ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by the Vicar at High Mass on the First Sunday of Advent, 2007

Readings: Isaiah 2.1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13.11-end; Matthew 26. 36-44

A few weeks ago, there was a news item about a group of Christians who had barricaded themselves into a cave in central Russia. They were there to await the end of the world which their leader had decided will happen in 2008. This kind of incident ends either in farce or tragedy, when the end of the world fails to take place at the predicted time. We must hope that this one ends in farce and that no one gets hurt.

The kind of people who get involved in this kind of thing usually see themselves as "Bible Christians", yet the one thing they seem not to do is to take seriously what the Gospels say about predicting the end. "Don't do it!"

The collection of Jesus' teaching at the end of his ministry in St. Matthew's Gospel is clearly intended in part to quell enthusiastic speculation about the end. The end is not yet:

"About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, not even Jesus knew, "but only the Father."

This is a lesson which seems to need relearning by some in every Christian generation.

When I was a student doing a vacation job, I worked with a chap who belonged to a pentecostalist group. He was a kind and gentle soul but his theology was bloodcurdling. This was not long after the Six Day War in June 1967 which had seen Israel vanquish its Arab neighbours. As the peace talks in Annapolis this last week remind us, the world still lives with the consequences of that conflict. Jerusalem now is far from being that city of peace which Isaiah looked for in his prophecy; the source of that instruction which would teach the nations to turn their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

My colleague held to a theology which is called "dispensationalist". To someone brought up on the Prayer Book and Hymns Ancient and Modern, this was very strange stuff indeed. It claims that we can read off a map of history from scripture. This tells us that the Book of Revelation shows that the kingdom will be inaugurated after a cataclysmic battle - Armageddon - in the Middle East. In this, the enemies of God will be destroyed. Back in the 1960's these enemies were the Soviet Union and its satellites. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the holders of this strange theology did not see that it was nonsense; they simply reworked it. So years later, when I was in El Salvador just as the first Gulf War went live on CNN, I encountered two American pentecostalist missionaries and their children. The wife rushed up to me at breakfast and said: "Isn't it great news : Armageddon is happening." This time the representative of the beast was Saddam Hussein. Now I hold no more of a brief for Saddam than I did for the Soviet Union, but when I had recovered my breath, I wondered out loud, in a rather wet Anglican way, whether our God really intended to bring in his final reign by sending lots of American and British soldiers home in body bags. I don't think my argument had much effect, but I still think the question is the right one.

These missionaries were devotees of the view, widespread among American evangelicals, called Christian Zionism. Israel is to be supported, not because of any great love for the Jews, but because prophecy tells them that the re-establishment of the Jewish state is an essential part of the prologue to the kingdom.

This strange, fantasy-world "theology" also makes much of "one will be taken and another left" to say that God's chosen will be "raptured", snatched up to heaven, before the end. This is what lies behind those whacky car bumper stickers you see in the United States which warn the driver behind that "In the event of the rapture, this car will be unmanned." There seems here a too ready, even immodest, assumption that the car in front's driver is among the chosen!

I don't encounter this whacko theology among my parishioners here. Its very existence and influence, is likely to lead us to play down the coming of the Kingdom of God which we prayed about in Archbishop Cranmer's Advent collect. We push that off into the safe distance and can concentrate on getting ready for Christmas - much nicer.

While today's Gospel warns us against speculating about the end, it does still seek to instil in us an appropriate vigilance. Ignorance about the end - though necessary can be dangerous if it leads us into a spiritual lethargy which dulls our capacity to recognise Jesus when he comes to us at the end or in countless ways before then. .

The disciples' task is to stay awake, to be ready, just because we do not know the day or the hour of the triumph of the Son of Man. Disciples are not in the business of prediction. Instead, we are called to be prepared. Like Noah, we are to build an ark, even though it is not raining. That ark is the Church. The builders of the Church will be surrounded by many who go on about the business of their daily lives; eating, drinking, marrying, living as if nothing had changed.

Jesus teaches his disciples what they must do. If the owner of the house had known that the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. Likening the activity of God to that of a housebreaker may not be very polite but we should get the point.

The gospel speaks to us of waiting, but not just any kind of waiting; an expectant waiting made possible by a hope that is real. Jesus is that hope and he instils it in those who follow him; those who, as Paul says, "put on the Lord Jesus Christ."

This hope is more than human idealism - that wearies when its ideal seems unattainable. It is a hope taught by the Father's patience in redeeming the world. Without patience, those filled with hope, threaten to destroy that for which they hope; as the fate of so many secular utopias demonstrates. We turn on those who seem to threaten ideals and programmes. But, without hope, the patient lose expectancy; they lapse into a weary resignation, and acceptance of the way things are. And so, they leave the world just as they found it.

In that passage from Romans which inspired Archbishop Cranmer's Collect, Paul highlights three things central to Christian life.

We have to read what Paul says here about the flesh in the context of what he has said earlier in Romans where he recognises and celebrates the goodness of the body, while rejecting some of the characteristic things the body gets up to - what he calls "the works of the flesh": While we celebrate the goodness of the body, we must not think that all rules concerning, eating and drinking, sexual relationships and our use of possessions, are now irrelevant.

As one commentator has said:

"As the flesh will make its own demands,
There is no need to meet it halfway."