Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Advent – 20th December 2020: : Isaiah 7, 10-16; Matthew 1, 18-end

Canon L W Do0lan – St Paul’s Athens

‘Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head, ‘To me be as it pleaseth God’ she said.  ‘My soul shall laud and magnify his holy name’; most highly favoured lady. Gloria

These are the words of one of the verses of the lovely Advent hymn we have just sung, ‘The angel Gabriel from heaven came’.

It takes us back to earlier in the year, to March 25^th, the date on which the church throughout the world celebrates the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary’ and also the date on which Greece celebrates occhi day. There is an irony in this. On the day we celebrate Mary saying ‘yes’ to God’s will, there is also a celebration of the ‘no’ that Greece gave to Mussolini.

We will stick with Mary’s ‘yes’, as this is the word that perhaps is a wiser word for us on the 4^th Sunday of Advent, when we are challenged yet again to allow Christ to be born again within us. Will we say a definite no, or an indifferent no; and indifferent yes or a definite yes? The choice is ours – just as Blessed Mary had a choice. God does not compel us to do anything – he works with our free will, with our consent. Our consent for blessing is as vital as Mary’s consent to the message of the Archangel. ‘To me be as it pleaseth God, she said’.

This same exercise of choice is offered to Joseph, as we heard in our gospel reading this morning. I wonder how many of us have significant and life-changing dreams that come as ‘night messages’ from God. Have you noticed how often in the bible, it is in a dream that God communicates with an individual? Joseph seems to be very prone to such significant dreams. It is through his dream that he is reassured about taking Blessed Mary as his wife. Imagine that – in fact, let’s imagine that!

Look at the circumstances. In those days the culture around pregnancy was very different to our own. Women went into a ‘seclusion’ during the main part of their pregnancy, and in some societies even today, this practice still prevails. However, as we know, this was no normal pregnancy. Despite the beauty of these Christmas stories of the Annunciation, and birth of Christ, it was really rather shocking. Mary was betrothed to Joseph – this means a marriage had been planned.

Joseph would have expected Mary not to have had sexual relationships with anyone else before her marriage to him. It would have been shameful to him that she is with child, and even more shameful to her family, who would have to face the judgement of their neighbours  – bad parents those who can’t even make sure their daughter behaves like she should.

All of this, and more, Mary would have had to endure, but so also would Joseph. He had determined to put her aside because of the circumstances, and he would have had great fears about continuing his association with this young woman whose apparent lack of morals would drag him down too!

In a dream all is calmed and his heart and mind are changed. He knows he has not had intimate relations with Mary, and he probably knew her well enough, and trusted her well enough, to know that what he receives in the dream is sure and reliable. To make the point even clearer, the gospel writer associates Joseph’s present situation with the words foretold by the great prophet Isaiah, words that would have known from his holy scriptures, ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’ which means ‘God with us’.

It is so easy for us to talk of the humility and obedience of Blessed Mary, but we should not forget the humility and obedience of Jospeh, who will later have another dream telling him to take the new born child away to Egypt for his safety, and not to return until the coast was clear.

Mary and Joseph are indeed obedient – but they are neither of them compelled to conform to the angelic messages they receive, for if angels are messengers of God, God does not compel us to do anything against our will even through the ministry of an angel.

As we approach the great solemnity of the Birth of Christ, hanging as we are in Advent 4 on the very precipice of this cosmic event, we have before us just a couple of days to reflect on how we will allow God to dwell in us – to be our Emmanuel. Emmanuel is not just a name, though it is for some people their name, and Emmanuel is not some out of body concept that church theologians have constructed. Emmanuel IS ‘God with us’, literally God transcends infinity and eternity and lives in the likes of you and me. How radical can this truth get? This is really God, made real, and really in you and me. So long as we give consent of course.

Mary and Joseph represent the model of obedience – freely and willingly conforming to the freedom and the will of God. This is the challenge for you and me right now. There is precious little time left for any dithering and delay. Mary willingly accedes to God’s will, and immediately her heart is filled with praise. This is the sacred alchemy of humanity and divinity brought together in one, in and through the Christ child.

‘Of her, Emmanuel, the Christ was born, in Bethlehem, all on a Christmas morn, and Christian folk throughout the world will ever say, ‘most highly favoured lady’. Gloria!

Audio Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent – 13th December 2020: Isaiah 61, 1-4,8-11; John 1, 6-8, 19-28

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent – 13th December 2020: Isaiah 61, 1-4,8-11; John 1, 6-8, 19-28

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Pauls Athens

‘What sayest thou of thyself?’ One of the great Anglican church music composers of the late 16^th century is Orlando Gibbons. His professional life took him via a circuitous route to Westminster Abbey where he was one of the organists. He died young after taking ill on a journey to Canterbury, at the age of 45, and he is buried in Canterbury Cathedral where there is a monument to him.

Gibbons was a fairly prolific composer of both secular madrigals, and of church music. One of the anthems he composed is called ‘This is the Record of John’ and the text is that of the conversation between John the baptizer and the priests and levites in today’s gospel reading.

‘What sayest thou of thyself?’ is one of the questions set to music – rather more poetically phrased in the 16^th century than our version this morning, ‘Who are you?’

We started to think about John the baptizer last week as the gospel directs us to John baptizing Jesus in the river Jordan and John proclaiming, as he does in Matthew, Mark and Luke, that he has come to make the path straight.

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Audio Sermon for 2nd Sunday of Advent – 6th December 2020

Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

Sermon for Advent Sunday – 29th November 2020: : Isaiah 64, 1-9; Mark 13, 24-37.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

I have to begin with an apology – an apology to all those who were not brought up in the UK with the children’s TV programme called Blue Peter. Please allow for a few moments of nostalgia. Every year at this time of year the Blue Peter team would make their own version of an Advent Crown. John Nokes, Peter Purves and Valerie Singleton are among the names I recall from my childhood. This is the 1960s.

Two wire coat hangers, silver tinsel, four candles (no I didn’t say fork handles!) and four Christmas baubles, transformed into their Advent wreath. This activity always forewarned us that Christmas was approaching, and we should be getting ready.

Advent candles on the television, Advent candles in church. The season of Advent is now here. A new church year begins today and a new set of Sunday readings on our three year cycle of readings begins today. As we might say, our countdown to Christmas begins today. Advent appears to be a time of beginnings.

Strangely enough in the old days, for example when I was much younger, the preachers for these four Sundays of Advent used to preach not about four themes of beginnings, but four themes on endings. The themes were what we call eschatological – the Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. I suppose these themes would indeed sharpen the expectations of the believers. It is a long way from the coat hangers and tinsel of the Blue Peter Advent Crown.

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Audio Sermon for Advent Sunday – 29th November 2020

Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

Sermon for 2nd Sunday of Advent – 6th December 202: Isaiah 40, 1-11; Mark 1, 1-8

Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40, 6-8)

As a boy chorister in my local church I recall an anthem that was in the choir repertoire. It was partly based on these words from the prophet Isaiah, and composed by Samuel Wesley in 1833. Jokingly the choirboys used to call him ‘steamship Wesley’ because his initials were ‘S.S.’

After a very beautiful and serene homophonic introduction, ‘Blessed be the God and Father, of our Lord Jesus Christ’ the anthem then moved on to a beautiful soprano solo, ‘Love one another with a pure heart fervently’ followed by a slow and sombre section for the grizzly basses to sing which ended, ‘the grass withereth, and the flower thereof, falleth away.’ Then a single thundering chord from the organ, and off we went in full polyphony ‘But the word of the Lord, endureth for ever’ sung a breakneck speed for which each choir member, soprano, altos, tenors and basses each needed a good pair of lungs and their own set of teeth, before the whole piece ended with the great Hebrew ‘so be it’, Amen, Amen.

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Sermon for the Second Sunday before Advent – 15 November 2020: ZEPHANIAH 1,7,12-18. MATTHEW 25:14-30

Deacon Christine Saccali via Zoom

May I speak in the name of the Triune God, Father Son and Holy Spirit . Amen

These are odd Sundays, these ones before Advent and this 2020 is the strangest of years. Here we are, two weeks before Advent, the start of another church year and moving on to another lectionary gospel from Matthew. We are preparing to be prepared, getting ready to get ready and for what? because none of the normal pre Christmas secular events are happening. In fact, nothing much is happening across much of Europe, the usual hustle and bustle has quietened down much to the disquiet of many. We are in lockdown due to the second wave of COVID plaguing Europe but now the days are shorter and the dark nights are longer in this hemisphere.

The heartfelt pleas and groaning I am hearing is How long O Lord , how long? Not how many days till Christmas but how long from the cancer patient, the grandparent separated from loved ones, how long do we have to work from home or go without meeting for a drink or coffee outside?  How long will the rescuers take to reach me thinks the victim buried in the earthquake rubble? How long until an effective vaccine is readily available to all?

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Audio Sermon for Remembrance Sunday – 8th November 2020

Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens, Via Zoom

Sermon for Remembrance Sunday – 8 November 2020: Wisdom 6, 12-16; Matthew 25, 1-13.

Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens, on Zoom

On Armistice Day, November 11^th, in the year 1920, a body was solemnly laid in the ground in the nave of Westminster Abbey. It is now known as the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. The body buried is in fact comprised of the bodies of four soldiers discovered in the battlefields of Aisne, Arras, the Somme, and Ypres. The stone slab is made of black Belgian marble quarried from near Namur in Wallonia. Among the words engraved on the monument are ‘Greater love hath no man than this.’ For 100 years it has been a place of many pilgrimages, an iconic monument, a memorial. It is part of our remembering of those sombre days of the Great War and the sacrifice.

Monuments help us to remember. In Greek a monument would be a mnimeio (μνημείο). Remembrance lies at the very heart of the Christian experience. At the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples, and thus us also, to ‘Do this in memory of me’. In the New Testament the word for this is ‘anamnesis’. The opposite to this is a well – known word in English, amnesia.

When we speak of ‘remembering Jesus’ it is not like the exercise of thinking back to a great beach we went to on holiday last year, wishing we were there now. It is completely different, for in our ‘remembering Jesus’ we are bringing an event from the past into our present day. This is a divine mystery in action. So remembrance is a highly significant religious activity, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’

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