The Rev’d Richard Browning
Malachi 3.1-4
The Song of Zechariah
Philippians 1.1-11
Luke 3.1-6
In the name of God, Dreamer, Dream and Breath. Amen.
If we are in the business of dreaming, fire is really helpful. Humans have been at it for millennia. Nestled by darkness the flames dance and shake and shoot up with delight, kicking sparks that spiral towards the stars. Dreaming and fire are companions. So, when was the last time you made a fire? There is an art to it. Something like newspaper is scrunched and bunched then little sticks, not even kindling is next, then kindling and sticks then bigger sticks until you get to a decent log that can hold the fire. This is called a nest. Too many little sticks too long and the fire expires into sheets of smoke. Too many heavy sticks too early and the fire won’t catch. It is necessary to be able to catch then keep the flame. Making a nest is a skill not all can master, but I offer it as a picture for our Advent work: building a nest sufficient to be ready, that in the coming of Christ, we can catch and keep the flame.
Our church holds up Advent as an invitation, an exhortation even, to be real about our world and who we are in it. Like God, we too are a verb. But not in the ‘you can always be better, do better’ kind of self-improvement grind. More the ‘honest questioning kind about project humanity’: if God becomes what we are, then what are we?
Making a nest to catch and keep the fire is about honouring God’s great in-breaking: God becomes human, how are we going?
Today’s readings introduce some advent trepidation – nothing like a touch of the apocalyptic to train our attention. As Malachi writes “Who can stand before the Lord? Who can endure?” The extremes of levelled mountains and raised valleys introduces the baptiser, whose work is to make crooked paths straight. Next week we shall hear John kick off with the attention grabbing ‘You brood of vipers’. The Baptiser owns the role of announcer and fully appropriates the prophet Isaiah who after pointing to the leveling of valley and mountain continues:
“All flesh is grass,
And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades … surely the people are grass.
(Chpt 40)
“God is good and we are bad” is the vibe of it.
The opening of Paul’s letter to the Philippians Paul is on point: purity, blamelessness, righteousness. If he were made in the mould of John and Malachi he would kick on with something like:
“remain firm in the narrow path of righteousness,
be zealous in your fight against sin
and fierce as you purge every hint of moral impurity.”
But he doesn’t. Paul says, “this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more”, with knowledge to know how to act.
There is the point of an Advent nest, to catch the fire where our verb is to love, and overflow more and more. The vibe is now more:
God is good and becomes human.
The becoming human bit and our transformation into greater love is not a gushy marsh-mellowy loveliness. Look at the world and ourselves. Look to the week just past and ask questions. How can a banana gaff taped to the wall sell for $9M, and the purchaser eat it, thinking he has become an installation? What of our consumerist culture makes this perversity possible?
Or on our own soil, what is it in our shared lives that makes a firebombing of a Jewish synagogue possible? This cowardly contemptible act is indefensible. How do we stand with Jews and their faith in solidarity? The targeting and scapegoating of a people can never be tolerated. Ever.
Which also means voting for Palestinian statehood is the right thing. Standing up for International Law is the right thing. As we make our Nativities and put out our Bethlehem stables, we cannot ignore the fact that Bethlehem is a walled city[i]; apartheid is the life of Palestinians, in Bethlehem, in the West Bank; and all the while Gaza is being cleared like an outback scrub, felled by a great chain pulled between two bulldozers, where everything in its path is torn, torn up, torn apart, torn away. Some say such talk is courageous. Others say reckless. Why is it either?[ii]
Cole Arthur Riley puts the Advent nest making on its square, but uncomfortable footing when she writes:
“If our spirituality does not demand beauty and liberation for every person and piece of the cosmos then it is not God we are seeking, but a shallow ritual of self-soothing.”[iii]
There is no season in the Christian calendar for self-soothing.
Recently I was asked by an emboldened child: so what does God do?
Become human is the answer of the season. This is what we get ready for!
God is powerful, generative, generous, compassionate without limit. But the impending Christmas story makes plain, humanity is an attribute of God.
The “central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation”, C.S. Lewis.
“The fundamental revelation is this: God is human”, Walter Wink.
Wink continues: “We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can only dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness.”
We are at peace with war making. We are happy with killing, mass killing, so long as it is over there, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria. War is a failure. War is an economy. War is a strategy, a culture, a habit, a desire, an investment opportunity.
Wink concluded: “Only God is human, and we are made in God’s image and likeness — which is to say, we are capable of becoming human.”[iv]
There is our Advent nest making:
we are capable of becoming human,
becoming the verb Christ became.
When we say Christ is alpha and omega (Revelation 22.13) we are saying that before the beginning and after the end, Christ was and will be. Without the Christ, nothing that is made is made! In Christ all things are held together, which means every era of the 14 Billion years of the planet exists in Christ.
What does God do? Make possible the necessary conditions for life.
What does God do? Pour everything out in love:
Christ is the Light from whom all light shines,
the Life from whom all life is breathed,
the Language in which all languages are spoken.
Christ is the forever story, playing out all the time everywhere.
Christmas is the natural eruption of God’s authenticity. There is no such thing as conceptual authenticity. Authenticity is always embodied[v]. Which is to say, the God from God, the Eternal Christ was always going to be made of flesh. And Jesus is the face, the hands, the heart of God from God, the eternal Christ, Son of Man, truly human.
This might sound all a bit much. Consider it this way. When we peer into the Scriptures, there are always two stories occurring simultaneously. One is eternal, the other historical. The historical story of Jesus points to, illuminates and is filled with the eternal story of Christ. No wonder we need weeks to prepare. This nest we ready has an extraordinary flame to catch. The story we anticipate is wild and should take our breath away every time we speak it: The eternal Christ breaks into history and is born Jesus, child of Mary, son of Man, true Human. There in Bethlehem among animals and before Bedouin sheep keepers the eternal Christ breaks in. These first witnesses will go and see this thing, this Jesus, the perfectly and fully embodied eternal Christ.[vi]
What does God do? Make possible the necessary conditions for life.
What does God do? Become human.
What does God do? Embody love in person.
What does God do? Call us into fullness of humanity and loves us into the same.
The next question is clear: what does humanity do? What are our verbs? Whatever they are, ready the nest for the incoming fire that is Christmas:
We must grow beyond vengeful, violent reactivity;
our hearts must expand and love, more and more;
our desire must be for the beauty and liberation of the whole of creation;
our becoming human is the glory of God.
The eternal Christ addresses us in this moment
with a love that burns like a fire
and liberates us to become what Christ became:
wholly and truly human.[vii]
[i] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2020/7/8/in-pictures-israels-illegal-separation-wall-still-divides
[ii] See below for further reading on recent events regarding Palestine. The us of the word ‘genocide’ is not controversial, but it causes some to stop listening. Instead I chose to paint a picture of land clearing. It is how we most efficiently clear fell forest, two huge dozers and one massive chain between them. Nothing substantial survives. The reports are clear, printed even in Haaretz, the Jerusalem newspaper now boycotted by the Knesset. If not courageous or reckless, what? The vibe of the sermon would propose “human”.
[iii] Cole Arthur Riley, author of Black Liturgies and “This here flesh”.
[iv] p. 102 Wink, “Just Jesus, My struggle to become human”.
[v] This is at the heart of Gabor Maté’s work on healing through trauma, see “The Myth of Normal”.
[vi] This paragraph draws heavily on the thinking and writing of Alexander John Shaia.
[vii] Sarah Bachelard’s writing has also been a helpful background in the preparations for this sermon.
Recently on Palestine:
- https://press.un.org/en/2024/ga12661.doc.htm
- https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-12-05/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/massive-database-of-evidence-compiled-by-a-historian-details-israels-war-crimes-in-gaza/00000193-979b-d408-a7d3-bfdbf1410000