Sermon Preached at St Paul’s Church on the Third Sunday of Advent – 12th December 2021:ZEPHANIAH: 3:14-20, LUKE 3:7-18, PHILIPPIANS 4:4-7
Deacon Christine Saccali
PASS THE PARCEL
I speak in the name of the triune God Father, Son and Holy Spirit AMEN
I remember well a childhood game usually played at birthday parties called Pass the Parcel, do you know it? If you don’t, then it goes like this: the children sit round in a circle, on the floor, and music is played. A large wrapped parcel is passed round until the music stops whereupon that child opens one layer of paper only to reveal yet more layers often of different coloured paper. There is much anticipation and squealing. In a later version sweets would drop out and be grabbed in a free for all.
A bit like the updated versions of luxury advent calendars which have upstaged the simple picture windows of my youth. The new ones seem to me to be missing the point of Advent. So many people glide over it or through it unlike Lent. But Advent is a gift to us to pause and reflect before the great feast of Christmas. We do not have to open all its layers at once there is a time of watching and waiting and savouring what is to come while enjoying the four weeks of Advent.
Now Advent ,which kicked off our new church year of Year C , on November 28th this year and today is the third Sunday so let us turn to our readings : the book of the prophet Zephaniah is not on the whole cheerful reading, and almost everything about it is disputed by the various commentaries on it. No one is absolutely sure when it was written, despite its firm placing of itself in the first chapter and verse in the days of King Josiah. Moreover, no one is quite sure how much of the book has been edited and patched together from different sources.
The lovely verses set for today are so uncharacteristic of the rest of it that they are generally thought to have been a later editor’s attempt to give a happy ending to an otherwise totally gloomy book. Certainly, it moves from a condemnation of Jerusalem, through dire warnings to most of the neighbouring states, to this sudden passage which could have been taken straight from Isaiah.
But even if it has been added on, it has a certain logic to it. In verses 12-13, the only people left are a ‘ people humble and lowly’, and to them God comes. At last, God chooses to come and live in Jerusalem and his presence makes it home. There is a sudden change in verse 18 from the third person to the first; this is no longer reporting what God will do but God himself promising to bring his people back.
Isn’t the word ‘home’ an emotive and evocative one especially in these pandemic times and before Christmas when the secular songs sing of coming home for the holidays? Nostalgia, literally in Greek an ache for return and Hiraeth, the Welsh word which means a spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was. Nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them. It is in the wind, and the rocks, and the waves. It is nowhere and everywhere. That definition may give us an insight into the longing God’s people had for Jerusalem. For Jesus’ return to Nazareth, maybe?
Think of all the things that have been done in the name of protecting this idea of home. To think of home and Jerusalem in the same breath is almost unbearably ironic just at present when they are a people in exile. Who has the right to call Jerusalem home? But Zephaniah suggests that Jerusalem can only be home when God is there himself. Home then- is not so much where the heart is, as where God is. And that same biblical theme continues today; exile, alienation and rootlessness and a longing to find our home in God. Good to keep that in mind.
The trick then is to train our hearts to be at home where God is. Augustine wrote, ‘Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee,’ but the problem is that it is so often not true, or at least we don’t know it is true. We may know we are restless, but until our hearts, minds and souls find their home they don’t always know what they are looking for. The final verse of one of G.K.Chesterton’s Christmas poems goes like this:
To an open home in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are.
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
It is God’s willingness to be homeless and to bring us home that we celebrate at Christmas, and that we spend Advent trying to prepare ourselves for. We aim to provide a church where everyone can find a home.
But our passage from Luke, like Zephaniah, warns us that dispossession is the only preparation for possession. We hear John the Baptist, whose candle we lit today on the Advent wreath, warning his hearers, in no uncertain terms, that they have placed their faith in the wrong things. They are trusting the fact that they are Abraham’s children to get them into God’s home. And they have relied on possessions, not God, to make them feel comfortable and secure.
But John has not fallen into this trap even when people start asking whether he is the Messiah. He is absolutely clear about his own role. He is the perfect person to prepare the way for the ‘homeless God’, since he himself was prepared to belong nowhere for the sake of God’s calling.
As we tear off the wrappers of Advent, awaiting our Christmas gift of the heavenly babe, we are aware of the figure of a heavily pregnant Mary, waiting too as she nears her time as God-bearer. We are called this Advent to respond generously in our hearts and homes as we did to the bazaar last week. This year’s Bishop Robert’s Advent Appeal is for areas in the Diocese affected by Climate Change, fire and flood and Greece is included in that along with areas of northern Europe and Turkey. One of the one hundred photos of the year from time magazine shows Panayiota Ritsopi, dressed in black, fleeing from her home in Evia clutching her heart and handbag. Unforgettable.
I remember from my youth, collection tins which were rattled outside shops for charity collections, including the Poppy Appeal. In credit cards and a no cash society we have lost some of this direct cash appeal apart from buskers or the homeless where we might casually toss a coin in a cap. I urge you as you spend to save your change and collect it so others may find a safe roof over their head.
Let us pray
AMEN
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