Sermon 4th December 2016 from The Ven. Dr Jane Steen Archdeacon of Southwark

The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the Way of the Lord.

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

When I was last here, Cameron told a joke at the start of his sermon which was both so good and so unbelievably terrible that I cannot hope to match it – but…  Permit me to begin with three thank yous.  The first is to Cameron for inviting me here today.  The second is to you, whom I assume he didn’t consult as to whether you wanted to hear me, for coming.  And the third is really to all of you since I should have been here more or less this time last year but was grounded with bronchitis – and it took us this long to find an alternative date.  So thank you.  And now, later on in our reading we meet the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  So here is my joke.  It’s really a question:  how do you tell the difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees?  Well, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection – we know this from Paul who was of the Pharisaic tradition.  The Sadducees on the other hand, didn’t believe in angels or the resurrection:  they were Sad, You See!

The voice of one, crying in the wilderness.  If I had to choose one word to sum up the Bible, it might just be wilderness.  The four weeks before Christmas, which we call Advent, are great wilderness times.  Last week, we remembered the pioneering voice of the patriarchs, lone voices as the faith of our God was forged for his ancient people the Jews.  Today, we remember the isolated voice of the prophets against their times and cultures, proclaiming the coming of our God.  Next week, we will remember John the Baptist again, prophet heralding the arrival of the Messiah in his own day – and finally, on the last Sunday of Advent, we remember blessed Mary, mother of Jesus, visited by God but charged with the immensely lonely task of bearing and raising the Christ, the son of God.  Isolation, then; what I will call vocation; and transformation – all are among the themes of Advent and all come together in this one word, Wilderness. 

First, let’s look at isolation.  Prophets isolated.  John, the voice of one crying.  Lonely.  Birds keening.  Complete silence, the extremes of the desert.  Something wild, untamed, even mad about the wilderness, somewhere to drive you out of the norm, out of your comfort zone.  John, like the prophets of old, inhabits the wilderness, the desert:  he appeared in the wilderness of Judea Matthew tells us.  Note this – particular desert.  Mark is non-specific- just the wilderness.

Matthew’s specificity is important, a word from God for us.  The desert is not general.  For people, our wilderness experiences are terrible personal:  grief, loneliness, depression, stress – it is always specific.  Prophets speak specifically because they speak the words of God and God speaks to us.  But this is not always easy.  The desert is hard.  It goes on and on and on and on.

And yet – don’t give up on it.  Only in the desert, sometimes, can we hear what God is saying to us; only when we are up against it does the spirit really break through. 

There is a novel by Doris Lessing called The Sentimental Agents which makes the point.  One of the character sues his country for making his life too easy.  His point is exactly that it is sometimes only when we are really challenged that we become the people God made us to be.

The loneliness of the desert is hard, challenging – but it is not therefore negative or distant from God.  And in the isolation of the desert the second of my Advent words for this Sunday of the prophets comes to pass:  vocation, calling.

Calling, you may say, to what.  Well, calling to repentance.  John is proclaiming a baptism for repentance for the forgiveness of sins – a turning away from those particular things which separate us from God – attachment, noise.  But also, repentance is, must be, a turning, turning away – from what sticks to us, holds us – even when these are good things.  It’s not that we need to go around abandoning them but we need to be consciously allowing God to call us to a different way of being with them – and perhaps, to a different way of being altogether.  For calling, vocation, is about calling to as well as calling from. Remember Moses with the people of Israel in the desert, calling them back after their aberration with the golden calf, standing in the desert and crying: Who is on the Lord’s side?  Remember Elijah, going away to the top of a high mountain, another place of desolation, to hear the still small voice of silence and then, to hear the Lord.  Remember above all, Jesus, again and again rising early and going to a deserted place to pray.  At this season as we prepare not only to welcome Jesus as he comes among us as a child, but as he comes again as our judge, now is the time to hear his call, to challenge ourselves about our own vocation, to listen to the prophets showing us things now hidden from our sight.  Let us then take time and be quiet to hear that call, to enter into transformation

Transformation happens in the wilderness.  We are not transformed by leaving the wilderness. In any Christian life the wilderness must remain, a place of quiet, untouched, uncluttered peace where God can get to us – a place in our hearts, our souls, our lives as well as a physical space.  For it is not by leaving the wilderness but by sticking with it that we find change, growth.  It is the wilderness itself which is at the heart of prophetic fulfilment:  the desert shall blossom and break into song, says the prophet Isaiah.  Jesus is baptised in the wilderness – and by his baptism, he is transformed, knowing that he is the Messiah.

As we continue in Advent to seek transformation by becoming more and more like our Lord, let me end by telling you about two ancient glass vases which for me illustrates the way in which we are transformed by God.  They were dug up by two archaeologists, the one American and the other British.  The American came from a university where there was lots of money and his vase was cleaned quickly with all the latest equipment. It went on display in a museum and he became famous as people admired its beauty. The British archaeologist came from a British university and there was no money at all for high tech kit to clean his vase.  So he worked away at it over years with old toothbrushes, gently removing millennia of accumulated grime under the cold tap.  Eventually it joined it pair in the museum but it didn’t shine as much and he didn’t become famous because everyone had already seen the other one.  And then one day, a brave young curator said, I wonder if those two still hold water?  So they tried.  And the vase that had been cleaned quickly with all the latest equipment could take no more strain and broke and shattered and was lost.  But the one which had been cleaned slowly over many years held water and as the clear, cool liquid swirled around inside it, its colours shone with a beauty no one had previously imagined.

So God transforms us, in the desert, through his calling.  May it indeed be so, in your life and in mine, that we shine more and more radiantly with the beauty of God in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.