WAITING FOR THE REVEALING

Sermon delivered on Septuagesima, the Third Sunday before Lent, the 20^th January 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes at St. Alban's Church, 461 Shedden Road, George Town, Cayman Islands

Scriptures: Isaiah 49:1-7    1 Corinthians 1: 1-9    John 1:29-42

1 Corinthians 1: 5,7-8 "You were enriched in Christ ... so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ."

In some words of Dr. Peter Toon, the period Septuagesima to Quinquagesima is to be thought of as a journey in penitence. He says that this ancient but also annual penitential journey is necessary for us so that we arrive at Ash Wednesday ready to think and act in genuinely Lenten terms. Indeed the Eastern Orthodox call the corresponding added period of time in their calendar part of a Greater Lent.

Let us take a moment to look at the Collect for today, which is found as usual in the pew-sheet. Let us read it out together.

O LORD, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

In the Prayer, we address God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ -- and our Father by adoption and grace -- as the Lord, the One who has all authority and power. And, as it were, as sinners, aware of our condition, we speak from a distance (as is suggested by the Latin verb, exaudire, used in the original for the English "to hear"). This approach is appropriate here for we proceed fervently and humbly to ask God for a major favour. This favour is not merely to note our petition but "favourably to hear the prayers of thy people." We recall the ten lepers of Luke 17 who "stood afar off" when they cried, "Jesus, Master have mercy on us." And more to the point, we recall the publican of Luke 18 who stood "afar off" and "smote upon his breast" when he said, "God be merciful to me a sinner."

Sin weakens and affects all aspects of human life, degrades the sinner, and causes a bondage of the will to sin. Guilt of sin before God causes us to deserve his condemnation and judgment. But thanks be to God the Father who sent the Lord Jesus Christ to bear our sins in his own body on the tree. Thus we cry for deliverance to the Lord our God who is good and merciful and who is glorified in the pardoning and justification of sinners.

And we end the prayer by celebrating this Lord Jesus who is now enthroned in heaven with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

St Paul in our second lesson today wrote to the quite problematic church at Corinth of our waiting for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain us to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the Christian life, there are periods of waiting and periods of actively forging ahead, and in the one circumstance and in the other, God is equally faithful to us. He has been faithful to each one of us from the time of our baptism, even though we may have been unfaithful to Him. The promise to us in the times that we wait for His revealing to us, is that He will sustain us in the waiting, so that at the end of the day of waiting, we will be guiltless before Him. Let me point out too that the word for "waiting for" in the Greek is more accurately rendered "awaiting". Our position as Christians in this age is that we "await" the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that implies an expectant waiting rather than an inactive waiting. An expectant mother, for example, will not be inactive as she awaits the arrival of her child, and as we "await the revealing" of our Lord Jesus Christ it is understood that we will be engaged in the preparations appropriate to our expectancy. Another way of putting it is by using the phrase I came across first in Jamaica, that we "wait on" someone or something. Indeed we are to be in attention to the revealing of the Lord, like a good waiter at a restaurant. .

My trust is that we will find that day in which our own Cayman Islands Church too is truly transformed after its days of awaiting, having been sustained, though justly punished for our offences, bur mercifully forgiven by His goodness, for the glory of His Name, and we can apply the same thought to our individual lives as well. God has been faithful to us. We can make the words of the Suffering Servant in our Old Testament lesson our own:- The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And He said to me, "You are My servant, ... in whom I will be glorified." Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of these words, and as those baptised into Christ and members of His Body, they may even be true, in a secondary and dependent manner, of us too. Then the servant goes on to express frustration:- But I said "I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity." Well is there anyone here that does not know such feelings? You and I have known them, have we not? But the Lord said to the servant, what you thought you were here for is too light a thing. "I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." Again, the words and the calling are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, but now it is we who are baptised into Jesus Christ that are within His Body upon the earth, and we too have an inescapable part to play in the calling into which we are baptised, and for which we wait, both in heartfelt repentance and in faith. We are to hope and trust that the time for which we are waiting is about to appear, and we will find ourselves being thrust strongly forward to the glory of His Name and by the power of the Holy Ghost.

 

John the Baptist’s ministry, which our Gospel touched down upon this morning, must have been transformed when the day came in which He saw the Spirit descending upon the Christ in the waters of His baptism. We all have a ministry too, given by the Lord, and we are to await in active and penitential faith the day in which its transformation by the Lord will reveal its true character.