Second before Advent, 16th November by Fr Jack

Malachi 4.1-2a
2 Thessalonians 3.6-13
St Luke 21.5-19

Geistliches Lied (words by Paul Flemming, Music by Johannes Brahms)

Let nought afflict thee with grief;
Be calm, as God ordains,
And so may my will be contented.

Why take thought for the morrow?
The one God who gives thee
What is thine watches over all.

All in thy doings be steadfast
And true. What God decrees
Is best, and this it is acknowledged.

Here we are approaching Advent. It is the end of the church year, as we prepare to begin a new church year on Advent Sunday. So, as ever, the Scripture readings for this period hold before us the end, not just of the year, but the end of the world. And our response is what matters. What is our response?

Hope.

Today in the Gospel, Jesus holds before us the end of the world, along with the ever-present realities of war and disaster, and then there’s that little verse hidden in the middle: ‘this will give you an opportunity to testify’; and that’s the hinge for us. We are asked, in the face of the difficulties of life, even of the end of the world, as followers of Jesus: what will your response be?

And our answer is hope. A hope that is not naiveté, but gritty, real, informed hope.

I spent my teens as a convinced atheist and one of the things that prevented me taking faith seriously was that Christianity and religion generally looked to me like a comfort blanket.

And, over the years, I have come to have two thoughts on this. One is that it is, and the other is that it isn’t. In the face of life’s challenges (in my own life, and the world at large) my faith, my hope in and with Jesus Christ, is a great comfort to me. But it isn’t, I hope, false comfort. I remember +Rose of Dover on Radio 4 years ago saying that sometimes people call Christian faith a crutch. And she said, yes! Too right it is, and when I break my leg, I want a crutch. A crutch to hold me and help me heal.

But the hope to which we are called (as well as being a crutch and comfort) is also challenging. It doesn’t hide us from the world, but it helps us to face the world as it is. Faith and hope, if real, help us to see the colour, complexity and reality of life.

And perhaps it’s at this point that we rightly crash down to earth with practical faith in today’s epistle - St Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. St Paul earns his living as a tent maker. He doesn’t take a stipend from the Church Commissioners like me. So when the Apostle speaks about getting on with faith and life, he does it with real integrity, not from an ivory tower.

It’s a nerdy point, but important, that clergy who are paid stipends (like me) are not paid salaries. I don’t get paid for what I do. A stipend is money given to live on so that the clergy don’t have to spend time making money.

Stipends weren’t standardised until the mid twentieth century. Until then, the priest simply received whatever his parish generated. Some got a few shillings from the rent of a farm or a few cottages, some received massive fortunes from endowments or land. In the mid twentieth century those assets were collected into a central pot, and then from that clergy are paid more evenly across the board.

In the days of yore, St Giles’ was not a bad living. Often the vicar here was also the Bishop of Gloucester, who took the cash for being vicar of St Giles’, barely even visited the parish, and would have paid a slither of his large income from St Giles’ to a curate or two who actually lived here and did all the work in the parish. A system much like the on we operate today, I’m delighted to say!

I digress. Whether we receive a pension, a stipend, a salary or nothing, St Paul grounds us today. And of course, it all feeds into this season’s attitude of readiness. We are looking towards the Advent. And like wise virgins, we need to have our lamps lit, and our lives ready to meet Jesus. In all the many ways He is coming to us, all the time, and at the end of days. We meet Him here day by day and Sunday by Sunday in Scripture, worship and best of all in Holy Communion, in order to train our spiritual instincts to spot Him and meet Him in every part of our lives. Active, watchful waiting.

Which is itself, of course, a disposition of hope. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Not a comfort blanket or a fairy story. A disposition of active, watchful hope.

Because, as Malachi so poetically puts it today: the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and we shall leap like calves from the stall. I love that image, its as beautiful as it is comic - the idea of us aspiring to be toddler livestock jumping about!

A good deal less comic than leaping cows is the beautiful Brahms anthem we heard before the Gospel Reading; words by physician and poet Paul Flemming. And I’ll turn to that to close.

Living as children of hope is, I think, a matter of becoming one with God.

In prayer and in life generally our aim is to unite our lives and our purposes and desires with God’s. We spend our lives not trying to persuade God to do as we want, but learning to desire what God desires. Our hearts becoming one with His perfect, Sacred Heart of love for the world.

That is hope. Not my hope for me, but becoming part of God’s hope for us.

And as we grow in the grace of the Eucharist, in Scripture, sacred music and silence, we find that we are inhabiting a paradox. To find our life increasingly at one with God’s life leads to a kind of divine indifference. We care both less, and much more. We feel much more, but also rise above the storms of feeling or circumstance. Our desires deepen, and grow larger, and also less sharp or fragile.

I wonder if that is what Brahms, and Flemming are getting at? Heard like this, this anthem isn’t twee or unthinking. It is a matter of living in such a way that we are growing into the true purpose and love and meaning behind the universe, and increasingly we are at one with this purpose… in His arms, as it were… we find (as the years go by and as storms and disasters continue to rage and blow), we find that we are living hope.

Where has all this left us? Leaping like baby cows? Perhaps not just yet. We are being honest about the state of the world, as Jesus is in today’s Gospel. And what is our response? To be honest about the hope that is within us. Not optimism, not a wishlist, but hope, because of who God is. And St Paul tells us to roll up our sleeves and get on with the business of Gospel hope in real life - at work, and home and in the community.

And this hope, as we have seen, is not an act of our own will. Instead, (as Brahms and Flemming show us) it is growing day by day to find the pattern of our lives, how we fill our days, and the rhythm of the years, is less and less about us. But living in God, inhabiting the hope He gives.

As the Book of Common Prayer Prayer of Humble Access puts it: ‘Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.’

Amen, Lord Jesus, let it be so.