Advent: Like President Trump speaking at a feminism conference

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Romans 16:25-end, Luke 1:26-38

My first job in the army, days after initial training, was to run the homecoming parade for the Theatre Logistics Group op. Herrick 20 – the last combat operation in Afghanistan – where I was pushed in front of a microphone for a few words from the padre.  Without doubt I was the least qualified person to speak. It was like President Trump speaking at a feminism conference. As is so often the case, though, one of the most visible people on show was in fact the least in the company present.  It might remind you of St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, when he says: ‘the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour.’ Clergy usually find themselves clothed with great honour –  which probably speaks truly to how indispensable and honourable they really are.

Something similar occurs with the Christian festivals. Easter, of course, is the big gig and the focus of the Church’s year with the great public events of the crucifixion and resurrection. Throughout the world processions and highly visible acts of witness. But then there is Christmas - which the world has seized upon for all its fairytale story, the magic of the season, the everyday miracle of the birth of a new life, and picaresque postcards of country churches in snow. Though if it snows on Christmas Eve we’ll really feel it this year. Nevermind, cold churches. We might also remember that Christmas hasn’t always been popular. Oliver Cromwell banned it and everyone had to go without presents for much of the seventeenth-century. So, despite everything, it could be a lot worse if the puritans were in charge.

But what should be the most important Christian festival is the story in today’s Gospel, nine months before Christmas.  Because if we celebrate God coming into the world at Christmas, that is only because God came into a woman sometime before that. The feast of the Annunciation slips quietly past us in the latter stages of Lent – though theologically it’s the most critical event in the history of the world. 

We have been running in Advent through the various prophecies that point toward Christ appearing. We started with the patriarchs – the great men of renown – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob; then we move on to the prophets, foremost of whom is Moses, the law giver, but also the prophecy of Isaiah who looks to the restoration of Israel; then, last week, John the Baptist, the last prophet – pointing towards Christ: ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’. Finally though, this week, after all those men, it is Mary who comes as the culmination of these great figures,  a poor peasant girl who is to be the Theotokos – the God bearer – who will announce and through her body present Christ to the world.

So as we enter into Christmas week here’s a first Christmas thought for you – one which Christmas movies also gets. Christmas is about inversions and surprises. Scrooge finally surprises everyone when he turns himself around, repents his old life and becomes jolly and generous. I watched Scrooged on Friday Night and there is an excellent line from Bill Murray: ‘For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be. It's a miracle. It's really a sort of a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve.’ In Love Actually each of the characters surprise – even perhaps themselves – by putting their real feelings in priority ahead of their career, their fears, in two cases ahead of friendship and marriage.  ‘Because at Christmas you tell the truth’, as the refrain goes. There’s a carnival aspect to the season – where what’s not normally acceptable becomes possible – for better and for worse. 

And we see it in today’s Gospel with that phrase: ‘nothing is impossible with God’ and with Mary’s song in the Magnificat:  ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.’  You wouldn’t hear that in many party political broadcasts.

The message of the angel Gabriel to Mary is the message of a new standard - in which the world is turned upside down.  The powerful men of the world will be gazumped by a poor peasant girl. The rich palaces of kings replaced by a dirty stable. The courtiers and courtesans upstaged by shepherds and beasts. It’s here that God chooses to enter the world. It is strange, it’s a carnival. It should remind us that at Christmas God may surprise us; that we should perhaps look for God in the people and the places to which we would not normally look; and we should check ourselves, to make sure that we have not become too grand or too complacent for God and the messages of his angels.

Today, Mary is our model. Like her at the eucharist we take God into ourselves with a mind to offering God to the world, through ourselves, in thought word and deed. This is too grand a task for any of us but God usually works through unlikely characters. All God asks is that like Mary we listen and obey: ‘Be it unto me according to thy word.’   Amen.