Later in this service we will be receiving Colin into membership of this congregation so it seems a good moment to think about what membership of this church, what membership of the Church of Christ, is all about and there can be few better times to do so than this second Sunday of Advent. This Sunday is often the time when we remember John the Baptist, the precursor or herald of the ministry of Jesus.
John announced the necessity of repentance, he practised baptism, he promised the coming of one greater than himself, who would thresh the harvest and burn the chaff with eternal fire. John was a fiery and energetic preacher of religious renewal and preparation for judgement.
There are a lot of different ways to think about what the Church is, what it means to belong to it, what it is meant to do, and as we think together over the coming months about the future shape of our life together I have no doubt that we will want to explore many of them. In what has been an eventful and fascinating week for me not the least interesting meeting was that which began to plan our elders’ away day in March.
Today I want to think about what it might mean to see the Church as continuing the ministry of John the Baptist, the ministry that prepares for the coming of Christ. This may seem strange at first sight, after all Christ has come, we are preparing, during advent, to remember the coming of Christ, no longer anticipating the revelation of an as yet unknown saviour,
I would like us, though, to retain a sense of anticipation, not just the slightly awkward anticipation of a remembering, but a real anticipation of something astonishing and wonderful, something impossible to comprehend until it happens, something that transforms life even more completely than the first falling in love with the person who is to be one’s partner in life.
I would like us to hear and feel the gospel, the good news about Jesus, as not only the good news about what he has been and what he has done for us but also about what he will be and what he will do.
We began to talk about this idea at Bible study on Monday and our discussion has given me plenty of food for thought. I knew I was unable to get across, as we talked about Adam, Eve, the apple and the expulsion from Eden, why I felt so strongly that we were all necessarily in the wrong with respect to God. Why, like John the Baptist, I want to say that we should all repent.
Thinking about it afterwards and reading again about John’s ministry, its end in his death, its relationship to the ministry of Jesus, I had an inkling of why. The world we live in cannot, in my view, be the world as God intends it to be and we cannot be the people God means us to be.
If God loves all of us perfectly, as I believe he does, the suffering and pain of so many must mean that something has gone amiss in creation. In the midst of all that is so bad it is impossible for us to be perfectly good and perfectly happy, as we were made, I think, to be.
We cannot simply jump clear of it all, of the misery, the injustice, the cruelty, starvation, loneliness and death that surround us. We can’t be clean in a world so dirty. No good intention, no purity of heart, no effort at holiness can free us from our entanglement with so much that is wrong, The Church cannot claim to follow Jesus’ way of love, service, humility and dedication if it tries to cut itself off and to be an isolated island of godliness surrounded by outer darkness. This would not be the kind of love of neighbour to which we are summoned.
Our only hope, it seems to me, is in the promise we are given, that in God’s good time Christ will come again, will come again in glory. will make all things right. This coming again is hard to picture, impossible to imagine, will take some form we do not know. Perhaps it is a metaphor for some series of events over long periods, perhaps it indicates some sudden and dramatic reversal that leads to the promised reign of peace. I don’t know. What I do know is that, for me, the present, with all its anguish, all its guilt, is made bearable by this vision of a future that is quite different, transformed by love.
In that sense to be a member of the Church is to undertake to represent that future to the present, to strive to be a sign of God’s kingdom, to speak for God’s love and God’s promise.
That is the sense in which remembering John, the voice crying in the wilderness, is a perfect preparation for us to welcome and embrace a new member of our community.
Together we Christians are given the task of calling out, in the wilderness of our fallen world:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'”
in the name of the father, the name of the son, the name of the Spirit Holy
amen.
Nick's Sermons 