Sermon: 'Doing God' In Advent

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6

Second Sunday of Advent. Durham Cathedral.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Elizabeth II, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of Great Britain and Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary and John Williamson was Mayor of Durham, during the episcopacy of Maurice Harland and when John Wild was Dean of Durham, the word of God came to Billy Graham at Wembley Stadium.

That's roughly today's equivalent of how Luke began his gospel. If, like me, you remember the 1967 Billy Graham crusade you've got an idea of the gap in time between John's preaching and when Luke wrote. The point is not ‘exactly who was in power?' but "Pay attention. I'm not telling you a fairy story but about something that happened in recent history."

So if your mind wandered during the first verse of the gospel reading, you missed something vital: Luke says "Wake up, take note, this is living history I'm telling you about. A messenger has come with an urgent message from God."

Many sermons require you to think. Today I'm asking you to use your imagination because our readings use very visual imagery as we find out what is involved when God answers the demanding Collects we have prayed in Advent: for grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, and for God to raise up his power and come among us and succour us since we are grievously hindered by our sins in running the race set before us. This doesn't make for a comfortable Advent, but it's where our hope lies, and Advent is about hope.

Luke quotes Isaiah's vision of the coming salvation of God which describes the earthworks needed to build a road across a wilderness. Think of cutting through hills for a motorway or railway: it involves digging and shifting tons of rubble and in those days was done shovelful by shovelful. God's coming bring disruption to the way things have always been, the way the landscape lies.

Then there's Malachi with as equally dramatic ideas of what God's coming means. Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, is not the personal name of the author but simply means ‘messenger' or ‘angel', given that angels are essentially God's messengers. This message is a strong challenge to the corrupt religious leaders of the day, "suddenly God will come to his temple and you won't be able to bear it - the day of the Lord is a time of refining and purifying, of judgement."  "Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?" If you can stop humming Handel's music to yourself as you hear these words, you may catch their urgency.

Malachi has some startling visual images. God is in the precious metals business, refining and purifying gold and silver by putting through the fire to remove the muck and revealing the pure gold or silver. God is a consuming fire.

Then Malachi has another vivid image for God: God is like a washerwoman armed with fuller's soap. This is laundry soap, not the perfumed soft soap that is kind to our skins but the hard stuff that scrubs and scours clean; one commentary describes it as the sort of soap made on the American frontier in the nineteenth century which was known for its power not its subtlety. That's the soap God will use to purify people from the accumulated dirt of evil ways.

When Jesus was transfigured in front of three startled disciples, Mark has an interesting way of describing what happened. He says that Jesus' clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them. The disciples had a glimpse of the sheer purity which is the benchmark for all humans created in God's image. And Mark uses the same image of a washerwoman scrubbing laundry but says that no amount of scrubbing can achieve that purity; it is entirely of God. And that holiness is what God made us to share, but we have lost through human sin. That is God's gold standard.

If we love someone we want the best for them, we hold them to the best and help them achieve it. That is what these strong words of judgement and refining are about. God, who loves us profoundly and with depths we cannot begin to grasp, holds us to the best, challenges us to be what we were created to be: people made in the image of our holy God who embody that holiness in our lives.

Salvation is sheer gift from God, we cannot earn or achieve it ourselves. Elsewhere the bible describes the garments of salvation that God gives us to wear. Hence, incidentally, Jesus' parable of the guests thrown out of the wedding banquet because they were wearing the wrong clothes - we think it was callous and unfair because we don't understand that in Jesus' day the host gave all the guests new clothes as part of the wedding celebrations, so to refuse the gift and still expect admission was unthinkable. God provides us with garments of salvation. To wear clean clothes we need to be clean and in baptism we are washed - Paul reminds the Corinthians ‘you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified.' But when dirt accumulates afterwards, in other words when sin messes us up, we will find ourselves in need of God's further scrubbing and purifying - that's why we confess our sin week by week to deal with it as it occurs.

Advent is the time when we prepare ourselves for God's coming among us, remembering his coming as a baby in Bethlehem and anticipating his coming again in glory as judge. And Malachi insists that the way we live now, individually and as church and nation, will come under God's righteous judgement when he holds us to that gold standard or contrasts us with the pure holiness seen in the transfiguration. So, in Advent we have vivid images of fire, scrubbing and highway engineering to describe what it is like to prepare to experience the salvation of God. How different that is from what we settle for today. Alistair Campbell notoriously stopped Tony Blair from answering a question about religion by saying "We don't do God". On the ‘Sunday' programme a couple of weeks ago a journalist contrasted that with another political leader's faith which he described as "doing a bit of light Matins" or "light Book of Common Prayer". The implication was that it was innocuous - no in your face religion for that journalist. I'm not commenting on the politician, only the journalist's caricature of him, when I say that God wouldn't have any time for ‘light Matins' but would see it as perfumed soap that is soft on the skin: pleasant but no good to Malachi with his rough scouring soap. Advent tells us we have to ‘do God' in all aspects of our lives and we can expect God to probe and clean us up.

Malachi condemned the laxity and corruption of the leaders of his day. That was then, but this is now. So if Malachi was in this pulpit today what might he say to us? There are several things in the news which would be named for uncompromising judgement. To take but one example, that of financial institutions. It's easy, and probably right, to criticise some of their investment decisions that brought on the global crisis and the bonuses being paid to some executives. But God's messenger would ask not just about institutions but about how you and I use our money.  As we prepare for Christmas do we spend more on Christmas cards and gifts for our friends than on the poor and needy? If so, perhaps we need to ask how that relates to the bankers' bonuses. Are we just giving bonuses to people who already have so much? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it is bad to give gifts to our family and friends because friendship is a wonderful gift that we must celebrate and strengthen. But we can buy fairly traded, low carbon or hand made presents - that's why we were pleased to welcome local food producers to the cloisters yesterday as part of the Christmas Market - and you might add up what you spend on Christmas and make an appropriate donation to charities on top so that the people who have no one to give them a gift can receive something, perhaps the basic necessities of life that we take for granted and don't even think of as gift. That is a tiny part of what it means to prepare for God's coming among us.

Why do we do this? For at least two reasons. One is that we are created in the image of a holy God: the first hymn we sang referred to us as ‘Children of the Day'. That is who we are, we are made for holiness, it is our birthright and vocation and we sell ourselves short if we settle for anything less. The other is that, in Advent, we are preparing to meet a King who comes in a way the world does not expect. In Jesus Christ, God has shared our human nature and comes to us in the company of the poor and outcast. Remember Jesus' parable - as we do it to the least, most needy person, we do it to him. That is where we will find him. That profound fact might influence career decisions for some of you here, and should affect how all of us use our time and money.

I leave you with one final visual image:  each year at the Mencap Nativity Play in the Cathedral a mother walks down the aisle carrying her new born baby and places it in a manger in front of a group of vulnerable adults and children who have the lead roles in the play. Then she walks away and leaves her baby in their care. That is the risk God took in coming among us, entrusting himself to our care or neglect, entrusting himself as a baby born to poor people who were about to become political refugees. That is God's salvation made visible. God entrusts us with the poor of the world because he is among them. That is the God who has shared our life so that we can share his life, who will judge us, in part, on how we have "done God" in the midst of the turmoil, oppression and injustice of this world. (If you want to see God's love spelled out this dramatically, come on Saturday 19^th at 2.30.)

Advent is a call to wake up. In the fifty seventh year of the reign of Elizabeth the Second, when Gordon Brown is Prime Minister and Alan Johnson is Home Secretary and Dennis Southwell is Mayor of Durham; during the episcopacy of Tom Wright and when Michael Sadgrove is Dean of Durham, the word of God comes to us:

Hark! A herald voice is calling:

"Christ is nigh," it seems to say;

"Cast away the dreams of darkness,

O ye children of the day!"