Advent 2009 - preached by Fr David Cloake
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Sermon
Advent Sunday 2009 – St Mary Aylesbury
Happy New Year
As most of you will know, today, being Advent Sunday marks the beginning of a new liturgical or church year.
Like all New Year’s celebrations, it is good to reflect on what has been, anticipate what will be and to come to terms with what is. To do this gives us a sense of our context and perspective; it gives us the satisfaction of another stage of life’s journey completed; it gives us a sense of excitement in the opportunities that lay ahead. We discover what we have learned and what we have yet to learn. We must accept what has worked for us and what has failed or at least what has not come to fruition as we might have hoped. We can mourn friends departed, thinking about Christine, Francis and Ann. We can celebrate new birth and new Christians.
Now is a good time to recognise our rich and robust heritage, those many hundreds of Advent Sundays that has come to pass both in this place but across Christendom. Each will have been a small marker in time, each a milestone and each a signpost to successive Advent Sundays. I am fairly sure that each and every one of us can remember previous New Years Eve celebrations following our standard calendar. We can string them together and in the chain that we form, we can perceive our own development. We also know now that what may have been terrible or lost then has not prevailed. We know that what was good and pure then remains so for us in our memories now.
So, we have the three-way point of reference; the past, the present and the future.
A couple of weeks ago, you heard me stand in this spot and talk to you about glass-ceilings and their profound limit on what we can achieve in this place in our generation. You may remember that I urged you to seize that day and this to be the one in which you answered God’s call for this his Temple in Aylesbury. You will recall, I hope, that I offered the reassurance of God’s saving help, in that case as offered by Psalm 16, and that we have a heritage of God’s protection and in his making good on his promised to his people.
Today’s reading from the prophecy of Jeremiah reinforces this assurance in absolute terms. The prophet Jeremiah was writing among the people who were experiencing the terrible drama that unfolded in the days leading up to the Babylonian exile. He knew what he was talking about and had foreseen all that in fact happened. Some regard Jeremiah as the Paul of the Hebrew Bible, as one speaking from direct experience. Jeremiah tells his people, in no uncertain terms, that the Lord will make good on his covenant or promise to them, and that ‘the Lord is our righteousness’. We have clear evidence of a promise fulfilled to a people under the greatest stress in the most adverse of conditions. This was a promise made to a people who were to be made homeless, no church, no temple, a people so in need of sacred space that a mere tent later became their Holy of Holies. God made good on his promises to them, because they trusted. The same will apply to us if we reach beyond our glass ceiling.
Our notion of ‘present’ and ‘future’ is well demonstrated by today’s Gospel reading from Luke. Here we have the parable of the fig tree, and like so many of the parables, the central motif seems hapless or even random. The fig is a very interesting choice of motif, as well we would expect from Jesus. Don’t forget the very deep meanings enveloped by other motifs such as the shepherd, the gate, sheep and goats, mustard seeds – I have preached on at least two them here. The fig was one of the first ever human propagated crops, an entire millennium before wheat was grown as a crop. The word ‘sycophant’ is derived both from the Greek for fig and the name given to those who informed on illegal fig exporters! Do not forget the association between the fig’s leaf and the consumption of the Forbidden Fruit in Eden. Indeed, the revealed nudity of so many iconic figures is concealed by a fig leaf, with Adam and Eve chief and first among them. The sweet flesh of the fig is mirrored by the irritant qualities of its sap, and so we have the condition known tellingly as ‘Grocer’s Itch’. So here we have another loaded reference to another parable.
The fig teaches us much about the ‘present’ and the ‘future’. Indeed, all plants, especially fruit plants, do. What they teach us is that everything has its time, its order and its process. In the winter, the fig tree will appear dead and lifeless, more especially as it is deciduous. It will be stark and uninviting, with its dormancy hidden by an appearance of failure and death. When the earth warms in the early days of spring, the fig tree will pour forth beautiful blossom flowers, scented, serene. Herein lays the hope that follows the barren season, the hope of what is to come, the promise of fruitfulness. Blossom is akin to God’s covenant or promise with us. Spring blossom mirrors and in many ways controls how we all feel in the spring months; happy, hopeful, positive. In the summer months, we lose that beautiful blossom, but we see it replaced by the business of growth and thriving. We would see the tree in full leaf, ‘getting on with being a tree’. Its fruits would start small and would swell under the warmth of the sun. Summer can also be a time of danger for a tree such as a fig. If there were a drought, or if the tree suffered damage or assault, its crop would fail, and its fruits would not swell. They would wither and eventually fall to the earth dead. Then we have the autumn. This is the season of the harvest, of the yield. This is the season when our labours see their reward. This is the season when the fig tree yields its fruit. We can eat; we can enjoy the taste and the nourishment. With this and other crops, we can survive another winter.
The primary lesson that the fig tree teaches us is that it abides by a process, an order of things. In the parable, it is used to allude to the coming of the Kingdom by the signs of the tree coming in to leaf, but we also see that this process is set. Fruitfulness does not occur before blossom, and the leaves do not sprout in the depths of winter. The Kingdom is coming, but all in due season!
How does the fig tree teach us about the future? Well, with fruitfulness we have seed; we have the future of the fig tree. One is implicit in the other. Again, we have process – the seed is not viable in the blossom nor is it present during the winter torpor.
Once again, I find myself needing to say ‘so what?’ So what about the fig tree, so what about the natural order? So what about pre-exilic prophecy and covenant? What has this to do with glass ceilings and more importantly, what has this to do with St Mary’s in Advent 2009?
What we have before us, with the context and perspective of two millennia and the pre-Christian millennia before them is a blueprint. The possibilities have been set out, demonstrated and proved. We have our place in that unfolding story and those who will eventually look back on the beginning of the third millennium will see the context that we cannot see and with a perspective that only the Lord has in this generation. What we have in the parable of the fig tree is the fact that everything happens as it should, in the time appointed and in its season. There are no short cuts; there are no ways to short-circuit the process of the realisation of the Kingdom. As we celebrate the start of a new year, we know that night will follow day and that spring will follow winter. By virtue of this, and that God has proven himself good to his word, we know that if we fly past our glass ceiling, we will not fall to the ground like so much withered fruit in a drought. We know that if we pray earnestly for our gifts to be made real in this community, that the fruit will swell in this year and we will have a bountiful yield. We have already seen the little green shoots growing in the fertile earth of our parish community. Let us look forward to our hopeful spring with its beauty and scent; let us look to a summer of deliberate and concerted growth to the autumn of our fruitfulness.
Amen
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