Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent
Second Sunday of Advent
Sermon by Edward Probert
Malachi 3.1-4
Luke 3.1-6
Nine days ago, and a couple of days before we actually entered Advent, as the congregation filed out of the cathedral at the end of our first Darkness to Light service, a friendly gentleman wished me a ‘Happy Christmas’: an early reminder just how jumbled up the Church’s seasons have become in 21st century Britain. This week my diary reinforces that feeling, as it includes 2 Christmas carol services, a Christmas lunch, a Christmas tea, 2 rounds of Christmas drinks, and a session singing carols in a local pub. The theory of Advent builds on a sense of waiting, mental and spiritual preparation for what is yet to come; but the practical realities have fast-forwarded us, past the preparation, and direct to the celebrations.
But just waking up on any recent morning tells us that we are deep in the season of darkness; that currently light is artificial, a human creation. Left to our own devices at this time of year, life would be cold, dark, damp, bleak. It’s physically dark out there, unwelcoming; this weekend it’s stormy, dangerous. I don’t say this to introduce a Scrooge-like quality to your season, but to remind us all that what we do in here, and in the privacy of our homes and the social environments of our work and play, is but a part of a much bigger, and more mixed, picture. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy; but equally, all Christmas and no Advent makes Christians unrealistic, unbalanced.
Not very far from the land where our readings and songs and nativities are focussing our attention through December, the last few days are playing out some very real hopes and fears of many years. In a matter of a few days the brutal and divisive dictatorship of Bashar al Assad seems to have collapsed, and the complex patchwork of Syrian society has woken up to complete uncertainty, to a hopeful but possibly dangerous future. More than 50 years of waiting; now a sudden time of reckoning. Hopes and fears at their most extreme.
It was the evangelist Mark who began his good news about Jesus ‘the son of God’ with a quotation from the ancient prophet Malachi, rooting his divine mission in the appearance of John the Baptist. Mark grasped the drama of both the prophecy and of the Baptist; but he wasn’t a great scholar, and he messed up his quotation. Luke tidied that up when he used the same quotation, much as he took care to locate the time and the circumstances in which these events took place: who was Emperor, who was governor, who were the local kinglets and high priests. He wanted his readers to know that God’s events were happening in time and place, among real people, and weren’t just a power play enacted by God. This isn’t simply some divine drama; this is working to the transformation of the whole order of things. That’s worth remembering when we attend a charming nativity, or see a crib scene, or receive a Christmas card. We are moving from darkness to light; but the journey includes the wilderness and may take much longer than the 75 minutes of our Advent processions.
In tidying up Mark’s quotation from the Hebrew scriptures, Luke cuts out the bit of Malachi chapter 3 which his predecessor had used, and which we heard this morning, and simply gives us the passage from Isaiah into which Mark had carelessly slipped. Luke is tidier and more correct; but he loses the suddenness and excitement in Mark. The more measured and more careful Luke has steered his readers away from the stark question posed by Malachi: ‘Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?’
That’s a question for us Christians in Advent. And it’s a question Malachi directs at the rulers and the priests in particular.
‘For he is like a refiner’s fire’.
How do we measure up?