Rejoice in justice - sermon for Advent III

 

‘Woke Christianity will kill the Church of England stone dead’.

 

So reads the headline of the most recent of the endless, tiresome, and frankly rather silly hit pieces that our newspapers appear to love to print in the run up to Christmas. ‘Congregants don’t want to be preached to about politics, & they certainly don’t want drag queens. What they want is the full-fat version of faith’, it screeches in faux outrage, getting into full pantomime mode. ‘Drag queens are not the answer’, it tells in increasingly bewildering absurdity. ‘The churches still thriving are those that refuse to pander to the Left’.

 

Now I will admit that I probably agree with the author that drag queens – at least by themselves – are not likely to be the salvation of Mother Church. In fact, like Jesus, I don’t really have much to say about drag queens at all, except to suggest that the clergy – dressed as we are – ought perhaps to be the last to throw stones. Yet such a convenient parody of the Christian faith – the idea that you can either have full-fat, full-faith Christianity, or a watered down, worldly, political form – has gained far too much traction in recent years. And a parody it is, because it is a wilful attempt to turn our faces away from the clear record of Scripture, to produce a Christianity free from prophesy and the life of the Spirit, and to turn our faith into a thin, insipid gruel of otherworldliness that leaves not only the world utterly unchanged, but us too – that leads us to conveniently separate the soul from the body, and in doing so, to deny the very reality that is at the heart of human life.

 

In other words, to try to separate Christ from the world that He came to save seems to me to pose a far greater danger to the church’s health and wellbeing than a focus on justice – justice that, as Isaiah tells us, the Lord loves.  For what the purveyors this parody really mean when they say politics should be kept out of the pulpit is that it is only their form of politics that should be allowed in it. The inconvenience of the real-world implications of the Gospel are much more easily brushed aside or spiritualised than faced head on – much easier to focus on the poor in Spirit of St Matthew’s Gospel than the poor of St Luke’s. Much easier to think of the prayer that St Paul calls us to as being merely good thoughts rather than genuine action. Much easier to find excuses to quench the Spirit rather than follow the Spirit. Much easier indeed, but so much further from the manger towards which we increasingly turn as we approach the great Feast of Christmas.

 

None of this is new, of course. White churches spent years bending over backwards to mutilate the Scriptures and claim that they supported slavery, or segregation, or violence, towards Black and other people of colour. Still to this day, far too many churches operate a careful exclusion zone to keep out whichever group they find undesirable. However we as Christians dress this up, whether it’s telling people to just wait a little bit longer before they can be blessed by God, or whether we weaponize the idea of unity – however blatant or pernicious – still we all long, in our little ways, to drive that wedge between the life we live and the life to which we are called. Each time we treat others as collateral, each time we load a burden onto their backs to make our loads easier, each time we treat people as means and not ends, each and every time – we do little more than draw our own hearts away from the source of life. And we do violence to our relationship with God.

 

It is into a world where that very human behaviour has the upper hand that St John the Baptist speaks. John, who comes to testify to the light, who cries out in the wilderness ‘make straight the way of the Lord’, who calls the people to repentance, to a turning around to see and be seen by the face of God. John who consistently refuses to point to himself but instead to point to Christ, recognising his own unworthiness and yet his clear duty to proclaim the Day of the Lord’s Favour. John, who himself will be imprisoned in no small part because he preached the wrong kind of politics, and who will be killed on the reckless and cruel whim of someone who wished he would stop rocking the boat.

 

Do not despise the words of prophets, says St Paul, but test everything. Do not quench the Spirit.

 

The world – and far too often the church too –has no shortage of self-proclaimed prophets. Yet whether it is in the pages of our newspapers, or on our television screens, or even on the floor of the General Synod of the Church of England, all too often these prophets are prophets of doom. Everything is going down the plughole, and it’s the fault of immigrants, or refugees, or trans people, or gay people, or black people, or whichever other scapegoat comes to mind or will win cheap political points. And all too often those same self-proclaimed prophets pose as self-proclaimed messiahs, too. Yet Scripture reminds us that puffed up and pompous voices are infrequently channelling the still small voice of calm at the heart of the Trinity. Indeed, scripture is rather light on prophets who spend all their time whingeing and blethering – but lighter still on prophets who have nothing to say about justice.

 

The voices of doom, the puffed up and the privileged, are not the prophetic voice of John the Baptist. Indeed, few Biblical prophets worth their salt, including John Baptist, are bothered about being called prophets at all. What they are interested in – what they are focused on – what they are desperate to bring our attention to – is ‘the one who is coming after’, the one who we all too often still refuse to know, despite His invitation to us not to untie the thong of His sandal but to call Him friend.

 

And it is by refusing to despise the words of true prophesy in our own age, it is by endlessly testing and asking first how they might purify our own hearts, that we might recognise the signs of the Spirit in the world and allow ourselves to be pulled along in the Spirit’s stream rather than boxing the Spirit into our own narrow worldview. It is by being open to the Holy Spirit blowing where it will, demanding of us what it will, however difficult or inconvenient or political, that we find ourselves conformed to the Image of God and not the other way around.

 

For make no mistake, the church is no mere extension of social welfare, or a spiritualised social justice – justice itself is first and foremost an outpouring and clear demand of the Gospel, a lived-out commitment to the life of God which flows from the pierced side of Jesus Christ. If we look our neighbour in the face and cannot see God there, then it is not our neighbour who must repent, but we ourselves. If we cannot or will not hear the words of prophecy speaking firstly to us, demanding that we change our own orientation, our own lives, that we confess and repent of our own sins, then what hope have we of being a blessing to others?

 

My dear friends, the one who calls you – who calls us – is faithful. The one who calls us loves justice, to pray without ceasing, to endlessly kick open the doors rather than slam them shut, to be open ourselves to be surprised by joy and the relentless bursting forth of the Kingdom of Heaven. The one who calls us does not do so to condemn or to exclude, but to rejoice. ‘Rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled from the breasts of your consolation.’

 

The call may need us to be courageous beyond our wildest imaginings, but that same call promises more than the even the human heart can comprehend.

 

For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
          and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
     so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise
          to spring up before all the nations.

 

That is full-fat Christianity – justice and all. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.