andygoodliff

Story and Promise: A Christmas Sermon

Those of us who are Christians are a strange bunch.

Every December we make a pilgrimage to the little town of Bethlehem

and then later in March and April we make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

We tell the same story over and over again.

Its on annual repeat mode.

Out comes the manager, out comes the cross, out comes the tomb.

This year marks my nineth time telling the story in this church.

Nine years of reminding you why the story matters

more than anything else in all the world.

The story is a particular story,

a story rooted in time and history.

You can’t get behind this story to some general myth

and you can’t take a moral from this story to be applied to living.

All we have is this story

rooted in time and history.

 

We go to the town of Bethlehem and the city of Jerusalem,

because the story hinges on what happens in both these places.

In Bethlehem the story begins with an eventful birth.

In Jerusalem the story reaches a climax in a death,

which looks like an ending,

but is followed by a raising back to life and a new beginning.

We tell this story and the places in which the story happened

because they tell us of Jesus,

in whom the whole story rests

and with it, all existence: past, present and future.

The story rests with Jesus

because of the outrageous claim

that at Bethlehem the birth of Jesus

is not like any other birth,

but the birth of God himself.

God takes flesh,

God becomes human,

God becomes one like us.

In Bethlehem. To Mary.

‘The eternal love of God locates itself in time and space,

and so becomes datable.’ [i]

The creator becomes part of creation.

The author becomes part of the story.

And so it's a story, but it also news,

good news — the gospel.

Good news of the God who loves without end.

And as well as a being a story, and good news,

it is also a promise —

the birth of Jesus

the life, death and resurrection of Jesus

are the promise of God that

God will be God with us and we will be with God,

now and for ever.

Jesus is Immanuel

who will save us from our sins.

This story, news and promise

is not a story, a piece of news or a promise

amongst others,

but, we say at Christmas and at Easter

and whenever we gather,

Jesus is the story, the news, the promise

that makes sense of all other stories,

that interprets all other news,

that outdoes all other promises.

Something new begins at the birth of Jesus:

a new age, a new time, a new creation

that through the life of the one born

the redeeming, transforming, rescuing

of all things for the freedom of creation,

and the glory and joy of God.

Because this story says that

the world Jesus enters is one in thrall and subjection

to evil powers.

God comes in the life of Jesus to bind these forces up

and to undo their death dealing ways;

ways that trade in hostility, exploitation and lies.

The story of Bethlehem, the story of the birth of Jesus,

is caught up with and in danger from these powers.

King Herod was one who exploited those he ruled,

Herod was one hostile to the news of the birth,

Herod was one who lied about his intent,

Herod was one who ordered death in response.

He is the epitome of the deathly Powers.

The story at Bethlehem begins in vulnerability

and depends on the courage and willingness of a young woman,

the humility and kindness of her husband,

the wisdom and understanding of foreign visitors

that Jesus might be protected,

Mary, Joseph and the Magi become co-conspirators in God’s salvation plan.

 

Today we have arrived once again in Bethlehem,

we indwell the story in all its messy grace,

we share in the undeserved joy of the good news,

we take hold of the unconditional promise

and welcome Jesus.

For in this story

we cannot get away from the one who arrives at Bethlehem

and leads us to Jerusalem.

And its not because everyone loves a baby,

But because, like the Magi,

when we see this child we cannot help but worship at his feet.

We have pinned our lives on Jesus,

or perhaps more truthfully,

we have found ourselves caught by Jesus

and discovered we don’t want to let go,

for all worries, all our hopes and fears,

are met in him and held by him today.

The knowledge and the promise that

Jesus is Immanuel gives us peace, shalom.

We too find ourselves becoming co-conspirators in God’s salvation plan.

 

And if you are here this morning,

and thinking yep he was right when he said Christians are a strange bunch,

I pray that today the Holy Spirit

will help you hear the story,

will cause you to respond to the good news,

and enable you to receive the promise.

You’ll find nothing will ever be the same again.

Amen and happy Christmas!

 

[i] Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today (1982)

Theology Live 2019

The first Theology Live was held in December 2017 - a day of British Baptists sharing their research. The second Theology Live is being held on 10 January 2019 and promises to be another great day of amazing papers. There are still some tickets available, so any Baptists out there, book yourself on. 

1. Rob May: 'What Stanley Grenz might have said about preaching in postmodernity.'
2. Rosa Hunt: "A Time to be Silent and a Time to Speak": theological language and the way of dispossession.
3. Joe Haward: "Redeeming Judas: Men, Suicide, and Hope"
4. Beth Allison-Glenny: “Performing the body of Christ: engaging with Judith Butler in our ecclesiology”
5. Seidel Abel Boanerges: “Homiletical Apologetics and the Local Church: Equipping the local believers through apologetic preaching”
6. John Weaver (and John Rackley): “Faith Journey as Theology”
7. Tim Judson: “Sleeping with Satan from the Grief of Gethsemane: A Bonhoefferian Interpretation of Luke 22:45”
8. Dan Pratt: A pendulum of Death and Resurrection: Towards a Theology of Modern Slavery and Liberation
9. Tim Carter: 'Did God really say "You must utterly destroy" the seven nations in the promised land?'
10. Hazel Sherman: '(Paid) "to equip the saints for the work of ministry”?’
11. Sally Nelson: Beyond liberation: a disability reading of healing in John’s gospel
12. Karen Case-Green: ‘Acts of the imagination: the missional potential of the arts in post-Christendom UK’
13. Claude Halm: African Christians in Diaspora: Discourses on the British Context
14. Julian Gotobed: ‘Diseased Imaginations and Desire: Ecclesial and Racist Convictions in Baptists’
15. Leigh Greenwood: "Never cruel or cowardly": Reading Whovian Nonviolence as Parable and Midrash
16. David Bunce: The theological virtue of patience in church life: reflections from the Austrian Baptist Union

When the Saints Go Marchin' | A Sermon for Advent 1

Its Advent time.

It's the time the church considers the coming of Christ

and while the world outside the church is

generally happy to give a nod in the direction of the babe born in Bethlehem,

the church turns our attention to the coming of Christ again.

Its Advent time

and as Christians we live in Advent,

between the coming of Christ and the coming of Christ again.

The four Sundays of Advent have traditionally been an opportunity to consider

death, judgement, heaven and hell

that is to give our lives an eternal horizon.

As Bob Dylan sung are you ready to meet Jesus?

Are you where you ought to be?

Jesus is coming

and he will come with judgement.

Why judgement?

Judgement because the world is not yet as it should be,

The world is not yet rid of the forces of evil. Satan is still on the prowl.

Judgement names God’s determination not to let evil go unpunished;

God’s determination to see love win.

God will save us from judgement, but God will not save us without judgement. [i]

Evil is not just out there, but in us,

the line between good and evil runs through each of us,

and Advent looks to that time,

when God will do once and for all with evil

out there and in us,

that all things and us might be reconciled to him.

 

This Advent

I want to talk about 4 songs —

one each week.

Not just any songs,

but songs that are known as Spirituals,

arising from the African American church tradition,

created in the brutal historical setting of slavery

by those who were enslaved. [ii]

Singing the spirituals I suggest is a good idea

because they infuse a hopeful imagination for heaven

from a position of things not being as they should be.

When you’re surrounded by injustice, oppression, evil

you long for judgement,

the rectifying of a world deeply askew.

This is Advent.

Advent begins in darkness and is a longing for Light,

a believing in the coming Light,

a hoping for the promised Light.

The Light that makes plain — that judges —

the inhumanity of human beings done to each other

and to the rest of creation.

I hope also

in getting you to sing these spirituals,

to give you a different playlist for the season:

I want you to spend the next 4 weeks humming, ‘When the Saints’

or ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ or ‘Go tell it on the mountain’

rather than jingle bells or even O come all ye faithful.

 

As we sing the Spirituals

we are being accompanied by the book of Revelation.

In the case of ‘When the Saints’

we find it is the book of Revelation put to music:

blessed are those invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb;

blessed are those who wash their robes,

that they may have the right to the tree of life

and may go through the gates into the city:

I want to be in that number!

The book of Revelation is perfect Advent reading,

even if it does not always appear straightforward reading.

Revelation is precisely a call to live in the light of the coming of Jesus.

The book ends with Jesus saying ‘I am coming soon.’

Revelation is often read as being all about the future,

a guide to how history will play out in the end times,

it is better read as a summons to how to live faithfully now.

 

The book of Revelation

is apocalyptic;

not because it describes earthquakes and the end of the world,

but because it describes in bold dramatic language

the intervention of God to redeem the whole world:

everything.

The word apocalyptic means to look behind the veil:

the truth is being revealed

and ordinary language is too ordinary

for that the revelation,

so John can only describe it as a poet —

a kaleidoscope of imagery and sound

that declares a new heavens and earth has arrived

and is arriving.

John of Patmos offers a poetic, theological, pastoral

vision of reality,

soaked in scripture,

unveiled by the Spirit,

for the purpose of imbibing faith and faithfulness,

hope and hopefulness,

truth and truthfulness,

courage and comfort

to churches who are named lampstands,

from which the light of the gospel is displayed.

This hope, faith, truth, courage and comfort

was the heart-beat of the slaves of the cotton fields of the American south.

Their songs were nothing less than a conviction

that God was on their side

and would bring their liberation,

their salvation,

their redemption,

that they would be numbered among the saints.

Advent deals in the apocalyptic.

The Spirituals turn to the book of Revelation

because in it they found something that mirrored their experience

and still gave them hope.

In singing ‘I want to be in that number’

they were identifying themselves with the vast number

who are counted with the Lamb, that is Jesus.

 

This conviction that God was on their side,

a conviction rooted in their reading of the Bible,

meant that their call to God was the same as they found in Revelation:

‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true,

until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’

In Advent time,

the longing is one for God’s judgement.

Advent people long for justice and judgement,

they ache for the wrongs to be righted,

and in their longing and aching and waiting

they remain convicted that God is just and will judge.

That conviction is one found in worship.

The book of Revelation overflows with worship,

the faith of the enslaved persons overflowed with spiritual songs.

Worship was and is the centring act [iii]

that orientates us to the God of creation and covenant,

the God of exodus and wilderness,

the God of judgement and salvation,

to the God who is known in Jesus.

 

The Spirituals, like ‘When the Saints’, offered

life in the context and threat of death. [iv]

Instead of succumbing to despair,

they sang, giving strength to the weak and weary,

the battered and bruised.

This is not to romanticise the singing slave,

the spirituals did not ease their suffering,

but gave voice to their suffering and to their hope in God.

The spirituals were acts of resistance.

Resistance to the narrative that to be black was to be a slave

and worthless.

The spirituals provided a bigger narrative,

that orientated the singers to belief in the kingdom and heaven,

the promised land over the Jordan.

The spirituals were a counter to a white oppressive version of Christianity

that was seen as false —

the white slave owners were Pharaoh and the American south was Egypt.

They read and sung the Bible with imagination,

which they learned from the likes of John of Patmos,

who likewise imagines Rome as Babylon.

 

Its Advent time.

Advent begins in the dark.

It takes seriously the darkness of the world.

It takes seriously the cry ‘How long?’

John Rackley wrote recently

The time of Advent lament is not a warm-up act for Christmas
anymore than were the prophets of Israel.
It is the soil into which faith can plant deep roots.
For Advent is an experience of having faith amidst the darkness of life.
It is more than calendar event.
It is a way of life;
a spirituality of truth seeking justice.
It is to be lived daily awaiting the arrival of God’s dawn.

 

The book of Revelation begins with worship — worship round the throne,

and at particular points John hears singing (chs. 4, 5, 7, 11, 15, 16, 19)

The songs are a different playlist

that offer hope when darkness surrounds.

The spirituals offer an imaginative response,

They are a third testament alongside Old and New.

 

Advent begins in the dark.

And in the dark we turn to God

And sing.

Oh when the saints …

 

[i] Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Christ, 2018, 182.

[ii] The idea came from reading Luke Powery, Rise Up Shepherd: Advent Reflections on the Spirituals, 2017, ix-xi.

[iii] Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of St John & the Praying Imagination, 1988, 140.

[iv] This paragraph owes much to Luke Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 2012, 31-39.

[v] John Rackley, ‘Dark Advent Rising’ https://www.baptist.org.uk/Articles/534902/Advent_where_is.aspx