The Gray Monk

Evensong Advent 3 2005
Tewkesbury Abbey

+ May I speak and may you hear in the Name of Him who was born and who died for us, the same Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world.
Amen

Ps 68 verse 19 “God is for us the God of our Salvation: God is the Lord who can deliver from death.”

This week I seem to have spent a lot of time waiting. For a delivery to my home yesterday, for a train to get home from London on Friday night, for visitors, lecturers, students and management meetings of one kind or another. While doing so I have had ample opportunity to ponder on the phenomenon of what seems to be a growing form of cult worship centred on celebrities – usually dead ones! Consider the way in which John Lennon’s death has been marked during the last week, or the way the death of Princess Diana is marked by her devotees each year. What is going on? What is that these “followers” seek? What drives their devotion?

The prophet Malachi speaks to a people whose leaders had begun to deviate from the path God had directed. Certain practices had begun to fall by the wayside, religious observance had fallen to a mere tokenism among many and certainly the “tithes” due to the Levites and the temple were not being paid in full. The argument was “we have waited, we have prayed, yet the Lord has not come to help us.” An argument we hear today every time some natural disaster strikes somewhere in the world and causes devastation. “Ah ha!” Cry the Humanists and Atheists – “See; there is no God or he would have prevented/stopped it!”

Now, as then, there are none so blind as those who will not see! Malachi answered his generation with the charge –

“You have wearied the Lord with your words.”

Malachi was dealing with a generation that had become self satisfied, materialistic and somewhat detached from religion. In fact somewhat like our own generation, as the doubters cried “Where was God?” whenever anything threatened their cosy world, and some even tried to portray evildoers as “good in the eyes of the Lord”. In essence a generation who had lost the heart of their faith and were now adrift looking for something to believe in.

In the week just past I found myself pondering anew the fact that as the gospel message has become less and less heard in the streets and workplaces of our nation, our young people – and some older ones – have begun to search for a new spirituality. I listened in amazement at the scenes of what one can almost describe as religious worship at various shrines set up to commemorate John Lennon to mark the 25th anniversary of his death. Look too at the numbers of devotees of the Elvis Presley cult, some of whom actually do believe that he will return from the dead! Then there is also the annual outpouring of grief for Princess Diana, whose devotees seem to me to get more bitter and more strident as the years pass.

What do they seek? What do we seek as we mark the passing of this Advent season? Do we expect the Lord Jesus to return in some Apocalyptic form, at the head of a host of warrior angels? Or are we simply in the habit of marking the shopping days to Christmas and the fun of exchanging gifts, separating the kids as they squabble over the latest video game, without any real expectation that the march of the seasons will radically change our lives? If so, we need to urgently rethink our faith! As Malachi told his listeners -

“Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come.”

In this last week, those who have followed the lections set for daily worship, will have noticed that it was a little difficult to get away from John the Baptist at times. He seemed to be in every set of readings, even today, we are reminded of his mission with Asperges at 1100 and the passage in our first lesson that reminds us that God will send his messenger and that the Lord is Himself a messenger! Both seek to bring us to the fountain of spiritual refreshment so that we need no longer seek but may know the salvation and comfort that awaits all who turn to God for refreshment.

It struck me as I waited and listened or read yet another report on the way people were flocking to mark John Lennon’s death, that this is where our society has begun to suffer the same problem that Malachi’s generation knew. If the spiritual development of the nation is stunted, or in some way restricted, then soon enough, other forms of spiritual search begin to take precedence over the established religions. If the people who remain in the churches, synagogues or temple are not practicing what they preach, if they are not setting an example that inspires and makes others hungry to share in the banquet, they will go elsewhere. I put it to you, that, in our generation, the Baal totems and idols have been replaced by the John Lennon’s of pop fame or the George Bests of football, by home-made quasi-religious philosophies borrowing from Humanism, Jainism, Hindu-ism and even from 20th Century re-inventions of Druidism.

In this mishmash one does indeed find that there are those who defend the doers of evil by claiming that the evildoer is good in the eyes of the Lord and He is pleased with them. But, more importantly, what does it say to us? What does it say of us and of how we have managed our stewardship of the message of God in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ? Can we be called good stewards when we do nothing in the face of increasing secularisation? Can we be called good stewards when our schools ban any representation of our faith? Can we be good stewards when there are those who will be alone this Christmas and who face a year without the warmth of friendship or in hardship?

I confess that it seemed to me to be a little strange, to find that the lectionary links the reading from Malachi to a buoyant message of hope in Philippians, until I looked more closely. “The Lord is near” says Paul to his readers, and in Advent this is especially true.

Advent is the time of the messenger, the time in which we should, as Paul puts it, “present our requests to God.” The messengers have been, all the old testament prophets, the patriarchs and the Apostles. John the Baptist came as, in the words from St John’s gospel:

“a voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord,”

And we know that in John’s lifetime Our Lord Jesus did indeed follow and bring about the fulfilment of the prophecies. Now it is our turn to play the messenger and carry the message. As we wait his coming in Glory, as is promised and predicted; we must, in our turn, proclaim the good news and bring those who seek spiritual nourishment – even those who don’t know what it is that they seek – to the Lord.

If we are to call ourselves the people of God, then we must be the people of God. If we believe that our Lord Jesus is the Christ, then we must proclaim it and show it in our lives. We dare not fall into the same trap that seems to have ensnared Malachi’s generation and become smug in our faith, for then it is no faith. Impatience is a difficult thing to deal with, it becomes more so in a generation who live by sound bites and visual stimulation, we need to engage their hearts so that we can give them the direction they need in their spiritual search. If we are to be the effective messengers we should be, we must be fully prepared to embrace all that this demands of us. We need to be prepared to engage with those who seek; to find ways to show them how Jesus is the hope and the life that they seek. That Christianity is relevant to this world and to our society. We need to show them the way to find God in His Son and not through pop-stars and other celebrities.

Malachi charged his hearers with the reminder:

“Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?”

Advent is our time when we need to remind ourselves of this and to prepare, lest he come upon us unawares and we fail to recognise him. That would be frightening indeed. We need, instead, to make sure that we are prepared, that we do carry the message of the gospel faithfully, helping others to find the truth and the path. And we need to prepare ourselves, so that, when he appears we both recognise him and he us. Perhaps, even more importantly, we need to make sure that we are the effective messengers He asks us to be.

We prepare for his coming and live in hope that

“the peace of God, which passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

Amen.