The Second Sunday Before Lent

Sermon

The Second Sunday before Lent

4 February 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom, Interim Priest-in-Charge

Proverbs 8.1, 22-31; Psalm 104.26-37; Colossians 1.15-20; John 1.1-14

At the 10am service George and Sarah will be baptised. They will express their faith in God and make their commitment to Christ. Lily, Austin, Emil, Oliver  will be admitted to their First Communion, and they will also become members of the Church, and they are expecting to come along pretty regularly for the rest of their lives to share with us and those who come after us the life of the church, here and wherever they go on to live.

This raises the question of “Why do we turn up week after week to do what we do in this place.”

I think we do so because it is really difficult to believe, even to believe true things, on our own. We have a set of beliefs and ways of understanding the world to which are true beliefs and to which we are passionately committed, but we need the help of our community to sustain them in the face of the scepticism of our friends and colleagues.

Our readings today which indicate that George and Sarah are committing themselves to believes which mark a departure from the common assumptions of our day, and are setting off on a journey with us, where we need all the help and accompaniment we can find.

Our first reading is from the book of Proverbs – the Song of Wisdom. Lady wisdom, Chokhmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, Sapientia in Latin is the personification of the divine purpose, plan, intention, meaning in creation. It, she, is in God’s presence before the creation of anything. Chokhmah is present in everything that exists, informs the whole of creation, is the focus of God’s delight and rejoicing in all that God has done and made. George and Sarah and you and I are committed to this sense of the presence of divine purpose, and of a cosmos saturated with meaning. If we want to live fruitfully in this world, we need to align ourselves with the basic purposes for which the world was created. We need to work with the perception that, underlying the complexity and difficulty, the joy and the sorrow, birth and flourishing, life, and death are not just processes of blank unfeeling randomicity, and a purposeless one-way journey to entropy, but Chokhmah, Sophia, Sapientia, purpose, reason and will in alignment with the purpose, reason and will of God.

That can be difficult for two reasons.

Very often with world does not seem like a place filled with the purpose, reason and will of God, and our friends and our colleagues will point this out to us, if we do not see it for ourselves. It feels chaotic, cruel, meaningless. Very often we do not experience ourselves as able to align ourselves with God’s purposes We feel wretched, poor, naked, pitiable, blind. To make things even harder, the belief, the truth to which Sarah and George and you and I are committed is not just one of the general purposefulness of God in Creation.

Our second reading, which we have so often at Christmas that it can simply flow over us, indicates that not only does God have purpose, but that that purpose has character. In fact, the Christian faith, says something so extraordinary that we tend to look away, to pretend that it has not been said, to avoid thinking about it. It says not only that that there is a fundamental organising principle to the whole of reality, its logos (in English, logos is translated “Word” – so in our reading, “in the beginning was the Word”.) Christianity says that this fundamental organising principle, this logos/Word, was fully and irrevocably expressed in the life and teaching of a wandering preacher called Jesus, who taught love, lived love, and who showed that the logos is love, by dying for love of the human race. We should notice, that If the word was made flesh, then the ultimate purpose and nature of the world is expressed in Christ.

When you read the Gospels you may have noticed that Christ did not live an easy life, conforming to the expectations and understandings of the people of his day It rather that follows that living in Christ is bound to set us marching to a tune that is more than a little out of step with much of the world. The Logos is not easy to live with. That is why for George, for Sarah, for you and for me, it is so important that we are baptised into, and that we belong to a church which is a living Christian community today, and is connected with all other Christian communities through time and space.

There are very few people in the world who have the capacity to sustain their vision and understanding of the world in complete contrast to the people who surround them. We are herd animals, even the most strong minded of us. As it happens, we do not live in a culture or a time that has a strong sense of a world saturated with the meaning and purposes of God. We are told that it is infantile, corrupting and dim-witted to live with that belief, and after a week of being surrounded by polite scepticism or a drizzle of tolerance, we need each other and we need this place to restore our perception that what we believe is perfectly reasonable, thoroughly plausible, and extraordinarily life enhancing. And, as it happens, no culture has ever successfully and persistently been at peace with Christ, who calls us always to a radical reorientation, a radical re-humanisation, which is in tension with our shabby compromises and our half lived lives.

We need each other, we need the disciplines of prayer, we need to hear and understand the classic revelations of God in our Scriptures, we need sermons and reading groups and study days to help us understand and grow together in understanding. We need the joy – the simple pleasure of friendships in Christ to keep us going. We need to reach out and touch and taste God in the Eucharist, to sustain us in our endless seeking to make real in our hearts and our lives what God has shown us in Christ.

Welcome to George and Sarah. Your coming to faith strengthens our faith, and I hope that our faith will strengthen yours. Welcome to Lily, Austin, Emil, Oliver. We find that Communion gives us strength for our journey.

We cannot stand on our own. We cannot see straight on our own. We cannot hold together Christian lives on our own. And so we join the church, we come to Church, week after week, to make it possible for us to stand, to see, to live.