Sermon 13th January 2013

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, preaches based on the reading from Luke 3 verses 1-18

“For nearly a decade scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene ... when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into ... Lower Manhattan. ... With an almost eerie foreshadowing, the dangers laid out by scientists as they tried to press public officials for change in recent years describes what happened this week: Subway tunnels filled with water, just as they warned. Tens of thousands of people in Manhattan lost power. The city shut down.” The same article in the New York Times at the end of October last year went on to add: “What scientists, who have devoted years of research to the subject, now fear most is that, as soon as the cleanup from this storm is over, the public will move on.’ Mind you, the 50 people in New York killed by Hurricane Sandy will never know if that does happen, or not: for them, it’s too late.

I already had that opening all lined up before I turned my computer on yesterday morning. What a coincidence (or something!), then, that one of the advertising banners on the unrelated webpage that I was browsing should have been placed by the US Government. This winter it’s running an awareness campaign called, “Today is the day before”. That’s the slogan which arises from their core message: “Prepare for tomorrow”. So, “What does the day before look like?” it asks – beneath pictures of a tornado. Well, “It looks like today”, is the answer it gives. So, today is the day to prepare then, the website advises, with all sorts of links to help you to do just that. (If you’re interested, check it out for yourself at http://www.ready.gov/) But get ready today; while you still can, it warns!

That’s a message I’m sure John the Baptist would have fully approved of. He wasn’t warning the people of his day about tornadoes, hurricanes, or tsunamis, much less of planes flying into buildings. He had something far more dreadful - in the truest sense of the word - in mind. More full of dread, and even more urgent: “The axe is already at the root of the tree”, he told his hearers – though quite why you brood of vipers are listening so intently to this I really don’t know!

 I wondered if anyone would laugh when I said that – and what kind of a laugh that would be! “Is he being serious? Might he actually mean me? Does he know something that I wish he didn’t? Or is this just some preacher’s ploy? Should I play along, then? Is it more embarrassing than that? Whatever it’s about, hopefully it’s not going to carry on like this too much longer, though.”

I hope that I’m allowed to put such words into your mouths. They would likely be in my own head, if I was sat where you are. You see, I’ve been around Christian circles since the 1960’s. So I know that God loves me; that He wants the best for me; that He is on my side. I know too that He is endlessly, eternally kind, gracious, forgiving; and that He smiles on people like me who try to live as good, Godly and responsible a life as we can. My tongue may be a little in my cheek as I say that – but there is, in fact, a lot of Godly truth in there. Trouble is, it’s far from the full truth – about God, or me; but the parts that are conveniently left out of that portrayal are those parts that are decidedly inconvenient for us.

Well, thank God for John the Baptist, then! Those are precisely the parts of the truth, about God and about humanity, that John put right in the faces of his First-Century hearers. They are the parts about the God of justice, who hates sin. They are the parts about the God of judgment who will chop down all the trees that bear no fruit. They’re the parts about the God who separates the useful from the useless – the wheat from the chaff – and burns all wasters. This is the holy God whom John came to get the way ready for. And John’s very clear, and firm advice was that people should respond today. They should do so in ways that are practical, and make it obvious that we have ‘got’ it; because the day before tomorrow’s judgment looks just like today – and the one who is coming will baptise with the Holy Spirit, and with fire!

Now I’ve clearly got more than little ahead of myself here. Of course I’ve done it deliberately. If you forget everything else that I say today, my hope and prayer is that you will remember this, in a truly life-changing way: the day before really does look just like today. So today is the day to get ready. So, yes there is plenty that needs saying about the start of a new series for this new year. There is lots to be said about the Gospel-writer Luke – and about how we have landed up going from here in his account of Jesus’ life. And yes that is ground that will indeed be covered today – even though it’s so familiar to many of us. But this time it’s all very firmly set in this context – of what John the Baptist came to do. To name it aloud, there is a practical response that the preaching team believe God is looking for from us at this point: it’s one of changed, repentant lives of faith.

Now I think that Luke wouldn’t much mind us using his biography in this way. He began it with an aim statement of his own, in the first 4 verses of his book. He said that there were lots of writings about, based on eyewitness accounts of what Jesus had said and done. As both an amateur historian, and a scientist – and nobody doubts that Luke was a doctor – who’d become involved in the expanding Christian story himself, he had decided to put it all into an orderly account. He addressed that to ‘Theophilus’ (meaning ‘lover of God’) – who may have supported him while he wrote it – and said that this was to help him, Theophilus, to know the certainty of what he had been taught. And that has been to the benefit of whoever has read this book ever since: it gives us solid, ordered fact.

We do know at least a bit more about Luke, and that’s worth saying now too. He definitely wrote a second volume, and he intended to do that from the start. With the book of Acts as well as his gospel, Luke is the largest word-contributor to the New Testament, then. He appears in Acts himself, as one of Paul’s travelling companions. He was a Gentle, non-Jewish, convert to the faith; most likely Greek; and was certainly well educated in terms of how he wrote. His clearly wasn’t the first Gospel written, but the scholarly consensus is that it was completed by the mid-60’s AD. About 40% of its content is very similar to Mark; another 20% is much like Matthew; but over 40% of Luke’s book is unique to him. He writes about miracles that no-one else has; there are parables of Jesus that we can’t read elsewhere; and that all adds to our gaining of a much fuller picture of Jesus.

That’s illustrated by the fact that we’re in Luke chapter 3 when we read about John the Baptist. Mark starts his account with this dramatic appearance, at this very specific time in Israel’s history that Luke now names. But Luke has taken 130 verses to set the scene, with stories that nobody else has. He wrote of the prophecies and the promises of the one to come, the one we’re still not ready to meet yet – because we first need this clearing blast from John. We’re not quite ready to back there just yet ourselves. First I need to say that the church year that began at Advent is the year of Luke. We don’t always follow the exact Church of England pattern of readings, and we’re not doing so now either. But between now and Easter those that want to do have the chance to read every word of Luke, to get the whole, full picture of Jesus.

That will take some work to do of course; but what that’s of worth in life doesn’t? Our aim, our hope as preaching team is that you will want to put in that work. It may be that you have never read a full, ordered account of Jesus’ life. Well here is that chance; and you may just be surprised, both by what you do read, and also by what you don’t. You might then want to decide whether you believe what you hear week by week: about who Jesus is, what he has done – and about what response that then demands of you. There are many here who have already made those decisions, and know what you believe and why. It never hurts to do a refresher course; but this may well be more than that for you. Tom Wright says in his commentary on Luke that Christian living is far more than ‘just’ repentance; but it is never any less than it.

All spiritual advance starts with a turning from whatever is holding us back from obeying God. It involves a turning to as well, as practical means of breaking the patterns or chains that bind us. We all need to do that in some way, no matter whom, or what we are. When I was training we had a session led by the national press relations officer. He told us that statistically there was at least one person in the room who was doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. “Stop it now!” he told us. He pointed out how we were all smiling in agreement, trying to convince him that it wasn’t us he meant. But he still said that before we completed our training at least one of us would contact him for help with a story that was about to break in the national papers. I don’t know if he was proved right. What I do know is that the last time I told this story here, based on the same statistics, everyone smiled in agreement that people really should stop doing what was wrong – which wasn’t them. That included the person who within months came to see me with their life in pieces because of the wrong things that they had been doing when I said “Stop it now!” – just as I’m saying again today, to you.

The people who came to hear John realised that they needed to make changes. “What are we to do, then?” they asked. And John had very practical answers for them – in general, and quite specifically for the soldiers and tax collectors who wanted to get ready today. There isn’t time to look at that, or much else, in any detail now; but do note the principles at work here; because those are what we each need to live by from here. The principles are that we are all invited to make wrong choices: in our job; in our relationships; in our lives: but we don’t have to give in to those. We can get ready to live God’s way, and then work that principle out in the specific decisions that we each face today.

Before now I have used 4 R’s to help explain how repentance works. Here they are again, briefly: first we have to Recognise our sin for what it is; then we need to Repent of, or say sorry, for it; we then Receive God’s forgiveness; and the fourth R is to Replace that sin with new ways – in these sorts of ways that John spoke of. It’s vital to recognise that this is a way of life, not something that we move on from. The decisions that we take today, to get ready for whatever tomorrow may bring, are to be taken in the context of the God whom John declared. It is the same God we come to know in Jesus: the God who loves us and is all merciful; but who also demands that we be holy, as He is holy – and then helps us to live for Him, and in Him. Such is adventure that lies ahead for each of us, as we work our way through Luke’s Gospel: and today is the time to get ready for that, because today is the day before! And so let’s pray ...