JESUS AT THE DOORS

Sermon delivered on the Third Sunday Of Advent the 16th December 2007 by Fr. Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the St. Alban's congregation of the Church of England (Cayman Islands) in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

Scriptures: Isaiah 35: 1-10 James 5: 7-10 Matthew 11: 2-11

Matt 11: 6 Jesus said, "Blessed is he who takes no offence at Me."

GOD TAKES ACTION

When people go through personal difficulties of some sort, such as mourning the death of a loved one or fearing for the future of a troubled child or even when we contemplate the budgetary constraints of our own or of others, it is quite a normal reaction to feel a certain depression. I have observed on occasion in such times - perhaps through the material of our daily worship, if we are wanting to get out of this state, but do not have the personal resources to do so - God seeming to take clear action through His words to strengthen our faith. "Blessed are the eyes that have seen what yours have seen, and blessed the ears that have heard what yours have heard," Jesus sometimes says to us, and we are suddenly brought up sharply to the realisation that our mind has not stayed in the way that God Himself perceives the events that are bothering us. Inevitably when we begin to bring to the matter the divine resources that God intends us to, and that is only to be found through inspiration, we find the burden of it is lifted. Jesus' yoke is truly an easy one, that is to say, one that helps us to carry otherwise difficult loads..

 

HOLDING THE IMPOSSIBLE VISION

There is a lot of material in our lessons today that can help us to listen to the voice, as it were, of Jesus at the doors of our souls. Contemplate a depressed mind encountering our first lesson from Isaiah 35, and hearing how the desert shall rejoice and blossom, how God will come with recompense, how the condition of the blind, the deaf, the dumb and so on will be reversed, and how a highway shall appear upon which the redeemed of the Lord shall return home to Zion with singing. The first reaction could well be, "Well, whatever all this is about has got nothing to do with my life." The temptation might be just to turn off. But if then an impulse deep within us or even our personal discipline tells us not to turn off, but just to hold the words within our spirit, then we might realise that after all there can be a connection between these two poles, one pole being the paradisal ideal, which in the New Testament is referred to as the imminent Kingdom of God, and the other the troubles of our experience. The connection would have to be patience or endurance, and in order to keep the two poles connected that patience and endurance would need to be like a very firm and strong connecting wire. We might not be able to see how the one pole influences the other, but by faith we can recognise that God orders it so. Did He not say, and does He not now say, "The Kingdom of God is at hand"? Remember we of the New Testament age are in the mountain valleys of the High Kingdom of God, one peak of which was His coming at the first Christmas, and the other His coming again. The seemingly unattainable vision should not be dismissed, and in this way faithfulness over time can heal and restore us from depression and isolation.

 

ACHIEVING THE RESOLUTION

St. James in our second lesson speaks of the farmer waiting for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rain. There is no question that you have to be patient in farming. You have to learn when to wait and when to act urgently, as the timing of most things is not under your control. St. James counsels that we have to have a similar patience as well as expectation over the coming of the Lord. It is at hand, imminent, yet for now its imminence must be endured for an unspecified time. Perhaps we can think of that coming, with its themes of the righting of the wrongs of the world, in terms of the resolution of harmony at the end of a choral work that approaches that end through an abundance of dissonance. The singers have to be patient not to try to scramble to the resolution under their own steam too early, but when the time is ready they have to seize the moment, otherwise they will spoil the resolution. That harmonic resolution of the Lord's coming we can perceive not only as the final Advent of the Lord, but sometimes in the way that the final resolution may be reflected in our lives ahead of time. Some aspect of the paradisal ideal, perhaps, comes about for us after a long ordeal. The ordeal, too, is the Lord's and must be conducted with faithful patience. In choral pieces too, there are many places where a temporary resolution is achieved before finally the grand resolution is achieved at the end.

 

NOT THE PRESENT MOMENT ONLY

Imagine if when the music was being copied the last two pages got lost and nobody knew that the composer intended the work to continue beyond the pages they had. People might complain that the composer had produced a poor result. This is what happens to us when the connection between the poles breaks and our endurance falters, and we take offence at the Lord over our life. A grumbling against one another is one possible result of this, when we forget that these others too are part of the score that God has handed to us. St. James warns that grumbling against one another in the church lays us open to divine judgement. No, we are not just to think of our lives as consisting of where we are in them at the present moment. We are to look back and forward too, and so we are to have patience when we consider the Lord's role, our neighbour's role and our own role, and not to take offence as it is so easy to do when we consider only the present moment. It is not we who are to judge the Lord: it is He who has the capacity to judge us.

 

THE TEMPTATION TO JUDGE THE JUDGMENT

Even St. John the Baptist, who as Jesus said was a prophet and more than a prophet, is recorded in our Gospel today as being tempted in this way. Jesus said that John was more than a prophet because he not only prophesied of the Messiah to come but also identified who that Messiah was. But doing that put him into a vulnerable position, because the works of Jesus on earth did not fulfil all the prophetic hopes of Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets, though the fact that Jesus gave sight to the blind, and cured the disabled and sick, and preached the Gospel of the Kingdom of God was sufficient sign that this was indeed the Messiah. Yet at the same time, the judgment that John himself had proclaimed, and of which the Old Testament prophets spoke, was apparently not occurring. Certainly this would have been of huge and direct concern to the imprisoned prophet, because a delay of judgement meant more injustice heaped upon his own head every day.

 

The Baptist had to learn as do we all that the Lord's timing is not our timing, and that questions of our own personal comfort do not come into it. Of course the Lord knows us through and through, and as St. Paul says does not give us more than we can bear, though we must understand that our own assessment of what we can bear is totally inaccurate. St. John the Baptist would in time have to pay the ultimate price for being a prophet, and no doubt died bravely and faithfully as such, knowing and trusting in the Messiah that he had faithfully proclaimed, and relying on Him to resolve what was for him the unsolved question of judgment. Blessed was the Baptist if after receiving Jesus' word from the disciples he had sent to him, he took no offence at Him.

 

THE STRANGE GIFTS OF GOD

A strange truth is that God gave us all life’s complications just as He has given to us everything else. It may not be for a long time that we will begin to appreciate such gifts. We may not yet know much of the story of 9-11 or the story of hurricane Ivan or other disasters from God's perspective, but I am prepared to say that the day will come when we will rightly look back upon them with sincere thanksgiving to the Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, who knows the end and purpose of things before they come about, and who will fulfil what may now at best only be vision for us. Let us be patient, and establish our hearts; and blessed are those who take no offence at Him.

 

QUESTIONS

1. The attitude of prayer and the attitude of grumbling are fully opposed to one another. How quickly can we expect to expel grumbling from our own life?

2. If you are prepared to stay in God's perspective about life, which is prophetic, are you prepared to pay the prophet's price?

3. Consider and list some of "God's perspectives" about the year 2004 (Ivan) or this year.