RonBlog

Sunday 28th November, 2010 FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT

Sentence
Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths Isaiah 2:3

Collect
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which Your Son Jesus Christ came among us in great humility, that on the last day, when He shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal: through Him Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever Amen

Old Testament Lesson Isaiah 2: 1 – 5

The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Psalm 122

I was glad when they said to me: “Let us go to the house of the Lord”
And now our feet are standing: within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is built as a city: where the pilgrims gather in unity.
There the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord: as He commanded Israel, to give thanks to the Name of the Lord
There are set thrones of judgement: the thrones of the house of David.
O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: may those who love you prosper.
Peace be within your walls: and prosperity in your palaces.
For the sake of my kindred and companions: I will pray that peace be with you
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God: I will seek for your good.

Epistle Romans 13: 9 – 14

The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbour as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

GOSPEL Matthew 24: 36 – 44

Jesus said, “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

NOTES ON THE READINGS .........

Before we quite get there:
This Sunday marks the beginning of a new Church Year, and a new Advent. This Season is preparation for Christmas as Lent is for Easter, and all the readings will offer both a sense of urgency, as well as a clear sense of direction, not just for faith but for life.
The focus of that direction is the Lord of course, but in a rather wider sense than is generally perceived by most of us Christians. The pattern pointed to and lived out by Jesus – as Servant King – is the clear pattern of reconciliation, forgiveness and love for all humans. It needs to be seen that the Faith, Hebrew and Christian, is actually rooted firmly in the ‘now,’ and offers serious solutions to the ‘human dilemma’ of tensions and hatreds.
So, please see that this is not some sort of unique and different faith that excludes all others; rather it is something so effective and emphasised for the entire world to see. Whilst it could be said that much of the clarity of this Faith was perhaps not as clear and visible in Old Testament times as later, it is all there in seed and potential. Why has this not been underlined by Christians ... and all others interested in coping with the human dilemma? I have more than a sneaky suspicion that the answer to that lies in the very human dilemma that this Faith sets out to resolve! Evil is never so dangerous as when it poses as the opposite.

Old Testament
If you think that Isaiah was having himself on when he wrote all this, then I would ask you to think again. In fact I ask you to take a deep breath and ponder the Old Testament Faith most Christians tend to be cynical about. The reality is, and always has been, that if and when old Israel (or ‘new’ Church) took their faith seriously, then all that Isaiah looked for was in line for completion. I kid you not. (Paul may well have sounded off about the incapacity of the Mosaic Law to change anything much, but there is another clear and powerful side to Hebrew Faith.)
That Faith, as with Christianity, was designed to bring about reconciliation and peace. And it still is. Here and now. So the prophet was not ‘off with the fairies,’ but dealing with Biblical realities. From Genesis on, those ancient worthies perceived the point and purpose of the Faith in precisely this direction, and when we do, a whole new ball-game opens up in front of me, and you, and the entire world. Irrelevant this Faith IS NOT!

Psalm
As a choirboy back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and we sang this Psalm in Church, I found it difficult even to consider the possibility of being glad when they said to me ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ Actually, even at my call to the priesthood, my great fear was the expectation of sheer and utter boredom. I kid you not yet again! And it took quite a few years for me to get past such a view. I am not all that good at being religious, preferring to be fair dinkum and honest.
However, life is quite a learning curve, and it must be many decades now since my discovery that boredom was never part of the equation, and that the Faith continues to make the greatest sense and offers (to my knowledge) the only positive hope for peace and life in a world gone more than slightly mad. The reason for the author’s rejoicing was that remarkable rarity in early Biblical times, peace, justice (consider the outcome of ‘judgement, not in terms of punishment but in terms of balance of truth,) and responsibility. OK, some of those words are not there, but the realities are. Think about it.

Epistle
If you had not caught sight of it so far, now look again. OK, this is New Testament, but it all stands on the shoulders of the Old, and while you might see ‘commandments,’ do stop and realize this as ‘direction and purpose.’ Love is the fulfilling of the Law. And you cannot gainsay that, now can you?



GOSPEL
Even this Gospel has its word to say about the likely outcome of human refusal to act with justice and fairness. Here is no end of the world scenario, but the result of human greed, lack of integrity and self-obsession. Pardon the shot, but are you aware that those who talk about ‘rapture’ in response to this passage have their facts rather upside down. Those taken are not the blessed but their opposites. The Flood swept the naughty ones away, it was the Ark that saved the righteous from raging torrents. There is a great deal to be commented on here, but unless I stop now it may well go on for many paragraphs.
Obviously, the main impact of Jesus’ words was to warn His hearers that such times are critical and demand action and decision. Any time of crisis provides that challenge, and the real threat to the Church – of any age let alone our own! – is only our complacency and apathy. There is nothing wrong with the Faith; our problem is with our understanding and commitment to it.

NOTES FOR A SERMON

You may well have heard the story before: of a Primary School RI Class of a number of years ago. The subject was the Ten Commandments and the Year 7 kids were not impressed with any idea of rules and regulations. Mind you, they were mad keen on sports. Football, netball, basketball, cricket.
So I wondered out aloud with them how it would be to play tennis on a football ground, using no rules whatever, no umpires, no limits. They looked at me quite oddly as if I had gone mad, signing to each other that they were sure I was! So I asked them the reason for their reactions. ‘How could anyone have a game out of that?’ they asked. ‘Nothing would be fair, and no one could keep a score or anything.’ So as we pondered the stupid situation, they began to see that no rules, no boundaries, no umpires meant not only no fairness, but also no shape to any game. All would be chaos. All would be chaos. It was a steep learning curve for those kids, who had decided that no rules was the way to go until they began to ponder the almost immediate outcome of such a course of action.

It may be some surprise to you, but in all my study of faith and faiths, I have yet to find any religion that developed along the lines that Judaism did. Certainly other cultures had their laws and even the Ten Commandments had precedent in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. But law and religion tended to be rather separate issues, and justice and truth and integrity were certainly not normally part of any religious scene. Except in Israel. In fact, the Hebrew faith developed some remarkably just and fair ways of operating. Those who are still very critical of religious superstition may have a case in rather early Old Testament views, but the passage of time brought some great maturity. Even the early minor prophets had some powerful things to say about unfairness and rapacity, about abuse of wealth and privilege, and about the even-then increasing gap between rich and poor. Read Amos, for instance, and take on board his very caustic response to the profound unfairnesses of his own day – and his clear recognition that such actions and attitudes as reflected by people around him not only displeased God, but were very likely (and did!) bring about the collapse of the nation from within.
I have noted elsewhere, often enough, that we who grew up with the Biblical repetition of ‘righteousness’ had it drummed into us that this meant keeping oneself ‘pure.’ That inverted view of the meaning of the word led to all manner of priggishness – little removed from Pharisaism. That was a singularly unpretty path to travel, and far from the Biblical reality. Righteousness = not priggishness but justice.  justice. In Biblical terms, justice has nothing to do with retribution and punishment, but rather taking all the related issues into account in understanding people’s reasons for acting in certain ways. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The outcome of travelling that road is far more likely to produce acceptance and understanding; and it reduces any resort to violence as almost impossible.

Now that great antagonist of the Mosaic Law, the Apostle Paul, clearly understood that, as he wrote that passage to the Romans. Paul, also, would have been very aware of the general human fear of chaos, brought very near if ever the fearful tribes from the far north east ever invaded; Genghis Khan and his ilk were a huge threat to anyone’s security. And in this passage Paul saw the value of caring and loving and truth and integrity. Love, he said, is the fulfilling of the Law.

Time and again, when people in Church have felt led to pray for peace, I have asked them to see that there can never be peace until their is first justice. There can never be reconciliation until there is justice. And there can never be reconciliation until there is forgiveness. And none of those directions can be followed unless and until I am so affected by such needs as to bend all my will and effort to head in such a way. It calls for utter honesty, it calls for utter commitment, and it calls for following my Lord and yours wherever that may take us.

And that is where the Advent bit shows up loud and clear. Advent is the annual reminder of the Lord Who comes to us: has come in the Incarnation; does come to us in the vicissitudes of ordinary life – if we are aware of His presence in crises. And will come again as guarantor of all that is true and worthy and genuine.

In other words, Advent is our reminder to keep our eyes open to His visitation, almost always in the guise of someone else, unremarkable but valuable.