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Baptism of Jesus
9/1/2022

Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

A favourite image on Christmas cards is the three magi with their unsuitable baby-presents gathered at a safe distance around the manger. It is a kind of tableau, a vivid image placed before our eyes, and has been a favourite with artists. And we are right to gaze in adoration on the epiphany in the mother and child, remembering Whose Child he is. But since the magi were late, the western churches remember them after twelve nights if we observe them at all.

It’s very different for Eastern Orthodox Christians, for whom cribs and magi are mere preliminaries and the focus is on the baptism of Christ, today’s theme. You often see a photo in the media of the ceremony on the Bay where the bishop hurls a cross into the water and some swift swimmer rescues it. Anglo-Saxons look on this ethnic display with astonishment.

The word ‘epiphany’ in Greek means a manifestation of God, and the Orthodox more precisely call it Theo-phany. In these moments, God is revealing something of Godself – in the birth of the Christ Child, in the young Jesus stepping down into the waters of the river Jordan.

Today we read Luke’s description of the baptism. The same notably brief account appears in all four gospels. We meet the strange figure of John, later given the title ‘the Baptizer’ because that is what he believed God had called him to do – that, and scare the living daylights out of an already fearful and subject people. Our lectionary leaves out most of Luke’s darker summary of the message (but so do the other gospels).

To be fair, John did preach about judgement – about the winnowing-fork and threshing floor, the separation of the grain and the burning of the chaff – but, unlike some modern preachers, he does not leave them without hope. The gospels use the same phrase for the first message of both John and Jesus: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!’ The first step for that crowd was to wash themselves in the Jordan.

But that’s not the epiphany. That follows Jesus’ baptism. There, a very striking tableau is revealed. Listen again:

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized/ and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²²and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Only Matthew records John’s objection to Jesus asking for his baptism. Of course, the human being who uniquely shared the holiness of God had no need to repent – and Paul captures the reason, when he writes to the Philippians, ‘Christ Jesus… though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.’ Of course, he stepped into the water with the slaves who were certainly in that crowd.

But look at the actual epiphany: Jesus, standing in the water, praying to the One he called ‘Abba, Father’, as the Holy Spirit visibly descended on him, and God’s voice was heard addressing Jesus: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. An ikon indeed, God revealed.

We tend to think of the link of baptism with the Trinity being in Matthew’s formula: Go, teach, ‘baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, but the three-actor image in the other three Gospels makes this ancient doctrine just as clear. This was an event in the life of the fullness of God, the triune God of love. This is the key to the birth of all Christians, of the way the Church reproduces itself.

Our reading from Acts this morning shows that there was a period when the earliest Church was sorting the liturgical details out. Some simply baptised ‘in the name of Jesus’ (v.16). Some indeed ’had not even heard there was a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2). Luke-Acts is doing some necessary tidying up.

Now let me ask a modern question, a liturgical one in fact.

A moment ago, I added another facet to my words about water. Water cleanses, purifies, and gives health; it also slakes thirst and refreshes. But now add birth. We are conceived and grow in the waters of our mother’s womb, and we are gently bathed. But then water is as dangerous as it is life-giving, as recent news about summer drownings attest.^[1] All symbols have multiple layers of meanings; they catch the attention and open the eyes in fascinating ways and lead us into deeper understandings. An early writer called the font both ‘womb and tomb’. Jesus left us the Gospel and two sign-acts which use physical elements, water, bread and wine. Sacraments.

Now, my question, perhaps an uncomfortable one.

What kind of epiphany accompanies our contemporary celebrations of baptism? In what ways does modern baptism proclaim the richness of its meanings? We usually achieve one: washing, but if our children came back from the bathroom after using three droplets of water, we’d send them back. It’s hardly bathing and it’s no threat to life. The dimension of cross is invisible. We are a long way from Jordan and the practice of the church for the first thousand years, evidenced in their generous fonts.

The change began as soon as the majority of Christians were adults. They naturally wanted their children to stand under the same gospel sign. And where there is a hope that children will be brought up in close connection with the faith, lived by their parents, I still think that is appropriate. Our present secular culture certainly does not assist that growing in faith as it once did; quite the opposite.

Our received church culture also became rather sentimental about babies, and baptism even became a social occasion, to be followed by a sherry party. But given that baptism of infants has almost totally disappeared from our society and churches, I want to suggest that rescuing baptism from all that polite custom, is necessary for evangelization and mission today.  If we are a church planning for the future, we will be baptizing adult converts. I see few signs of that in the Uniting or other churches, except for Roman Catholics.^[2] Our worship book, Uniting in Worship-2 (2005) has adapted their program for our use, but it is largely ignored.

My point is not to dig up ancient rituals, but to recover the living symbols which served the church well until now; it has nothing to do with the amount of water used; the Holy Spirit is quite capable of working with three droplets or none!

The old ikons show little fishes swimming around Jesus, deep in the water. They are there because they have seen and felt and known the Christ of the epiphany and are reborn. They are us.

In the crowds around us here and now are grown-up, educated and self-aware human beings, seeking salvation, wholeness of life, for an alternative to the destructive philosophies of our time. There are also those who are none of those things, the marginalised, the neglected and the poor.  For all these, the God of love gives the church the means to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (Rom. 12:2) in and through the experience of our faithful worship, by words, yes, but also in sacred signs, in the overflowing font and in the breaking of the bread.

[1] John promises that Jesus will baptize with fire (the Holy Spirit), and fire has this double meaning too: both the revivification of the bush and its modern devastation.

[2] The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (1976) is a process which arose from the research and teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It is sometimes called the ‘Catechumenate’.

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Christmas 2
2/1/2022

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:10-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

Happy new year, he said with as much optimism as he could muster. Optimism may be difficult, but fervour for a better year goes without saying. How else could it be as we stagger through a world pandemic as it climbs its way through the Greek alphabet. Even hearing me instead of Matt preaching is a symptom of the uncertainty that dictates our plans and expectations. We do have a reminder in our Sunday worship each week that the world has been here before. We hear, almost daily, of ways to tackle and live surrounded by this virus. Little individual wine glasses at the communion table were one of the answers our forebears came up with for living with the Spanish flu in church. Most protestant churches never let them go. I hope masks don’t hang around like the little glasses. We prayed about this a few weeks ago as we sang ‘Immortal, invisible’. I am sure I wasn’t the only one who smiled as we sang the line, ‘take the veil from our faces…’. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was smiling – you were all wearing masks.

Of course, the prolonged disaster attacking the world population is just an extra added to the regular fires and floods and wars and geotectonic eruptions and other disasters that beset humankind. It is as if our race is continually battling universal eco-systems and malignant social systems. It often feels they are not on our side. The rottenness of all this seems more devastating, more unfair, at times of festivity – Christmas, New Year, summer holidays.

Remember nearly 50 years ago when Cyclone Tracy struck. At 2 am on Christmas morning winds of around 180 kph hit Darwin and devastated the city until 5.30 – 3½ hours of horror. People huddled in their houses as their homes disintegrated around them. Sixty-six people died. The hospital and churches were extensively damaged. The naval patrol boat HMAS Arrow capsized and sank and all communications with the rest of the world was broken.

So it was on Christmas morning 1974 as Australia and the world waited to hear what had become of Darwin a Christmas service was broadcast from the John Flynn Memorial Church in Alice Springs. The minister was a lover of Dr Zeuse books and that morning he told one of the stories to the children in church. While waiting for news from Darwin the outback of Australia heard the story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, a strange green monster who hated all happiness, especially the happiness that Christmas brings. He felt sure that if he could steal all the Christmas gifts and take them high up into his mountain hideaway there could be no Christmas because there would be no happiness.

As the story was being told on radios across the outback the people of Darwin were sifting through the tangled wreckage where Christmas gifts and decorations and dinner plans were all mixed up together with their clothes and furniture and hopes and dreams – all blown away. Surely the Grinch had done his worst.

Children’s stories must have happy endings. In Dr Zeuse’s tale the Grinch’s plans were foiled because to his dismay the sound of laugher could still be heard down in the valley on Christmas morning even though there was not a gift to be found. The Flynn Memorial Congregation and the outback folk who listened in were reminded that Christmas joy does not come by way of our festival traditions.

In Darwin as that story was being told its truth was being tested in churches whose roofs and walls had blown away. Every church expects to have more people at worship on Christmas morning than at any other time. Christmas Day 1974 in ruined Darwin churches congregations turned out in full. All the trappings of celebration had been stolen but people gathered anyway, to give thanks to God that he had come to them in Bethlehem.

Neither the Grinch nor Tracy could steal away the essential heart of what makes Christmas joyous. Singing carols in Darwin did not restore one house or put the lights back on one tree. Typhoid broke out 2 days later. The Uniting Church minister who conducted Christmas worship in his ruined church conducted funerals for many who had died. He led worship in the only clothes he had, his shorts and shirt. Christmas brought no magic to that disaster. But within that disaster even the mystery that God is on our side could be celebrated. God is on our side.

We long for a return to a covid free life. We pray for deliverance from pestilence. We follow our call as disciples of Jesus to aid healing and recovery. But nowhere are we promised that this world will experience freedom from systems that gang up against us. Not even all our prayers will evoke such a promise. The promise is that that God in Christ is on our side. God is with us. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Another disaster story. I was chaplain in the casualty ward of Warrnambool hospital on the night of the Ash Wednesday fires. The waiting room was filled with people smeared with grey ash. A nurse emerged from a cubicle. Her forehead was smeared with grey ash – in the shape of a cross. Before her evening shift at the hospital, she had gone to church where her priest had traced a cross in oil and ash on her face. For all to see, amidst trauma and death, she wore the message that the suffering Christ is with us.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Will this new year be happy? Who knows? Will it be accompanied by the suffering, dying, resurrected Christ? Yes, he said with all the assurance of faith.

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Christmas 1
26/12/2021

Genesis 3:1-24
Psalm 130
John 1:1-14

In a sentence:
The incarnation is not about God ‘invading’ our space but making our space truly a place for us

In 1978 there probably appeared in a milkbar very near to you a “Space Invaders” game machine. Very cool!

It had a left-right movement lever, a single large plastic firing button, monotone 8-bit graphics and a gripping soundtrack. Space Invaders was a whole new world to the average 13-year-old of the day – not that this 13-year-old could afford to play it very much, but that was beside the point. It was, again, very cool.

Space Invaders was a shoot-em-before-they-get-ya game. The enemy was a space invader in a double sense: first and most obviously, it was an invader from outer space. Such invaders are nearly always bad. Second, and a little less obviously, it was a coloniser: the space enemy sought to occupy our space. These invaders are always bad.

But with this second sense, “space” itself needs to be stretched in meaning. When our space is invaded we are not dis-spaced but dis-placed. Space is too arid a concept to capture the loss of being dislodged. The coloniser sees space and takes it, but those already there lose not only their space but their place. Place is lived space – a home as distinct from a house. The violence of the coloniser includes the dissolution of place. The invaders might justify the invasion in terms of their need for “Lebensraum” (the Nazis) – living space – or that they are reclaiming lost space (Israel and the Chinese, among others). Yet space-invasion is violent nonetheless. In modern geopolitics, this kind of invasion is now relatively rare, but the experience of a challenge to place continues through the rise of the modern refuge; the refugee is an invader with moral rather than military claims on our space and place.

Space is not quite place. This difference is not merely [spatial] but is also social and psychological. Have we not felt displaced under the shadow of the virus these last couple of years? The COVID context aside, what we considered yesterday also relates to the distinction between space and place: wanting our lives to be comedic, but suspecting that they might be tragic. These are alienations in our own space – displacements even as our space stays the same.

But our sense of displacement is scarcely new. In the creation myth in Genesis 2, Adam is “placed” in the Garden and – by the end of chapter 3 – is again dis-placed with Eve as they are driven out of Eden. This displacement is marked with a number of curses: the joy of having children becoming a source of great pain, the distortion of the mutuality of human relationships and the struggle between us and the earth. These woes are not because of a “historial” expulsion from Eden but mark our experience that things are not right, the experience of having space but not quite place. This is our world, but it is against us; these relationships constitute us, but they are always troubled.

What Genesis 2 and 3 describe is the reverse of where the creation narrative of Genesis 1 began: in the beginning is not nothing but a chaotic, deep void. This is “mere” space into which God speaks to create place. With the Fall, however, space without place “returns”. Adam and Eve only know place before the Fall; the tension between space and place first appears in Genesis 3. From the point of Genesis 4 – from our point of view as the children of Adam and Eve – displacement is all we have known, and it is uncomfortable. From there, the human being fanned out into the world to fill it with cities, to invade each other’s spaces, and to invade the heavens. The Genesis pre-history portrays space as distorted place into which God doesn’t quite fit, or us. What we come to call “the human condition” is just this displacement. In a world like this, God is alien, and we are too. Most of the time, God is not present and, when present, it is only to “intervene” – to “come among” – before departing from our space again. Such an interventionist God is the space invader par excellence. The soundtrack to the old video game is suddenly the tune for a Christmas carol.

It is within a world like this that we hear from John’s gospel: “And the Word became flesh…” After Genesis 3, this can only mean: the Word invaded the world, for the world is now not a natural place for God. “He came to what was his own”, John writes, “but his own rejected him. ” Compromised space does not easily recognise the place which God makes. The crucifixion is a radical displacement of Jesus from his place among the people, casting him out of even that compromised place into a mere space outside the city. In the crucifixion, we read God’s approach as an invasion, and we reject it.

What happens when the place-making God is thrust into outer space – the cross, outside the city, formless and void? Is the cross a Godless space or a God-filled place? We are at the crux (cross! ) of Christian faith. The question is not, Did God enter the world at Christmas. Or rather, this is the question, but it is the same as the Easter question: Is the place-making God attached to the space of the cross?

Our answer to this is everything, which is why the Creed hammers the Christology: God from God, light from light, through him all things were made. This is not about getting mere theology right for its own sake, whatever that could mean. All of the extraordinary things said about Jesus in the Creeds are said about the one who is crucified – whose story looks finally to be tragedy, to recall what we considered yesterday. The question answered here is whether the harsh space of the cross – or the radical humility of a manger – can be the creative place of God.

Pastorally – in connection to us – the question asked is whether our experience of displacement is within God’s healing reach.

And the answer is, Yes.

God is not absent, occasionally invading our space. Rather, God makes place. God creates a “rest in peace” which is not death and the loss of all space and time but peace in time and space. As in Genesis 1, so also here: the deep empty of our displacement – in this God’s hands – can be made to be place and life.

John might have written: “He came to what was his own, but his own space‑d him. But to all who did receive him, he gave place as children in the family of God” (cf. John 1. 12f).

Is there a home in the world, or are we just invaders of space who must yet fear now being invaded by God or some other threat?

God has “made his dwelling among us” John writes. God comes home in the place­­‑d incarnation. As Adam was placed in the Garden, Jesus is placed among us, naming us as God’s own place, making flesh – our flesh – into Word.

Let us, then, make place for God, and for each other.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2021

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-7

In a sentence:
God lays us in the manger of the world with a promise to bring us through all things, back to himself.

Every generation throws up its own questions about God. Over the last couple of months, I have found myself pondering one of the pressing theological questions of this age. Most simply, that question is, Does God have Netflix?

Of course, this question concerns not only Netflix but extends to the providers of any video streaming service. And we note that there are those who would insist that heaven is illuminated by the glory of God and not by the ghostly glow of LED flat screens and that, besides, surely God reads books rather than watches TV. But such objections need not be seriously entertained.

Now, while the question of a divine streaming subscription has continued to nag at me, part of the difficulty in answering it was that it wasn’t clear to me why the question mattered at all. However, I have begun to suspect that the problem to which this question points is that of divine omniscience: the theory that God knows all things. We have all had the experience of sitting down to a movie or a book, only to realise 30 minutes or a few chapters into the story that we have seen or read it before. This must surely be the experience of the all-knowing God – Every. Single. Time: “Oh, I think I’ve already seen this! ” So far as an omniscient God goes, what would be the point of watching or listening to a story if you know how it’s going to end?

Putting that question on hold for a moment, we can contrast this divine experience with our own. We would love to know the end of our own stories. To know our own end would not be simply to have information; it would be to know how to live here, in the middle of our story, anticipating that end. Our sense for the end colours our experience of the middle – our experience of life here and now.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we generally anticipate our lives will turn out to be tragedies. – that, finally, things will not turn out well. Suspecting this, we gravitate towards comedy. The sense of comedy we mean here is not “funny” or “amusingly entertaining” but the narrative sense of comedy. A comedy is a story that starts high, moves through a deep low and then rises to finish at least as high again. (We spoke earlier in the year of “the comedy” of Job in this sense). In contrast, a tragedy starts high and ends low.

The prospect of tragedy is everywhere. Global warming is one such threat – lush forests reduced to dry dust; in a different way, the possibility of a very long tail to the COVID-19 pandemic is another looming tragedy – freedom and predictability gone. And, of course, no one gets out of this life alive.

The prospect of living a tragedy is scarcely bearable, so we seek comedic distractions and diversions from the dismal here and now. We turn away from the present, from our own story. In its worst manifestations, we descend into living through other people’s more uplifted lives. So-called “reality TV” is about someone else’s reality. If the glow of LED screens doesn’t illuminate heaven, it can serve as something of a secular “opiate of the masses” – a diversion from the dreary prospect that, for us at least, things might not get much better. There are, of course, more positive reasons for watching TV or reading books. But when the CEO of Netflix observes that the service’s principal competitor is the human need for sleep, we might suspect that escaping the world – to the point of denying our own biological needs – might have more than a little to do with the booming success of the streaming services.

The choice of a life lived in distraction reflects the experience or suspicion that our own story is finally tragic, without meaning. Our stories are not interesting enough that anyone would want to watch them. We seek, then, to be entertained – entertained, in the sense of amused rather than in the sense of being considered – as we might “entertain” a thought.

Now, while media consumption can be mere distraction, distraction is the purpose of reading Scripture. The Scriptures are there also to distract us from tragedy by telling us a comedic story – that of Israel and Jesus. There is, though, no LED opiate here to null the pain of the life. We are not to “borrow” the lives of those in the biblical story but to live them: to see our own lives as hidden in God, with Jesus. Live this life – the kind of life Jesus lived. Why? Because the life of Jesus is the defining comedy. It begins with all the promise of a babe-in-arms, descends to the crucifixion and ends with the resurrection. This last – the resurrection – is not a “reversal” of the crucifixion in the middle but signals that God’s love is the context of the whole of Jesus’ life: even the cross is not outside of this.

Faith in this God, then, is a conviction as to how our story ends. However, we hold this conviction only in the middle of the story, where we are buffeted from the comic to the tragic and back again, more than a little given to wonder how things will, in fact, end. Sometimes the best we hope for is a little comic relief. Christmas seems to have been cast as something like this in our culture: a gasp of air before we descend under the waters again.

But the central question of our lives is this: are we living a tragedy or a comedy? This question doesn’t ask about what it feels like here and now. It is a long-game question – not of experience but of conviction. And it matters because our conviction about the end of the story changes our experience of the story here and now. If our life is finally a comedy, then “Lift up your heads”. If our life is finally tragedy, then it is perfectly sensible to make the ride as easy as possible with whatever works: drugs, travel, sex, chocolate or distraction-by-media.

Our gospel reading today – as always on Christmas Day – has Jesus laid in a manger. Our focus here is often on the “outcast” Jesus, born at the margin, a manger in a stable being a sign that he had no real place among us.

But we are all born into a manger: the world in which we are placed. And to the extent that we think our lives are finally tragic, we are all cast to the margin, from which we watch someone else’s more comedic passage through life.

It is given – it is the “law”, we might say – that God has laid us in a manger. And we open our eyes and wonder what is going to happen, and our first breath becomes a crying out for fear of it all. But it is the gospel that this God has laid us in a manger. This is gospel because, with this God, all lives are finally comedies. They are comedies because God is watching. It is when God watches that we have life. For God is no mere voyeur seeking distraction, and neither does God watch to oppress, accuse or condemn – all tragic outcomes. Instead, God watches with an attentiveness that brings life and does not give it up.

And so God doesn’t need Netflix. God has us – a divine comedy in the making – and God watches with intense interest. For ours is a story the end of which God both knows and does not know. God doesn’t know the end because it is truly our story – yours, mine, ours. And it is not yet finished.

But God does know the end because God watches not for distraction but for traction: to pull us towards life. Or, to put it differently, God watches not merely to be entertained by us but to entertain us: to consider us. God watches as much for our sake as for God’s own.

Jesus laid in the manger is God entertaining us – not for our distraction but considering us. And God looks to us now to entertain Jesus: to contemplate him. Because in his story we see God entertaining us, considering us, and the gospel makes this attention the ground of our being: that God sees us. Faith is seeing that God sees us, and resting in that. Faith sees in Jesus God and us, together on the great rising arc of a divine comedy which begins wherever we do and takes us wherever we go but always ends in peace.

When God is watching, whatever is laid in a manger ends up in heaven – even us.

From the manger, then, lift up your eyes to meet the gaze of God, and choose a life the ending of which not even God knows except that it ends with life.

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Advent 3
12/12/2021

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Psalm 23
Luke 1:7-18

In a sentence:
The Holy Spirit is given to renew us in the midst of a world which seems to be without God.

With today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, we find ourselves once again in the strange world of apocalyptic thought.

Foreign though it is, we don’t have to try hard to find points of correspondence between that strange world and the estrangement in our own. The threat of climate change presses ever more closely upon us, as does the ongoing impact of COVID-19. In response to our chequered past, questions of restorative justice continue to threaten the future we presumed to be ours. Gender wars fill the papers, as do diplomatic tussles reflecting troubling shifts in international balances of power.

Just as the apocalyptic prophets of biblical times tell their hearers to look to the signs of the times, so also do we read the signs – the patterns in the weather, the number of cases each day, the latest mutation – all to understand where we are and what is coming next.

John’s apocalyptic language, then, is perhaps less strange to us than might first seem. At least in the frightening aspects of the apocalyptic outlook, we see something of ourselves and our experience of our own times. Yet, what troubles we see on the horizon today are “merely” troubles. There is nothing in what is going on around us which could make sense of the conclusion of our passage today: “So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” Whatever our trials and tribulations, there is good news in the preaching of the apocalyptic prophet.

As we’ve noted before, the apocalypse is properly not the dramatic, attention-grabbing shaking of all things but the revelation of God which comes with it: the revelation of God’s glory and the setting right of history. This is not a threat but rather something for which the people are longing. This is the “good news” – the gospel – in what John announces.

In the midst of all this, we hear in John’s preaching something which almost passes without notice but which we will consider today: “I baptise you with water … but one is coming who baptises with the Holy Spirit and fire”. The difference between what John is doing as a prophet of the old era and what Jesus will do as a prophet of the new is that Jesus brings the Holy Spirit.

The coming of the Holy Spirit, then, is part of the apocalypse or revelation of God. And when it comes, what happens? Jesus “happens”. The Spirit with which Jesus will baptise is the Spirit which comes upon him in his own baptism by John. Of course, Jesus has already “happened” at this point – he has been born and lived perhaps 30 years. Yet the connection between Jesus and the Spirit made explicit here (and in his birth – consider the descent of the Spirit on Mary in Luke’s narrative account) is crucial for what he is: the presence of God in the form of a piece of the world. In Jesus, God looks surprisingly like one of us.

This means that he has himself become the bearer of the apocalypse – the revelation of God – even as he is. What we see here is less a new age than a renewal of the age – a renewal of human possibility. This holds up even to the point of the crucifixion. What then happens by, around and to Jesus happens for him as the one on whom the Spirit rests.

Why does all this matter?

It matters because, for the things which trouble us today, resolution is only available to us tomorrow – that kind of tomorrow that never comes. Stark apocalyptic thought was also like this – now is the time of tribulation only; peace is coming tomorrow. God is presently – truly – absent, and we are on our own. God is coming, the enthusiast affirms, but right now we are truly alone.

But the New Testament baptises apocalyptic thought, soaking it in Jesus. To say that the Spirit-soaked Jesus baptises with that same Spirit is to say that God’s coming is here and now. The Holy Spirit is the means and the extension of the apocalypse, of the revelation of God. By itself, the world is not a sign of God, and neither are the signs of the times. We might well try to read the signs of the time, but we do just as well to dismiss them. God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, not in the graphs or the predictions, not in warmer weather or diplomatic boycotts. Rather, God is in and among us by the Spirit who renews the face of the earth (Psalm 104).

This is why our liturgy for these few weeks of Advent has been laid out in the pattern of the church’s liturgical year, making each successive season approximate to each element of the worship service. The service moves from the perceived absence of God lurking under Advent through to the proclaimed presence of God in the world in Pentecost, in the community of believers. At that Pentecostal point of the service – the Eucharist – we pray: send that Spirit which makes Jesus the Christ also upon us and what we will eat and drink, that we might be the presence of God, the Body of Christ. Let your will be done once more on earth as it was in Jesus. As that Body, we then pray for the world and are sent into the world.

And sent to do what? To bear fruit, as John cries out. As a tree takes mere elements and makes of them nourishing fruit, the renewed heart allows God to take what are mere elements – us – and make of them something life-giving. Jesus’ own life is the taking of elements – the stuff of us – and making of them God’s creative presence.

What does God’s creative presence look like? It looks like a table spread in the darkest valley and all its signs of the end, our cup overflowing. We are called to take our seat at that table and to bring others to it – here and now, all the days of our lives given us to live. God comes not to wipe all things away as beyond redemption but to renew them. God comes not “spiritually” – spookily, in hidden places, hearts and minds.  God comes not tomorrow or the day after but today.

The gospel proposes, first, that – by the Spirit Jesus receives – God looks surprisingly like Jesus – that heaven is made of earth.

The gospel proposes, second, that if we open ourselves up to the same Spirit Jesus gives, God will then look surprisingly like us: the Body of Christ, here and now.

The gospel proposes, third, that this is enough, whatever the signs of the times might be.