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Christmas 1
28/12/2025

Psalm 148
Matthew 2:13-23

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Foreword

Hijacking a story

One of the favourite family movies at our place over the years has been Shrek (2001), which is basically a beauty-and-the-beast story, with a few extra twists.

Shrek is the name of a grumpy but otherwise good-souled ogre, who is forced by the evil Lord Farquaad to rescue the beautiful princess Fiona from a high tower in a dragon-guarded castle somewhere, Fiona being whom Farquaad intends to marry. One of the twists, however, is that Princess Fiona has been cursed: while she is beautiful by day, she turns into an ogress at night. This she keeps secret.

Along the journey back after the rescue, Shrek and Fiona find themselves falling in love. Fiona, however, is bound by the need to release herself from the curse, which can only happen at true love’s first kiss. She presumes that, since Lord Farquaad instigated her rescue, he is that true love. For his part, Shrek is bound by the fact that Fiona is, as far as he knows, human and not ogre.

Finally resolving that he loves Fiona regardless, Shrek crashes the wedding. Shrek and Fiona kiss and, because it is love’s first kiss, Fiona’s curse is lifted: she is beautiful again. The twist here is that she takes the form of the ogress – that which Shrek would love all the more. And the two live happily ever after, as the saying goes. Or, at least, they’re happy until the crises arise which precipitate several successful sequels.

In the traditional beauty-and-the-beast story, of course, it is the beast who is transformed into the handsome prince, who then marries the beautiful maiden. A popular animated version of the traditional story was made by Disney a decade before Shrek. And the Shrek movie plays on this, taking the beast-to-human transformation scene of the Disney film and mimicking it, but with the opposite outcome. Whereas in both scenes a “beast” is levitated and spun around and transformed by the lifting of the curse in a circle of brilliant light, in the Shrek version, what descends is not the beautiful princess but the ogress.

You would probably still get the point if you’d not previously seen the Disney version, but to recognise the link between the scenes in the two movies makes the critique of our assumptions about beauty all the more pointed. Shrek says “no” to Beauty and the Beast, and it’s the interaction between the two which gives the later movie much of its grunt.

Now, feel free to forget most of that straightaway, except for the technique of plagiarising what has gone before in order to make a comment on it, or on something else. For this is exactly the kind of thing which is happening in our gospel reading this morning, with its account of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth. We can read these stories “cold”, and understand that this or that particular thing happened. But, to get the point, or even the joke, of what Matthew is saying, you have to know earlier stories of old Israel because Matthew is drawing on what the people already know, to tell who this child Jesus is.

If we miss this engagement with the earlier events and sayings, there is a danger of romanticising the stories and turning them into mere facts about the events of Jesus’ early life. But Matthew’s intention is not simply to tell us that all these amazing and terrifying things happened. More important are the links with what has happened before in the past. It is as if history is repeating itself, although with a difference.

Let’s, then, pause to hear from Matthew’s Gospel…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 2. 13-23)

Word: Proclamation

Once more, with feeling

Matthew tells us that Jesus and his family were forced to go to Egypt, not because he thinks that it’s something we’d like to know, or need to know so that we’ll be nicer to refugees in our own time. They go to Egypt so that they can come back, because when they do, it is just like when the Hebrews were set free from slavery. It is not the Holy Family’s itinerary we are to note but the resonance, and so the meaning, of their movements. In Matthew’s presentation, Jesus is like old Israel itself: loved by God as a parent loves her child, and “saved” from Egypt as Israel was.

Matthew also tells us about Herod’s rage and the killing of the young boys. Again, this is not so that we’ll be more sympathetic to people who suffer these kinds of atrocities. Matthew is more interested in drawing parallels to the well-known birth story of Moses, when exactly the same thing happened. To kill the rumoured deliverer of the Hebrews, the Egyptian Pharaoh had all the young Hebrew boys killed, although Moses escaped; King Herod does the same thing. And so in Matthew’s telling of the story, Jesus is cast as a new Moses.

And our Gospel reading finished with Jesus ending up in Nazareth. Once more, this is not given as mere information. Important for Matthew is that he is then able to call Jesus a “Nazarene”, which may have reminded Matthew’s readers of the Old Testament order of Nazirites, men specially dedicated to serve God. (In fact, the precise reference Matthew intends to make to the Old Testament is not clear, as there is no “He shall be called a Nazorean” line to be found there. The reference to the Nazirites is one possibility (cf. the birth of Samson, Judges 13.5); another is a play on the Hebrew word “neser” in Isaiah 11. 1 (“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch [neser] shall grow out of his roots…”). In any case, the point is the resonance with what has gone before. (And the story of the star of Bethlehem, and the gifts the astrologers bring, are also told not merely because they are actually supposed to have happened, but because they have an important Old Testament precedent, but that’s next week’s reading! ).

Matthew is saying to those to whom he writes: “You’ve heard all of this – this is your heritage – the story of Jesus is your very own story”.

The repeated history is not quite the same, of course. When the old stories and images are revisited, they’re given a new twist, and their meaning is intensified. So, for example, there’s an element of irony – something unexpected – which creeps into this new enacting of the stories: whereas in the original story it was a “foreign” power holding the Hebrews captive, or killing the children, here it’s the royal representative of the people of God himself; the people of God are shown to quite capable of the inflicting the evil they themselves have suffered at the hands of others. It’s not merely a matter of “once more, folks”; but a re-enactment of the old stories which digs deeper than the original did.

Now, if we’re telling a story, we don’t have to do it in this way. Tales which begin with the familiar “once upon a time” just get going, introducing the characters as required, to relate some happening or teach some moral. But it isn’t just accidental that Matthew tells his story in this way rather than in one of the other ways he might have told it. He tells the story this way because this way of telling reflects how God actually enters our lives. When God enters our lives, it’s not as one more piece of information. Christian discipleship is not about learning a lot of facts about God.

When God enters our lives, the things we already think we know – our stories, our histories, our hopes and dreams – are taken and made knowledge of something different.

But it’s not quite that something is added, or that our old knowledge was incomplete. Matthew is seeking to make sense of what otherwise makes no sense. In Jesus, he has encountered something which must be proclaimed, but how? What makes sense of life out of death, the continuing felt presence of the crucified Jesus? The old stories had meaning enough in themselves, but Matthew takes them and applies them to speak about what Jesus now represents. What hi s readers already knew about themselves becomes the basis for understanding what Jesus is: their story becomes wrapped up in his.

Our story for God’s story

But this works both ways. Matthew borrows the old stories to say what Jesus represents. But this changes the old stories in the process. In the case of the scriptural narrative, Matthew’s method makes the old stories look a little like prophecies, and this is probably partly how Matthew understood it. But we don’t have to commit to an overly simplistic prophecy-fulfilment process here. Perhaps a more accessible reading of this dynamic for today is to see what Matthew does as revealing that our stories are open to God’s story. Our stories are steps along the way in God’s own story. If Jesus is not prophesied by the Old Testament stories, those stories are still useful for understanding him because it is the same God at work before and in Jesus.

And the same applies since then. Faith does not look back 2000 years to an experience constrained by the categories of the time. Jesus is the new Israel, the new Moses, for those to whom those identities are absolutely central. Matthew effectively colonises these ideas, borrowing them, hollowing them out and filling them again with Christ. In this way, he makes the history of Israel point to Christ, be oriented towards his appearance.

For us, now, the requirement is not that we become first-century Jews and think about Jesus in the same terms they did. Rather, to come to faith is to begin to see our own stories as the material by which Jesus can be experienced and known. What we have been taught, and have done and suffered, are the basic elements by which Jesus takes shape for us, and so these things become part of Jesus’ own story.

Jesus is given as the key to unlocking our own stories, recasting what has happened to us and reshaping what might yet come of us.

The continuing presence of the crucified Christ, which the Easter church celebrates each Sunday, is an invitation to see our lives re-shaped and re-modelled in this way. This is to recast our past not as a thing which limits us but as something which, in this God’s hands, can become our liberation and the liberation of others. It casts our future not as uncertain and so threatening but as the place where we will meet God, and so as sheer opportunity and possibility.

What we have and are now is where God begins, but God will end in a surprising and enlivening filling-out of who we are, making of our lives in Christ the very presence of God, whether we look like a princess or an ogre. For our story to become entwined with the story of Jesus is the transformation of true love’s first kiss.

Christmas is an invitation: Open yourselves to this one, allow his story to become the true meaning and goal of your own story, and begin being the people of love and hope you were created to be.

This is the gift in Christmas.

Let us receive it, become it, towards our own richer humanity and God’s greater glory.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2025

John 1:1-18

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ForeWord

The playwright Dennis Potter once remarked, “The trouble with words is, you never know whose mouth they’ve been in.”

Our words are always second-hand. They come with fingerprints on them, with scratches and dirt. By their associations – by the other mouths which have uttered them – words always say more, carry more, than we intend or hear.

We hold our words in common, of course, otherwise they’re of no use to us. But they pass between us, virus-like, picked up, replayed, amplified, mutated, infected. And so some words even seem to require that the speaker utter a “trigger warning” before the main event – a kind of pre-word word. The warning flags words which might catch us unawares, upset us, cause us to spill over somehow, because of other mouths they’ve been in.

I’ve been wondering this week about the words which have flowed from the horror at Bondi Beach eleven days ago: “terrorism”, “Australia”, “community”, “hero”, “condemnation”, “innocence”, “antisemitism”, “protest”, “values”, “resistance”, “solidarity”. These seem to be the right words, but they are contested: What is a terrorist? What is antisemitism? What are our values? What is peace?

We understand why these words present themselves. Like ants from a nest upon which some tormenting child has jumped up and down a few times, we are suddenly darting around everywhere, grasping for understanding, out of both a recognition of the crisis and the sense that we must do, must say, something.

But we end up saying again the kinds of things one always says at times like this: words of sorrow, of comfort; words of pain, of condemnation; words of commitment and promise. And so, for all the necessity of such expression, our all too human, Large Language Model AI-like response kicks in with words we’ve all heard before: tired words, for dismal times.

This is our desperate – indeed truly hopeless (Latin: de-sperare) – attempt to wrap in words an experience which has to do with the very failure of words. For what is the violence of guns but precisely the bankruptcy of words – a swearing, a cursing, to signal an otherwise inexpressible hatred or frustration? And do not screams and tears indicate another failure of words to touch the truth, bodies now expressing what words cannot?

Words as law

We use words to grasp, to take hold, but they slip and fail us in this. Because, for our words truly to grasp, they have to be our own words only: fresh, not yet mouthed by others, and so still uninfected with other meanings which cause confusion.

And so, from despair that there might be no fresh words which could break everything open, we reach for the narrowest of words – the words of law: of commissions of inquiry, of prohibition of ownership and gatherings and certain slogans. Law seeks to exclude ambiguity and the risk inherent in having room to move. Law secures. Law is old words, the words of foundation, the rule according to which things should unfold. Law says before we speak. It is the mouth that uttered our words before we came to say them for ourselves.

We need laws, of course. But if the trouble with words is that they’ve always already been in someone else’s mouth, then we who imagine that we have “freedom of speech” have already been spoken before we speak. And so we say, and hear, nothing new, nothing truly free or liberating: merely law, untempered by grace. There is here, then, no penetration to the heart.

Perhaps all this seems rather dismal for Christmas Day! But Christmas is not the time for sentimental wishing away of hard things, for a forgetfulness of the realities of the world in which we live. Guns can menace at Hanukkah, bombs explode at Christmas, missiles rain down in Ramadan. Whatever we are doing here, today, it should not be a hiding from the world, a fearful withdrawal into the shadow of half-truths.

Because it’s into precisely our space – the space of the human with its tainted, slipping words – that our Gospel text today speaks of a certain and unique annunciation, a certain en-mouthing, of [a] Word.

Most of us know this text pretty well – at least, its themes and rhythms. But let’s listen again, towards hearing something new about words, and light, and life, and grace, and truth…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1. 1-18)

Word: Proclamation

The Word among words

In the beginning, the Word.

Note that John doesn’t declare, “In the beginning was ‘a’ word” but rather, the Word. It’s “word”, but not one word among many. And, being in the beginning, it’s [a] pre-word Word – the first thing said – but now not as a trigger warning. This Word-before-all-words is not only the first thing said – the firing of a shot – it is also the last thing, the target. This untainted Word at the beginning remembers not each prior utterance to warn us of what’s coming but remembers rather its future, final use – its purpose, which reaches not backwards for its meaning but forward.

This is the miracle of Christmas: that this child in the manger, this God on a cross, is a new language-ing of our words. By this, I mean that it poses a new and strange grammar for our old words. This grammar is new in that it joins the wrong kinds of things: the human to God, flesh to spirit, grace to law, death to life. It takes what is old, familiar, tired and worn out, and poetises it into something fresh, something new.

Christmas is the possibility of a new thing being said with old, overused words. When John declares that the Word became flesh, he’s not making a statement about a mixing of God-stuff and world-stuff. He’s talking about light flickering forth out of darkness. He’s talking of order taking shape in chaos. He’s talking about a resurrection of the dead, not at the end of the world but here and now, bringing new life and truth to stale words and the chaotic account they effect.

It is less that the Word becomes flesh than revivifies it, makes it alive again. Flesh itself – our flesh – now bears, becomes, the Word, becomes the location of grace and truth.

At least, this is the promise of Christmas, the promise of any decent talk of God’s coming to the world which seeks truly to touch us, to make a difference.

The murders at Bondi unleashed a furore, as they should have. But, like all furores, this one will bring us no closer to grace and truth. We cannot agree on what our words mean, so many mouths have they filled. The furore is really about the words themselves. For this is the trouble with words: they are compromised: they pro-mise contradictory things in different mouths.

Our words are not inherently bad. They are stale. They retain a taste of truth, perhaps, but without grace. But it is the grace we need. It is grace which breaks through as light in darkness; as the sudden, overwhelming appearance of life in the midst of death; as the sur-prise of joy in the midst of despair.

It is of this grace and truth that John writes, identifying its possibility in the appearance of Jesus. We are here today not necessarily because we have felt much of this, or because we have this joy. This is part of the compromising of Christmas: that, these days, Christmas continually tells us that we should be joyful. We are here because we lack but still we long for relief, finally being ourselves but different, our words and actions made new, shifted from a staleness to fullness of life.

And so, we don’t gather today merely to remember – if we even do that. Christmas, rather, poses a question: What would it look like if the fullness of life occurred not despite all that has happened to us or we feel will happen, but in the form of all that? What would it look like if what had been stale now tasted like the best we’ve ever tasted? What would it look like if we, with history’s dirty fingerprints all over us, were nonetheless brought again to fullness of life?

Flesh becoming Word

This is what John means when he speaks of the Word become flesh: grace and truth in the midst of the whole catastrophe. The world looks the same – a baby in a cot, an innocent man murdered – but it feels different. And by “feel” I don’t mean to return to mere sentiment or a denial of the hurt the world often is. “Feel” means, here, a re-entry into our compromised words, but now struggling in speech and action against the confusion all around: grace and truth against law and compromise.

This is not an easy calling. In Jesus’ case, it leads to the cross, and it might feel like that for us, as well. But, one way or another, God kills us all in the end, and so the question is really only, What should we say and do until that time, what shall we be?

Seeing what Christ is, coming into the world, let us seek to be what he is and what he makes possible: Light. Life. Grace. Truth: the unfolding of the very heart of God in the midst of a compromised and contradictory world.

This is the gift, and the call, of Christmas.

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Advent 3
14/12/2025

Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 11:2-11

Sermon preached by Sesi Taunga

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Malo e Lelei and Good morning, Church!

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, a Sunday when the Church invites us to rejoice. Sometimes, just hearing the word Rejoice! can feel a little overwhelming.

Life isn’t perfect. We are tired. We are worried. We are still waiting.

Some of us are hopeful, and some of us are quietly panicking. Advent holds all of that together. It reminds me of Advent in Tonga. Families begin preparing for Christmas months in advance. I remember my grandmother telling me and my cousins. “If we start preparing for Christmas now, by Christmas we will have enough food to feed the whole village.”

My cousins and I looked at each other with worried faces and asked, “Grandma, won’t it all go bad before Christmas?” She laughed and said, “Ah, my grandchildren, that’s Advent. Advent is about hope, preparation, and a little panic.”

We laugh because we recognise ourselves in that story. Advent is life as it really is, messy, joyful, anxious and hopeful. This is exactly the place where God meets us. Not because we are perfect, but because God draws near to our humanity, our fears, our weaknesses, our doubts, and our joy.

Isaiah 35: God Comes to Our Humanity

Isaiah speaks to people who are weary and afraid. He speaks. “The desert shall rejoice and blossom. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knee. Say to those who are of a fearful heart. Be strong, do not fear. God will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35)

When we think about that:

• The desert blooms.
• The weak are strengthened.
• Fearful hearts hear good news.

This is not just poetry. It is eschatological hope, a vision of God’s kingdom breaking into the world as it is. God does not wait for us to be perfect. God does not wait for us to be strong. God comes to the deserts of our hearts, the places where we feel tired, uncertain, or afraid.

But notice something important. Isaiah’s vision is not only for the broken. It is for all of humanity.

God comes to heal what is wounded, but God also comes to bless what is already good. Where there is happiness, God deepens it. Where there is laughter, God joins in. Where there is celebration, God delights. Advent is about God entering the full spectrum of our humanity, not only our mess, but also our joy.

Transition: From Promise to Human Struggle

Isaiah paints a beautiful picture of hope, deserts blooming, weak hands strengthened, fearful hearts comforted. Yet even as we hear these promises, we know life is not always so clearly filled with joy and renewal. Sometimes we long for God’s presence, yet doubt creeps in. We wonder if God’s kingdom will truly break into our world.

This tension between promise and human doubt is where Matthew 11 begins. John the Baptist, the prophet who prepared the way, finds himself in a place of uncertainty and fear. Sitting in prison, he wonders if the One he has proclaimed is truly the Messiah.

He sends a question to Jesus. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Jesus answers him. Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receives their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matthew 11:4–5, NRSV)

Jesus is showing John that the kingdom Isaiah promised is breaking in, and that God’s nearness is visible in these signs of healing, hope, and transformation. This is Advent theology at its heart. God draws near to our humanity, in doubt and in faith, in weakness and in joy.

Reflection: God’s Nearness in Real Places

When we say that God draws near to our humanity, we do not mean this only as an idea. We mean it in real places, among real people.

God’s nearness echoes in our church when we gather to worship, when we pray for one another, when we sing, and when we sit quietly together in silence.

God’s nearness echoes in the hospital, in waiting rooms and hospital beds, in whispered prayers, in the courage of patients, in the compassion of doctors and nurses, in hands that hold other hands.

God’s nearness echoes in our families around kitchen tables, in celebrations and laughter, and also in moments of pain, conflict, and silence.

These are holy places. Not because they are perfect, but because God is present there. This is the mystery of Emmanuel. God with us, in pews and hospital rooms, in living rooms and waiting rooms, in joy and in sorrow, in strength and in weakness. Wherever humanity is deeply felt, God is already drawing near.

Here, the wisdom of a Pacific theologian, Sione ʻAmanaki Havea, resonates deeply. He reminds us that God is never distant from the people. In Pacific life, God’s presence is felt not in separation, but in shared life, in communal meals, in stories told together, in waiting alongside one another, in pain and in celebration. Hope, he says, is something we carry together as a community. This is Advent, God drawing near to our humanity, not in perfection, but in presence.

Reflection: Advent in Our Lives

Advent is not about waiting perfectly. It is about faithful waiting in the midst of real life.

God meets us,

• in our weakness
• in our doubts
• in our imperfect preparations

But God also meets us,

• in family meals and friends’ visits
• in quiet reflection
• in everyday blessings

Think again of that Tongan grandmother’s feast. It may be messy. It may involve a little panic. But it is full of life, full of hope, full of joy.

And in the same way, each of us has our own story. Some stories feel full and loud right now. Some feel quiet, fragile, or unfinished. Some carry grief and loss. Some carry gratitude and celebration. Many of us carry all of these together.

That is exactly how God’s joy enters our lives, not in perfection, but in presence. Not only in our mess, but also in our happiness. This is a deep spiritual truth.

Emmanuel. God with us, is here in all of it. Even in silence, even when we do not know what to pray, God hears the desire of your heart. Your story matters to God. Your waiting matters. Your joy matters. Your pain matters.

Application: Living Advent Joyfully

So, what does this mean for us today?

1. Notice God in the ordinary
   Pay attention this week to God’s presence in simple moments, in meals, conversations, laughter, and silence.
2. Offer God your humanity
   Bring everything to God, your weakness, your doubts, your joys, your fears. Nothing is too small or too messy for God.
3. Rejoice with confidence
   Rejoice not because life is perfect, but because God’s nearness is real. Rejoice because God delights in you exactly as you are.

Call to Rejoice

So today, let us rejoice

• not because life is perfect,
• not because we have no doubts,
• not because our preparations are flawless

But because

God draws near. God is faithful. God meets us in our humanity, our mess, and our joy.
God is Emmanuel, with us.

Let us lift our hearts with joy. Rejoice, for the God who draws near meets us in our humanity

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Advent 2
7/12/2025

Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 104
Matthew 3:1-12

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ForeWord

High spirits

Our little Monday Morning at the Movies cinema group met last week to see The Edge of Life. If you only see one movie per month for a quarter or per year, this is probably one you could afford to miss.

The movie is a documentary concerned with the state of mind of people who have a terminal illness diagnosis, and the possibilities of prescription psychedelic drugs to assist them in their emotional health after such news.

The state of mind of people with such diagnoses is, of course, very often greatly disturbed. And so thinking about how best to assist people in these circumstances must be of the highest order of priority.

And psychedelic drugs sound like they can be pretty good fun, which would surely help at such a distressing time.

Both the experience of knowing how close our death might be and the impact that such drugs might have on our well-being are surely things to be studied closely. But, to me, the most interesting thing about the documentary was the way it interpreted what the drug did for those who have such difficult news to negotiate.

Because the drug has a psychological effect, with various visions and felt impressions, the language of “spiritual” was invoked to interpret the experience of these dying people. The drug, it was proposed, connects ut to something deeper, perhaps, or to a different, spiritual dimension. This was reinforced by crossovers to indigenous cultures in South America, where drugs with similar kinds of effects are routinely taken as part of what is called their spirituality.

Certainly, the illness suffered by the various patients is very real, and we have no reason to doubt their testimony as to what they said they saw in their psychedelic trances, but this is quite different from making connections between their experience and any “reality”. Why should what we experience when lying down on a comfortable bed, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and under the influence of a drug that alters perception – why should what we experience there be any more “real” than the world in which we usually live?

And yet, for no particular reason, the assumption behind the presentation of these various experiences in the documentary was that what happens inside minds loosened up by psychedelics is more real than what happens in our here-and-now world. Such experiences might well be more comforting, but this isn’t the same as it being more real, even if we call this reality a “spiritual” one.

Disturbing spirit

At one level, perhaps, none of this immediately matters: the interest in the use of the drugs was the same as the use of all drugs: to alleviate suffering, which it seemed to do. And it would be fine if we left it at that. But the invocation of a notion of “spirituality” connected to this experience touches upon what we do when we gather like this. And this led me to consider again something you’ve heard me say several times over the years: “spirit” is the second most useless word the church has in its faith vocabulary.

Like all of our god-words, “spirit” is a borrowed word. It has meanings beyond what it might mean, for example, in the church. And we easily succumb to the temptation to jump from one place to another, taking the meaning from the first place to the next, as if the meaning stays the same. “Spirit”, of course, is a church word and so, to that extent, the church is interested in “spirituality”. But words take their meaning not from some internal, fixed notion but from an informing grammar the word takes from its context. And so spirit is not always what we think it is.

In the case of the movies, “spirituality” is a human thing conventional medicine can’t yet measure, a kind of “opposite”, then, of medical science. And so it becomes there a kind of mystical catch-all. Add to this that these unfortunate people are trying to negotiate hard news about the end of life, and “religion” kicks in – the third most useless word the church has.

So, with those thoughts about spirit in mind, we come to our Gospel reading today which, as is the case each Second Sunday of Advent, features the preaching of John the Baptist. The Baptist comes as the forerunner, the herald of Jesus. But more than just announcing that Jesus is coming, the Baptist also announces what Jesus will do. Let’s listen, then, to what it is that John says Jesus comes to do, and this in particular with reference to “spirit”

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 3.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Cleansing spirit

Who John is and what he is doing is of great interest to everyone, and so they stream out to see and to hear. John’s role, however, is not to be noticed but rather to point to Jesus. And he characterises what Jesus will do by contrasting Jesus’ work with his own: “I baptise you with water for repentance”, John declares, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me… He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

This always surprises me – that, in view of all that Jesus does and is said to be in the Gospels, this is the summary statement the (synoptic) Evangelists make of his ministry. Matthew, Mark and Luke each begin their Gospel with this characterisation of Jesus’ ministry: Jesus is the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit (to which Matthew and Luke add, “and fire”).

Here we have an idea about Spirit – about spirituality even. And what does it have to do with the warm spirituality that comes with noise-cancelling headphones and psychedelic drugs? We might suspect, “Not a lot”. There surely is a place for quiet, for withdrawal – for the spirituality of the Sabbath, perhaps. But the Sabbath is only one day in seven. What has spirituality to do with the other six days? It is these days that Jesus comes to address.

Recall what we said last week about apocalyptic thought. This arose from the very pressing existential and political question: How can such things be happening? Where on earth is God? And it is, as such, a “spiritual” question. But it was not asked as a prelude to a retreat from the world, in order to find God; the apocalyptic mind didn’t expect to have to go anywhere. The expectation was that God would come into the world, into the midst of everything. And so apocalyptic thought was an urgent prayer: Come! The later texts in the prophet Isaiah verge on apocalyptic urgency: “You who remind the Lord, take no rest, and give God no rest until Jerusalem is re-established… (Isaiah 62.7)”.

This is spirituality, but now it has to do with the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the times in which we live, the shape of our lives together (German Zeitgeist: time-spirit) – and with the whole of that time and life. But as a spirituality of the whole of our time, it doesn’t propose that God will be sitting around somewhere, that God will become a visible, tangible thing in the world like everything else we see and touch. It proposes the world not as containing God, but as becoming the glory of God.

Human spirit

And what does that mean?

The glory of God, one of the old saints declared, is the human being fully alive. And what does “fully alive” mean? It means something like what Jesus looked like. He baptises with the Holy Spirit because he himself lives in that spirit. And so everything he does is spiritual: the teaching of the people, the arguments with the authorities, the exhaustion after a long, hot day, quiet Sabbaths with his friends, the emerging possibility of his being crucified – surely a terminal diagnosis – and his very dying on a cross. This spirituality is not always comfortable, but when did “spiritual” come to mean “comfortable” in its usual, thin sense?

The spirit to which John points – the Holy Spirit – is a spirit which burns away what is not real, what denies life as distraction or hidden power. Spirit is already everywhere, long before we realise we’re going to die, and so spirituality as escape is not only active in the taking of drugs to ease our troubled minds. It’s there also in drinking ourselves stupid, in weekends lost to unplanned binge-watching, in sexual gratification through porn, comfort chocolate and retail therapy. These are all spirituality as oppression and avoidance.

And, as appealing and fleetingly comfortable as the spirituality of withdrawal usually is, it’s a sign that we are not exactly human beings fully alive.

We know this, I suppose – that we are not fully alive. But the gospel point is that it’s into the normal, troubled humdrum-ness of life that the Holy Spirit is given. And so the apocalyptic vision was not of withdrawn, disembodied, disengaged souls. The vision was of a city – a living, bustling place. We cannot imagine this: that heaven could be bustle – a city with sirens and sewers. We cannot imagine “your kingdom come”, earth as heaven.

But this is the proposal of the gospel, a different kind of Spirit, manifest in the glory of God in the face of one of us, Jesus of Nazareth.

We cannot imagine this. But surely, we want it. We want not to live under the shadow of death and his many friends. We want that the glory of God be manifest in us, in our faces: a light shining and burning as promise of life, even here, even now.

And so we pray with the wild-eyed, apocalyptic prophet and with the church ever since: come, Holy Spirit, come fire, and make us whole.

And all God’s people say…

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Advent 1
30/11/2025

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

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ForeWord

The bad-news apocalypse

Those of you who peruse The Conversation online may have noticed a piece last week reflecting on the impact of AI on writing, and this within the threat of an “AI apocalypse” bringing at least that aspect of human creativity – writing – to an end.

I don’t want to spend too much time today on the question of the AI apocalypse, but rather to note the way in which the word “apocalypse” is used here.

We’ve noted before that the Greek word which gives us our English “apocalypse” has the basic meaning of “from hiddenness” or, more simply, “revelation”. This is lost in our modern usage, where apocalypse is not about revelation but about just one feature of New Testament apocalyptic thought, which is the end of the world as we know it, and the great overcoming of satanic power in the battle at Armageddon.

 

To speak of an AI apocalypse is to reference this kind of radical destruction of the familiar order. On this hearing, an apocalypse is always a bad thing: the AI apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, the environmental apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse. These are breakdowns in the order of things, usually springing from some very human miscalculation.

The good-news apocalypse

This is not how the apocalypse works within the scriptural testimony. Apocalyptic thinking begins to appear late in the Old Testament, where it serves the purpose of answering a pressing question: Where on earth is God?

The question of the faithful was, Why, if we are faithful, do we continue to suffer as we do? This was a question about whether God is faithful, reliable, and righteous, and about where God’s righteousness will be manifest. The hoped-for apocalypse was the revelation precisely of God’s righteousness. And the apocalyptic mind imagined that righteousness would be revealed in the near future: God is imminent.

The classical prophets answered the same question differently. For them, suffering was the result of the people’s sin. The marauding Assyrians and Babylonians who decimated old Israel and Judah were God’s punishment. But the apocalyptic mind separates suffering from guilt and looks for an alternative accounting for the suffering of the faithful: God is absent, away, but coming. The anticipated arrival of God – and with it, the apocalypse of God’s righteousness – was then something to which the faithful looked forward with eager anticipation. All things will then be well.

Of course, such a setting right involves a judgment against what is not right, and those responsible for any not-rightness in the world. This is to say that the coming apocalypse is only good news for those who suffer unjustly, and is bad news for those responsible for the unjust suffering of others.

With this orientation around apocalyptic thinking, then, let’s now listen to the reading from Matthew’s gospel set for today. The first Sunday in Advent always begins with a reading about the approach of God, in apocalyptic terms. Listen for whether the text comes as good news, or perhaps not.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 24. 36-44)

Word: Proclamation

God’s coming as threat

Things arriving at unexpected times are not usually all that welcome: unannounced guests. A heart attack. A stock market crash. A shark in the bay. A fire in the apartment building. Psychologists tell us that our brains are prediction machines: they constantly survey what is happening around us to anticipate what might happen next, and this as a survival technique. Surprises can be dangerous.

It’s in this key that we hear from Jesus, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your lord is coming”.

We don’t get the impression that this is good news. The hopeful anticipation of the arrival of God to set things right is overshadowed by the arrival of God as the threatening thing: “Therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour”. This is the apocalypse we might not want. An element of threat and fear is now introduced. God is coming; shape up. There is something dangerous here.

The idea of the fear of the Lord is politely understated or even dismissed in many modern Christian circles. We would rather say, not that we should fear God, but rather love God: fear is surely bad, and love is good.

But this misses the biblical polemic (for the Bible is always polemical). When the Scriptures speak about the fear of the Lord, the emphasis falls not on “fear” but on “the Lord”. Recalling the notion of “the fear of the Lord” from the Old Testament, the expression “the Lord” is the name of one particular god, among other gods. The point is, Fear the Lord, and not some other god-like thing. It’s like saying, don’t eat chocolate, eat an apple. The assumption is that we will eat something – or fear something – so the question is, What is the best thing to eat, or fear? To speak of the beginning of wisdom as the fear of the Lord, is to say that if you’re going to fear anything in the world, let it be this one.

In this way, the Scriptures pose a theory about us: that the human is a being profoundly given to fears. And these fears make us do things which reduce our humanity and the humanity of those around us. If this is the case – if it is not possible for us to stop fearing – we might as well at least fear that which is ultimately life-giving rather than life-denying. The fear of the Lord is not an addition to whatever else we might already fear, but a revaluation of our fears.

Fear against fear

And so when it comes to our Gospel text today, with its implication that the day and the hour of the coming of God is a time to be feared, the thought is not that God will arrive like AI or a thermonuclear weapon or a roasting climate to disrupt our comfort. It is that our comfort itself is already built upon fear. AI, massively destructive weapons and climate change all have to do with responses we have already made to the fears and desires that drive us. The fear of each other that drives arms races, or the vulnerability and fear of dependence which drives the capitalist economy, or the fear of inconvenience and falling behind which drives the carbon economy – these fears are all very real for us. The fear of rejection by which we push others away. The fear of being overwhelmed by which we justify not doing what we can to help. The fear of judgement which keeps us quiet when something should be said.

But Jesus’ call to be ready for the arrival of God is not the announcement of another front on which to defend ourselves. If the arrival of God is to be feared, it is not for fear’s sake. It is in order to be released from other fears.

Why we do what we do is very much a question of what we fear. If we think and act wrongly – and moral thought and action are important undertones to what Jesus says here – it is for fear of what happens if we don’t. And so the issue gospel apocalyptic seeks to address is less what we are or aren’t doing than why: what fears and anxieties do our moral failures address?

God’s arrival, then, is not merely about reward or punishment – if at all. For those of us – most of us – in the wrong place, God’s arrival is a setting free. What we need from God is that God might set us free from our fears, and from what we do to settle those fears. To fear the Lord is to stop fearing other things. It is to see that we are often in the wrong because we have feared the wrong things.

But freedom from fear is not easy. Freedom from fear is hard just because we have so much invested in keeping fear at bay. Sovereign borders, financial investments, insurances, locks, passwords and secrets – such things protect our way of living, secure our health and longevity, ensure our reputation, safeguard the stuff we might still need.

For most of us, this is all so deeply embedded in how we live that we have forgotten that it’s there. But the revelation – the apocalypse – of God is a revealing also of the nature of the world and the powers within it. It’s because these powers are great and oppressive in the world that we have vivid biblical images not of “apocalyptic” struggles but of liberating struggles. Freedom from the powers we fear in the world is the revolution we need. The biblical apocalypse reveals not only the searing righteousness of God but the freedom of the children of God.

Do we not need to be set free? If we pray, is it not precisely for liberation from fear and oppression?

It is into such a world as ours that God does not threaten but promises to come.

As we hear Jesus’ call to stay awake, then, let it not be for fear’s sake.

Let us, indeed, examine ourselves – our commitments, our investments in life, our permissions, our hesitations – but not for fear that God might catch us unawares.

Let us rather do this towards the freedom from fear we need, and towards becoming ourselves signs of the proximity, the in-reach, freedom and fullness of life God will bring.