In the same boat

There were, you recall two closely linked annunciations in Luke’s Gospel : The first to Zechariah who was alone in the Temple sanctuary when an angel appearing to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense said: “Do not be afraid Zechariah, for your prayer has been answered. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you will name him John.” And the second annunciation was the Angel Gabriel to Mary. “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favour with God. And  now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus.”

There is it feels to me something about shared experience be it very good or very difficult that can bond people; being cast off in the same boat brings people together in a special way. I am minded of a small group of my colleagues who when we were training were unexpectedly uprooted from the course of our choice and obliged mid-stream to join a different one with a different curriculum  which was much less suited to us and further more was geographically hard  for us to attend. I am not one for joining old school clubs and in fact rather avoid them, nonetheless I remain regularly in touch with some of this particular small cohort. 

In the  verse immediately after the Magnificat which we read this evening Luke 1:56 simply says “And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home.” 

So, I fell to wondering why that was? Why do you stay three months with someone who was  but a distant relation? It was not that Mary stayed to help at John’s birth - Luke makes sure that she has returned home before that event which he tells as a separate story in the following paragraph: Luke 1:57 “Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth.” 

We have to recognise that God’s hand was in both births, both announcements, both angel visits. 

We see this from the first when Elizabeth exclaims “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” They immediately know that they have a shared extraordinary experience. (Remember without any of the advantages of our rapid communications over long distances.) 

I think I want to write a play (maybe for television) which looks at the three months, brings Elizabeth and Mary together on stage, across the threshold (which we are not told about)  and which follows them exploring together their amazement, fear, excitement, all the feelings of knowing they are each carrying a child with God’s blessing and intentions.

Now there is a boat to be cast adrift in.

Amen

Refiner's Fire

Malachi is the last book of our Old Testament and he is writing to the settled jewish community in Jerusalem in 433 BC some 90 years after the return of the exiles. The Temple has been rebuilt, completed in 516 and is once again splendid and a focus for the presence of God, but while the outside looks as it should, inside the spiritual life of the community is far from well. It does sometimes (or maybe often happen) that following enthusiastic completion of a project that attention dwindles and it seems that the ardour of the people has faded. Among the record of misdeeds that Malachi rebukes Israel for in the first two chapters of his book are many to be laid at the feet of the priests. Most prominently the sacrifices being offered in the Temple were inadequate - instead of bringing the very best, the choicest offerings the priests brought imperfect animals including those which were sick, lame or blind for example. Malachi is so affronted by this that he thunders that it would be better to shut the doors of the temple altogether and offer nothing at all than these polluted offerings. He continues his list by condemning them for not faithfully teaching the law and thereby causing many to stumble. The people of Israel (as a consequence of the poor example set by the priests) have gone on to leave their wives and marry foreigners, something that was specifically prohibited during the period of exile. Malach says the people have wearied God by exalting evil over good.

Now, says Malachi, “The Lord will come suddenly to his Temple.” This is what the people have been waiting for - that God will return. But asks Malachi in view of all these bad things which have come to pass who will be able to withstand his reappearing?  The priests in particular will need to be careful; they will be refined like gold and silver. In Thursday’s podcast I quoted from an 1856 book of Metallurgy:

“In the process by which silver is separated from such impurities as iron, copper or tin, the alloy is mixed with lead, placed in a small crucible made of bone ash and then raised to a full red heat in a furnace. When the alloy is melted, air is blown upon it, this causes the lead and other metals to oxidise. At this stage the refiner watches the operation with the greatest earnestness until the metal has the appearance of a highly polished mirror reflecting every object around it. Even the refinner as he looks upon it may see himself as in a looking glass.”

This is written so it seems to me in alost biblical language and would not be comfortable reading for the sons of Levi : except of course that in the end they shall be so purified that even God may see himself in them

Amen

The prophet of hope

Over these last three Sundays of Advent we have been walking our way through the book of Isaiah who is the prophet who is always full of hope. Now, what happened when the exiles returned to Jerusalem turned out to be less smooth, less accomplishable than they had expected. Arriving from Babylon where they had been used to magnificence and sophistication, they found desolation and ruin. It would take over twenty years for even the foundations of the second Temple to be laid. The exiles were trying to fulfill the prophecy they had been given:

“They shall build up the ancient ruins 
They shall raise up the former devastations 
They shall repair the ruined cities
The devastations of many generations.”

But they found themselves living “in between times”, between the promise and the fulfillment - when wold the Lord return to the Temple? With the difficulties they face the people needed strength in adversity and to give them that, Isaiah reminds them who God is:

"For I the Lord love justice
I hate robbery and wrongdoing
And I will make an everlasting covenant … 
Their descendants shall be known among the nations 
And their offspring among the peoples. "

Which would have reminded them directly of God’s covenant with Abraham. 

Jesus himself used the words from Isaiah which we heard introducing our reading when he read in the synagogue:

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me
Because the Lord has anointed me 
To bring good news to the oppressed
To bind up the broken hearted "

And Luke writing  in his Gospel concludes this section of it with Jesus’ own words;

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In so many ways we too are in the “in between times.” We feel this particularly now in the middle of a pandemic, a plague among us, with the promise and now clear signs of a vaccine before us, a light of hope, yet like the Israelites on their return  have devastation before us - loss of loved ones, loss of economic prosperity and I think especially for the young loss of opportunity. Estimates by the pundits of a return to “normal” (if that is what we want) vary but are always counted in numbers of years. 

The disciples expected Jesus to return quickly and it is a characteristic of the Gospel of John an early part of which we heard this morning, that we hear most clearly of the four the realization that we are living in the in between times waiting for Jesus to come again. 

And so how to cope with the messiness of a destroyed Jerusalem? How to cope with the uncertain time to wait for the parousia? And how to cope with the uncertainties of our present epidemic.?The answer was  identified by Isaiah, the prophet of hope, who began  by reminding us who God is - for God is faithful, immutable and steadfast and we need always to hold onto that both in good times and bad.

Comfort Food

 It turns out that we have been turning to the food of our childhood during lockdown with Cadbury and Mr.Kipling in the fore. We know the words “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God” from the first tenor recitative of Handel’s Messiah. For me this is one of those wonderful openings which sets off a world of sound and of anticipation for both the oratorio and of memories of listening in the past, live in Bath Abbey, and frequently on a frosty Sunday afternoon in late Advent when I am feverishly writing Christmas cards. Although this is chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah everything suggests that this is the beginning of another author usually called second Isaiah. He is writing to those in exile now -his readers had been taken into captivity in Babylon or maybe it had been their parents some forty years before and they remembered sadly and deeply the Jerusalem of the past.  Passages from Lamentations point to the feelings of their hearts:

“How deserted lies the city once so full of people

Bitterly she sleeps at night, tears are on her cheeks 

After affliction and hard labour, Judah has gone into exile 

The roads to Zion mourn

All the gateways are desolate her priests groan 

Her enemies looked at her and not laughed at her destruction” 

And into this come the first words of the prophet: “Comfort ye comfort ye my people.” Now our exiles had not turned to mini chocolate rolls or cupcakes but to the stories of the past. It is in their exile that the laws of Moses are codified, refined, respected and that the identity of Israel, (the people) is delineated. [Many years later - well very very many I observed that the Italians of New Jersey would become more Italian to my eyes than the natives of the country itself.]  And so a voice cries out:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”

The wilderness or desert recalls instantly the wanderings of the Israelites, which for forty years were very far from straight - neither physically or spiritually - our tenro thought has other ideas:

“Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. “

This new exodus, foretold and which will come to pass will be direct and assured for as we have heard “The mouth of the Lord has spoken.” And there follows in our reading a pastoral completely comforting section:

“He will feed his flock like shepherds, he will gather his lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep. 

But we know this is about more than comfort (neither Cadbury or Mr Kipling) it is also more than pastoral for it is another foretelling: the promise that we are in this advent season, in our time, waiting to celebrate, the coming of the great shepherd of the sheep.

Amen 

Advent Sunday 2020

 Advent Sunday 2020

https://open.spotify.com/track/497DNjrgkIdoFVKrLtN9Ys

I am cheating for this piece of music was not written for Advent Sunday, neither is it a cantata but a motet almost certainly written for a funeral and moreover is Bach’s only motet without a Biblical text. It is a setting of a poem which expresses the yearning for the end. 

“Come Jesus come, my body is weary, my strength is fading  more and more, I long for your peace. The bitter path becomes too difficult for me.” and on this Advent Sunday we are surely yearning for an end to our own exile. 

I am writing this at the beginning of week two of lockdown two and as I read the words of second Isaiah writing to the desperate by the rivers of Babylon the poignancy of our present situation helps us feel their longing. 

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” or maybe even better the King James version “ that thou wouldst rend the heavens and that thou wouldst come down”

This is  a prayer for help, but a prayer for and from people on the edge who are weary of waiting. 

I suppose that the first ever known exile was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden beautifully expressed by John Milton in Paradise Lost:

………        the hastening angel caught

Our lingering parents and to the eastern gate

Led them direct and down the cliff as fast

To the subjected plain; then disappeared 

They looking back, all the eastern side beheld 

Of Paradise so late their happy seat.

Exile has been practised ever since ,expulsion was a common punishment for ancient tribes, it is very prevalent in Shakespeare’s plots, there have been penal colonies established in many places including Australia and Siberia  there are still governments in exile and today we are painfully aware of the people of Syria camping by the million on the borders and only yesterday in Nagorno-Karabakh the Armenians were packing up their homes on lorries to leave while the Azerbaijanis were preparing to come home. 

So there are plenty of people praying to come home: 

“Do not remember iniquity forever - now consider we are all your people.”

Isaiah remains a prophet of hope and he sees the coming of God as sudden, explosive and immediately effective. “As when fire kindles brushwood” and extraordinarily powerful “the mountains might flow down at your presence.” 

The homeland we are missing for most of us is not far away but is none the less as palpably distant as the Temple and mount Zion for the Israelites. This morning as we begin this season of Advent, we are conscious of being exiled from our own free use of time: unable to meet family and friends, browse a shop in the village, go to the library, cinema, theatre or sit in a tea shop with an unexpectedly met friend. So it is with the longing of Bach’s motet that we pray for imminent release.

Amen   

God is with us now

The book of Ezekiel opens with a vision and a call fully reminiscent of the vision and call of Isaiah. Ezekiel was stunned off his feet, for in the confusion of storm fire and noise he had glimpsed something that looked like the glory of God coming towards him. Now there is a gap of more than a century between these two prophets yet the extraordinary thing is not this passage of time but the passage of place. Ezekiel, you see, is writing from the city of Nippur, south of Babylon and is among the exiles living along a tributary of the Euphrates. 

In the ancient world God is invariably associated with place - consider Solomon’s Temple with its outside courtyard for sacrifices, an inner vestibule or hallway leading finally to the holy of holies housing the Ark of the Covenant and there it is all built on the hill of mount Zion. God was there, up high, inaccessible. In Isaiah’s vision we remember that the lower hem only of God’s robe filled the whole Temple. People might almost unimaginably hope to partially approach him like Moses and the burning bush but this would be granted to very few, like the Devir to the priests alone and then only one day a year. 

Ezekiel and the exiles are far away, they have long since stopped blaming the Babylonians for their troub;les but are filled with the sense of their own sin,  their own distance from their God, their Temple destroyed as a punishment for all they had done wrong.  

So, Ezekiel seeing God coming towards them, there by the rivers of Babylon is completely outside and beyond all expectation. Separated from their Temple they are separated from their God yet he is coming to them. By chapter 34 of Ezekiel’s prophecies this has become very personal: “For thus says the Lord God I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of thick clouds and darkness.”

We think mostly of sheep in flocks, but I have rescued single solitary sheep, snipping the wool of one entangled in barbed wire, gathering a lamb with its surprisingly oily fleece, (which looks so fluffy from a distance) they do really get lost and need seeking out and I hear Ezekiel telling me that the Lord will gather all the sheep “gathering them from the countries” and bringing them back to their own land to be fed on rich teaching and to lie down peaceably and in safety. 

Make no doubt about it this is a big change - God is among us now, no longer far away in Jerusalem on mount Zion but here with all of us, looking down the ravines, up at the crags, in the marshes looking across the whole world. We no longer need a Temple or dare I say for all that I love them a church building. We can carry God with us wherever we are for God is mobile and God will never be far away again.

Amen

When the Lord comes?

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-end 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Today is the second Sunday before Advent but as last week was Remembrance Sunday this is the first look we take at the Advent theme. The question is “What do we think happens or will happen when the LORD comes?” 

Zephaniah as befits an Old Testament prophet is unambiguous :

“That will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom a day of clouds and thick darkness. “

Now, right now mid lockdown this may be the last thing we want to hear; it contrasts greatly with our usual more excited approach to this time of year. Zephaniah was writing between 609 and 604 BC, he was a contemporary of Jeremiah so writing only a little  before the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. He foresees the coming of the Babylonians who will drag people from houses, streets, sewers and tombs where they have been hiding or as he puts it “at that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps.” Why though does Zephaniah write like this? He is it seems to me the sixth century BC equivalent of the graphic images which for a while at least appeared on cigarette packets, some of you may remember them the horrible pictures of diseased lungs :” REFORM,” says Zephaniah “or these bad things will happen to you.” 

Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians has five chapters and the final verse of each and every chapter ends with a reference to the second coming of Christ. For example, chapter one ends describing “Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath.” and at the end of this chapter five which we have heard some of this morning it says” May God himself, the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” 

And so here is the difference, there is still the unmistakable imagery of impending tribulations “When they say there is peace and security then sudden destruction will come upon them as labour pains come upon a pregnant woman and there will be no escape” and again just as in the Old Testament there is a warning of darkness to come. But this time the cigarette packet has two pictures, the inescapable diseased ling of sin, the warning is still there, but also a brighter clear picture of healed tissues brought about by Jesus Christ, who died for us that we might be clean. 

When Advent really comes we will give more emphasis to our waiting and this is what we are waiting for, not the day of darkness  but the day of light and so we wait not with the foreboding of the old prophets but with the anticipation of the new.

Amen.