Advent 3: Transformation
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-end, Isaiah 12:2-end, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
There are moments in any life, which experience transformation. Sometimes you don’t realise it. So you have your first child, and perhaps a little later you look around, and realise that all your little preferences, hobbies, self-indulgences are now drowned by the impossible task of attempting to be an adequate husband, father and maintaining a job. I’ve heard it gets easier. Another moment of transformation: A mother told me this week of a lovely epiphany experienced one Christmas eve having a glass of champagne with her mother at 6 o’clock, knowing she could finally relax and enjoy the whole evening. The ghost of Christmas future.
Or it might be a moment like Kate Winslett telling Rufus Sewell to get lost in ‘the Holiday’, having finally discovered ‘gumption’. And don’t worry, sermon illustrations from Christmas movies are very shortly going to come to an end! But Christmas films so often have that Christmas, or Christian, miracle, where someone turns their life around; ever since the classic turnabout Scrooge McDuck in Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
There are times when the scales fall from our eyes, and we see ourselves, another person, the world, in a different, more truthful way. And we make a change. And Faith is about transformation.
I was struck by the anthem we will hear at communion today, on page 11 of your order of service. It’s based on a poem written by Richard Wilbur, a very successful 20th Century American poet. Each verse turns on the central repeated line: ‘and every stone shall cry’. The genius of the poem is how in each verse the line ends the initial thought of the verse, but begins the second. Bringing a thought to a close, but then, in the same words, opening a new thought in a different key. So he uses the ambiguity of the word ‘cry’ – to weep, to cry out in pain, but also to proclaim, to protest, to resist, to sing;
But it’s the image, the metaphor of the crying stones that gives the power to the change in key. Christ famously proclaimed of the temple that not one stone would be left upon another. But when Jesus is admonished to keep his disciples quiet as he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he replies ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’ And surely, he is also thinking of Isaiah who prophesies that ‘the mountains and the hills shall burst into song’
Finally, we see this transformation directly in Jesus’ own words, as he quotes psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”
So we hear:
Yet he shall be forsaken,
and yielded up to die;
the sky shall groan and darken,
and every stone shall cry.
later:
And every stone shall cry
in praises of the child
by whose descent among us
the worlds are reconciled.
It is a peculiarity of grief that in it are contained the strongest elements of suffering, regret, shame, guilt, pain, anger, fear, And hope, love, happiness, intimacy and many others. Grief transforms the soul, sometimes again and again and again. Christianity is a work written in grief. Which becomes the work of resurrection.
The first line of one of TS Eliot’s most famous poems reads: ‘In my beginning is my end.’ You might gloss: from dust we are made and to dust we return. The poem reflects on village life in East Coker, Somerset where Eliot’s seventeenth-century ancestors came from. It’s about time and mortality. But the poem finishes: ‘in my end is beginning’. That is a statement of faith: That death is not the end.
It’s doing something similar to Richard Wilbur’s strategy, repeating a line but in changing the tone and context, making it the start of something rather than a gloomy conclusion. In me beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning. Eliot means something else alongside this. “end” means last moment, but it also means “the point of something”, as in: ‘To what end, do did you do that?’ Or ‘he went running to get fit, but enjoyed it so much that running became an end in itself’ His first line then becomes, to paraphrase: ‘in my beginning is the point of me And finishes: ‘in the meaning of my life is my beginning’, bringing the two meanings together. What has been made by God, for a reason, will find its home in God. East Coker, is also the village where Eliot’s ashes were buried on Easter Day in 1965. A plaque can be found in the church with the twin epitaph: ‘in my beginning is my end… in my end is my beginning’. This may all seem a stretch from John the Baptist. Well he’s not a stone, but he is the voice of one crying out. And his purpose is a change of vision, and a change of life. In baptism one dies in the water and is reborn in faith. What is dead can never die.
What strikes me is the sudden changes of tone in this episode. He begins, by accusing the crowds of being vipers and declaring the axe is at the root of the trees, ready to cut down the wicked and toss them into the fire. But when he’s actually asked his demands are really moderate: Share your clothing, share your food. Don’t be corrupt, extort or intimidate. Essentially: be nice. He then speaks of the one to come, and again, it’s a little terrifying: ‘the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’. Before the episode ends: ‘with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people’.
John is preaching judgement and repentance; Which sounds like bad news. But actually it’s the beginning of very good news, The coming of the Son of God and the kingdom of heaven. The presence of God brings about this turn around, this shift in meaning; It’s the sign of the kingdom of God.
There’s a shadow of this in the epistle. Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice. Do not worry about anything. The early Christians had an exceptionally hard time. It takes a mastery of resilience to rejoice always. To always let your gentleness be know to all. To not worry. To believe in a peace that passes all understanding. After the last two years do we have the strength of character to continue rejoicing? In the face of hypocrisy, scandal and frustration to remain gentle? This winter to not worry? Through this Christmas to keep hold of the message of the angels peace on earth? Faith isn’t about believing that everything will turn out alright. But it is about believing God is with us in and through everything. That nothing can separate us from God.
And faith is about transformation. It’s about seeing the darkness of the world, and trying to shine a little light. It’s about believing that the end we see, which looks tragic, is the start of something new and profoundly different. It is the low lifted high;
‘the sky shall groan and darken,
and every stone shall cry…
And every stone shall cry,
and straw like gold shall shine;
a barn shall harbour heaven,
a stall become a shrine.’
For the next two weeks, let’s hope for a Christmas miracle. And let’s keep faith with the Christmas miracle. Let us find that transformation, that rejoicing, Which begins with repentance and ends with praise. In my end is my beginning. Amen.