Bible Reading
Dennis, T. (2012), God in Our Midst, London: SPCK, p7
Radcliffe, T. (2006), Just One Year, London: DLT, p24
Silf, M. (2002), Wayfaring: A Gospel Journey into Life, London: Doubleday
