Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh and Killodiernan church on Sunday 9th January 2022, the 1st after Epiphany, year C
‘Be afraid. Be very afraid’
I’m sure you’ve heard
this popular catch-phrase – it’s used to warn us that something dire is about
to happen, in a menacing but slightly jokey way. But do you know where it comes
from? It’s from the 1986 remake of the science-fiction horror movie The Fly, in which a mad scientist experimenting
with a matter transporter mixes up his
Today, many of us
really are feeling afraid, very afraid, about what can seem like a threatening,
dangerous future.
- Think illness and death – due to novel
viruses, and growing antibiotic resistance.
- Think rising sea levels, droughts, and floods
- due to catastrophic climate change.
- Think famine and wars - due to declining
soil fertility, water shortage, rising population - and the evil in human hearts that causes us to hate others.
That is not how we as Christians are called to behave. The future is not hopeless. God has given us a great gift of hope, hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. And surely we must share this gift of hope with others, who may not share our faith, but badly need our hope.
The ground of our hope is our conviction that
God loves us.
This is at the heart of the good news that Jesus preached. But its roots go back much further. The OT tells the story of how over hundreds of years the children of Israel gradually came to understand that God - the terrifying mighty creator - also loves his people. As Psalm 29 which we have just read puts it, the God whose voice ‘breaks the cedar trees’, ‘shakes the wilderness’ and ‘makes the oak trees writhe and strips the forest bare’, is also the God that ‘shall give strength to his people’ and ‘shall give his people the blessing of peace’.
Nowhere is this more
beautifully expressed than in today’s 1st reading from Isaiah
(Isaiah 43:1-7). Scholars tell us that this passage was probably written around
540BC. The children of Israel are in captivity in Babylon. They are afraid for
their future, on the verge of giving up hope that they would ever be able to
return to their homeland. So the poet seeks to encourage them in these words:
‘But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed
you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called
you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with
you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk
through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not
consume you.’
And why should the captive children of
‘Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.
These
are beautiful, encouraging and reassuring words, aren’t they?
‘Do not fear … because you are precious in my sight,
and honoured, and I love you’.
500 years later the Jews of Jesus’s time were utterly convinced that God loved them and this gave them hope for the future, even though their country had been conquered and occupied by the Romans. They believed that God loved the Jewish people, the children of Israel, in a special way; they were God’s chosen people, with whom God had established a covenant; and they lived in hope for the coming of a promised Messiah, the anointed one of God, who would restore the fortunes of his chosen people.
This is the background to Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism by John in our 3rd reading (Luke 3:15-17, 21-22), in which God marks Jesus out as the Messiah. God as a loving Father sends the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and says, ‘You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased’, in an echo of Isaiah’s words. It is the only place in the Bible where we encounter all 3 persons of the Trinity at the same time – God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Jesus himself and the
first Christians were Jews, and we have inherited their Jewish conviction that
God loves us, and with it, God’s gift of hope – thanks be to God for the
insight of the Jewish people!
With a fresh insight, Christians came to believe that God loves all people created in his image, not just Jews but gentiles like you and me, not just white people but people of all colours and ethnic origins, not just those who are like us but those we find alien.
In this I feel sure we follow Jesus himself. But it is interesting to notice how Jesus’s own self-understanding developed over the course of his ministry. Matthew’s Gospel records him telling the Canaanite woman ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt 15:24); but by the end of the same Gospel he would say to his disciples, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28:19).
The Epiphany season is traditionally a time to
reflect on how God reveals his nature to us.
So, I invite you to
ponder God’s loving nature, revealed in Isaiah’s beautiful poetry:
Thus says the Lord…, ‘Do not fear … because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you’.
Let us give thanks for the insight which we have inherited from the ancient Hebrews and the first Christians, that God loves all his people.
The implications are life-changing:
·
Because we
believe that God loves us, we live in hope.
·
Because we
live in hope, we do not fear the future, no matter how dangerous it may seem.
· Because we do not fear the future, we have the confidence to work for God’s kingdom.
All this poses a great question to each one of us – and to us all as a body, Christ’s body, the Church. The question is this: What am I, what are we, going to do to make God’s kingdom a living reality?
I shall finish with a Collect of the Word
Spirit of energy and change,
in whose power Jesus was anointed
to be the hope of the nations:
be poured out also upon us
without reserve or distinction,
that we may have confidence and strength
to implant your justice on the earth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen
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