Get Ready ! Prepare ye

Are you ready for the festivities ?!

I have been taken this year with the adverts for sparkling jewellery. Swaroski. Should I shouldn’t I ?  All the advertising is playing on our anxieties about getting everything ready for Christmas. We don’t want to let anyone down, it has to be a perfect Christmas.

Be prepared. Fill up the fridge, buy all the shopping, ….surprise, delight your guests. (Perhaps at the back of our minds there’s compete too…)

So much of our economy runs on exploiting anxiety. Marketing creating needs that we can only satisfy by buying something. We know it’s wrong, and we know it doesn’t really brings happiness, but we do it anyway.

Unlike commercial Christmas froth Advent is a time of preparation for something profound. But what are we going to get ready for? How do we get ready for Christmas, for the arrival of the baby Jesus?

Each year we re-enact the drama. We pretend Jesus hasn’t arrived. It’s a very good practice because it means we have to refresh and renew ourselves. Jesus has come, this is historical and cosmic reality, he has been born in our midst, but we hope for more, we await his coming amongst us again. We have the perfect gift, but we look to the Lord God to save us.

I have been hearing in my head recently that’s opening song from Godspell. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

It speaks to me on several levels; personally, as a church and as a society.

I had the privilege of going on retreat with some people from this benefice (Christ Church Healey and All Saints) on Thursday. I got away from the busyness, the expectations, the church duties. I spent some time in silence. We looked at at the nativity story and let it talk to us. We used our imagination.  I think we each found that when we paused,… God spoke to us. This was an attempt at getting ready. It helped.

The trouble with our economy and social world we create to sustain it, is that it seems design to stop us from looking deeper, searching for the more important things. We have to break free and get ready, get prepared, get to a new level.

You don’t need to go away on retreat this week. Not everyone can manage that. However we can put ourselves in a place of silence, of openness to His coming, of repentance from all that diminishes the divine in us. We can be ready. And Gloriously, you can do this with no money, no shopping required.

We can hear the call of John the Baptist. His message was radical, and called people back to the important things. Turn back he said. Excessive consumerism wasn’t a big problem in his time, but I’m sure he would have spoken out against it ! A few locusts and some honey was all he sought. Jesus signed up to his movement by being baptised by him. He and many others were baptised in the river Jordan. But John pointed to the one who was to more than take over the mantle. Jesus

The second track of Godspell is called Save the People.

It’s written by Ebenezer Elliott who was one of the leaders of the Chartist movement in England, 1781–1849; known as the “Poet of the People,” and by his enemies as the “Corn-law Rhymer”)

WHEN wilt thou save the people?   O God of mercy! when? Not kings and lords, but nations!   Not thrones and crowns, but men! Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they!         5 Let them not pass, like weeds, away! Their heritage a sunless day!              God save the people! Shall crime bring crime for ever,   Strength aiding still the strong?         10 Is it thy will, O Father!   That man shall toil for wrong? “No!” say thy mountains; “No!” thy skies; “Man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise, And songs be heard instead of sighs.”         15              God save the people! When wilt thou save the people?   O God of mercy! when? The people, Lord! the people!   Not thrones and crowns, but men!         20 God save the people! thine they are; Thy children, as thy angels fair; Save them from bondage and despair!              God save the people!

A strong message, cloaked somewhat. A yearning for God to act, a prophetic voice, a yearning for a better world.

Solving the problems of an unjust society and damage to the planet begins with each of us doing some spiritual work. It is amazing to think that the future well-being of people and planet depends on us. (We don’t need to be terrified by this – we are not alone, we have the Holy Spirit). This doesn’t need effort or great holiness, rather a letting go and stopping.

So the first two tracks of this perhaps dated Album have given me a nudge – prepare inside and yearn for a better society.

So I Have been trying to pray through the news. Today I see that our MP Tony Lloyd is in Bangladesh supporting the needs of the Rohingya I hear…

Don’t write Christmas off as some do – as too materialistic, too empty.

I love the exchange of gifts. These can be precious tokens of love and affection, acknowledging our relationships and connections. As you may know, It all began with Saint Nicholas that wonderful Saint, from Myra in Turkey, Patron Saint of Russia. He cared for the poor and the outcast. One of the many stories about him was that when two girls lost their parents and were at risk of being drawn into prostitution because of poverty, he got the money to get them dowries. He saved them. Thus for our good Saint Nicholas encouraging the giving of gifts to the poor children was a way of caring for the poor.

We still give gifts – but has good saint Nicholas become a Bad Santa. Is Saint Nicholas losing the battle to Santa Claus (we have lost the Nic) ?

The good news is that this season, this time of year, can be filled with hope and joy. It is not irredeemable ! We can write our own new song for Godspell

Here’s my own thoughts for an advent song of hope. Your challenge (should you choose to accept it) will be to put it into words and perhaps music.. !

As John joined Jesus movement, so can we. We have been baptised into his new community, a world-wide church that lives for his mercy, his justice, his peace. As we recommit to day in this worship, we renew our commitment this kingdom

We are in Jesus’ cosmic time. The new testament reading tells us that one day is like a thousand years. We yearn for a new heaven and a new earth, and we need it, but it is here. We yearn for him to come, but he has come, and will come again.

When we follow him, here in cold Healey, he comes again

When we comfort his people (as Isaiah has God tell us) we find him alongside us.

Because what we have and what we yearn for is #Godwithus

(Follow the hashtag on Twitter if you can)

Our song this advent can be a song of yearning, a song of sorrow at injustice, but it must also be a song of hope. The messenger will come, has come, will come again.

We must stop telling ourselves lies about the world, we must seek the truth, we must make space for some depth, an encounter with pure truth and love born among us. But we must get ourselves ready, hungry even, for it. 

From 2 Peter:

Therefore beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without blemish or spot and regard the patience of the Lord as salvation.

Nicholas - Bishop at Myra

What are people like ?

Some are saints, some are sinners...you may say. Perhaps in the current age we would say : “Some are celebrities, some are scroungers”

We do have a way - don't we - of putting things into binaries, black and white, yes and no, good and bad, this and that. It works for computer code but I don't know if it works for human beings made in the image of God.....

Perhaps now more than in previous ages and certainly since the economics of the Thatcher era arrived, the neoliberal economics that makes the market its God, we have so many stories that make people other than ourselves...and so make it possible to cut their wages, to implement austerity.

We have heard the stories about those who are poor and how they are to blame for their property because of the lack of initiative, laziness, fecklessness etc.  In today’s Rochdale Observer the story about poor children not being ready for primary school can be told to us as poor parenting causing the problem. We know now how to respond to these stories - we blame rather than feel compassion or work for change.

We have seen the way some people talk about the homeless people we welcome into our churches.

Saint Nicholas, who we celebrate today did not condemn but reached out in love to the vulnerable. He was a fourth century Bishop of Myra in Asia minor which was in southern Turkey. He had a reputation for working wonders and he is known by many stories and legends. And they can't all be factual but perhaps all are true ! Many of these tell of his concern and love and care for children, how he fed the hungry, healed the sick and cared for the oppressed.  There is a particular story where he saved three girls from a life of prostitution by providing them with dowries and so developed the tradition of bearing gifts to children on his feast day.

This of course is the practice appropriated by our Christmas celebrations.  Nicholas is also one of the patron saints of Russia.

What was Nicholas like ? We call him a Saint and we can see that his sainthood is revealed in his life. He was motivated by love. Not by the way of talking about the world which has us put people in boxes where they are other than us. In the kingdom of God there is no such thing as celebrity or scrounger .....

This time last week at a tribunal we put our way of talking about God into action as we stood alongside a member of our worshipping community who was brought up before the Home Office accused of not being a “proper” Christian. We do not believe that and we stood together and spoke of her faith.

But deeper than the legal case was the human case. We believe that everyone who comes through that church door is a child of God, whatever their faith, whatever their nationality and economic status, they are made in God's image and we are welcoming Jesus when we welcome them.

This week a woman from Tunisia turned up at my door. She had two children and had a thousand questions about where to get help and support in Rochdale. So I brought her down to the Red Cross.

So welcoming newcomers to the town and to our worship is just one way we enact the Christian story. There are no Iranians or Aghani. No alleged celebrity or scrounger. All are precious.

Like Jesus we hear the words of the prophet Isaiah, quoted in today's scripture: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me, he sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the Brokenhearted, to proclaim Liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners."

Because like Nicholas we welcome the little children, and the vulnerable

As the shops prepare to go mad with a material Christmas, we commit to the ways of love and care, of justice and mercy. When we think of gifts let's think of Nicholas gift of the dowries.

Let us learn from the vulnerable, hear their stories, and build a world they can live in

Jesus said: let the little children come to me do not stop them for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

Mark Coleman