Second Sunday before Advent - preached by Fr David Cloake
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2nd Sunday before Advent 2009
Daniel 12.1–3
Psalm 16
Hebrews 10.11–14 [15–18] 19–25
Mark 13.1–8
I’d like you all to look up at the roof, because there is something there that you may not have noticed.
It isn’t made of wood and it has never been carved. It is robust and strong, but almost completely invisible. It does its job so well that we hardly notice its effect, yet what you are trying to look for has influenced the worship and life of this church for a great deal of time. It is not a natural phenomenon, but rather, a thing that you have all put there. It didn’t need a faculty and won’t need repair.
Can you see it; it’s there if you look hard enough! A most fascinating feature of this church and so many others.
Glass ceilings are hard to spot, my friends, but St Mary the Virgin Parish Church in Aylesbury has a fine example of a neo-Gothic, with Perpendicular flourishes, fern leaf scrolls, with gold tracery and carved Angels Grade II listed Glass ceiling.
Psalm 16, which we prayed a few moments ago, teaches us in clear terms about the futility of glass ceilings. No, the psalmist wasn’t an architect, but rather one who has much to tell Christians today about trusting God.
In life we are surrounded by preventatives. We don’t move a muscle in our daily life until certain given things are in place. We would never dream of getting in our cars without knowing that the insurance policy was current. We would not walk out in cold weather naked, for fear of illness and for fear for our desire to preserve our privacy. During the summer, I took the girls for a slow meander through a field full of lions. They are, I have now discovered, huge. Their shoulders would easily measure to my chest, and they were hungry. There were easily twenty of these lions, themselves meandering as we ourselves meandered. They walked in front of us as we pointed to them and took pictures. Before you call in Social Services or wrest our screaming babies from us, never fear – we were safe behind the body and windows of our car. Without the safety and assurance offered to us by our car and its shell, I would of course have been bonkers to have taken two walking giggling veal cutlets into a field of veal eating monsters.
Some of you may know that I have a particular passion for jumping off of cliffs. For me, the higher the cliff the better and I just run at the edge like a man possessed. In fact, racing off of cliff edges is such a pleasure that I have paid for lessons to teach me how to do it most effectively. I have yet to bowl off of Beachy Head, but I will do. The landing can be bumpy, and I have muddied my clothes on occasion, the bit in the middle, between jumping and landing, is just exquisite. Perhaps I ought to explain that I love gliding, and that sprinting off a cliff edge is an effective take-off method. I will be suspended under a glider, with a secondary parachute, wearing a helmet and a flying suit, with a license and the training needed to get that license.
And so I bring us back to the glass ceiling. A glass ceiling, as we know, is a way of referring to an imposed limit on progress. It is almost completely invisible, but a person cannot pass through a glass ceiling if one is in place for them. Without the protection of a car, the glass ceiling to enjoying lions would be that we couldn’t get close enough to see them. Without a glider and parachute, the glass ceiling to my flying would be found about an inch from the edge.
Parish life is similarly affected. What we can achieve in this place and as a community is limitless. People might tell you the money is short, that talent is hard to find, that time can be a problem, but these are the very glass ceilings that we put in place in our own efforts. We put that ceiling above our heads, no-one else.
Let us take a look at Psalm 16:
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot – This tells us that we can depend on God, we have made our choice and we can relax having made that choice. Once we have signed our Insurance papers, we can drive off safely – we need not fear the journey. As we need not fear what is ahead of us, we can relish its possibilities and its potential.
I have a goodly heritage – This gorgeous building is testimony to the success of removing glass ceilings. This is not a government provided building, it is one paid for by the congregation of the day, who believed that they were capable of putting this place of worship here. They trusted in God, and their heritage means that we can do the same.
I keep the Lord always before me – Prayer, prayer and more prayer. Without the shield of faith on our arm, we will suffer the blows of this life.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. 10For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit.– This is theimportant bit. In all that we do, God will not us fail so miserably that we cannot try again. This is the verse that tells us that I can jump off my cliffs in I am strapped to my Glider. This is the verse that says that if I take them in a car, I can show the girls lions close at hand.
This verse and this whole Psalm tells us to have courage. We are directed, quite clearly to take a risk. We are invited to swing on the Trapeze because the safety net is there. Our community is enjoying the first flourishes of new growth. Various groups have been formed and have met all through the autumn to look at aspects of the parish’s life and they all speak of our need to take courageous leaps into our own future. They are all aspiring to places that are above our glass ceiling, so the choice is ours about precisely how high we can aim. We must believe that we can succeed in every project, in every venture, in every initiative. If twelve flawed humans can take the example of Christ and build a world-wide church, imagine what 120 can do. You may be asked for money, you may be asked for time, you may be asked for talents, you may just be asked to attend – but we must search within and deliver those needs.
Mark’s Gospel reading tells us to ‘beware of those who would lead us astray’. Mark also tells us that many will say ‘I am he’. The voices that will utter those things are the voices in our hearts and in our community that claim that things are not possible, that ‘this is all we can manage’. The Gospel asks the question of us in the voices of the disciples – ‘when will this be’?
My Brother and sisters – that time is now.
There is a truism in the gliding community. When we assess where the greatest danger is when we are flying, it is the case that we are at most danger when we are nearest to the ground. When we are 5,000 feet up, we have time to think if the worst happened. The moments when we take off and just before we land are the moments in which we could lose our lives if things went wrong, and the same applies to parish life in our time. We are in peril when we limit ourselves to the low level flight.
So, we have a job to do here. I invite everyone who is sat here today to pray, and to pray earnestly, and try and work out what it is you are called to do in the life of this place. We all need to be creative, we all need to be generous of ourselves and what we have, we need to have a heart of love for the world we are called to serve, and we need to strap in to our own gliders and fly. We must fly past our neo-Gothic glass ceiling, and we cannot lose another moment.
It is our time to fly.
Amen
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