God In Action

Advent 3: 2010: Matt 11.2-11

The theme for today, as the present showed us, is that God already is at work in the world. God is already at work when we get up in the morning and is there, at the coalface, after we’ve tucked ourselves up in bed. He is the Ever-ready bunny climbing the mountainside. He doesn’t have days off, or holidays. He never turns up late the day after his work’s Christmas party. God is there before us and God is there after us as well. God is already at work.

None of this is fresh or new, but there is often a temptation to take our faith too seriously, to think that it all depends on us. We think: ‘if we don’t make the effort, if we don’t make things happen, if we don’t visit that person or work that bit harder, then nothing will happen’. Certainly we act like that’s what we think. Certainly most vicars are guilty of that tendency. We’re people who want to make a difference and help, and so we often confuse how hard we’re working with how much good we’re doing.

There was an article in the Church Times a few years ago which has long haunted me. In a good way. A woman wrote that she doesn’t want her vicar to live as if it’s all about how many hours you put in. She gets that message from her boss and from the world all of the time. She wrote that she was paying us, paying me, to sit still and to pray and to model a different way of living, which is all about the grace of God. It challenges me every time I think about it. I don’t often fall wholeheartedly into that trap, but I do from time to time, and then I have to remind myself, and have to rely on you telling me, that the kingdom of God depends on God and not primarily on me. God is there, at work, before me and God is there, at work, long after I’ve gone home. And thank God for that.

Now this doesn’t mean that we don’t have a role to play, a job to do.

What it does mean is that our role is to join in with what God is already doing, to jump on board the moving train. We don’t have to do it ourselves, on our own, in our own strength. We have to follow the course God has already set. It’s about seeing where God is at work, and joining in. We might have the best idea in the world about what St Mary’s needs but if it comes from us and is not part of God’s plan for St Mary’s then we shouldn’t be surprised if it falls flat on its face. It doesn’t depend on us: it depends on God.

This is great, good news because we can all take a deep breath and relax about some of the things which stalk our dreams, like how we’re going to fund the rebuilding of the towers or how we’re going to reach all of the people of Newton with the love of God. It’s ok. God has got it in hand. God is at work.

But there is a downside as well about joining in with what God is doing, which is highlighted in this morning’s reading about John the Baptist.

John the Baptist is someone who listens intently to find out the truth. As an unborn child, he leapt in his mother’s womb when he heard his cousin Mary say the words x just read, surely the most perfect marriage ever of elegant poetry conveying certainty and faith. In the desert he listened to God and to the world and he began to proclaim his message, began to make straight the path for the one who was to come. And when Jesus came to the Jordan he listened to him and baptised him even though he knew instinctively that he was not worthy of polishing his shoes. Again and again, John stood still and listened and knew God’s mind.  

But now John is in prison, a prison from which he will never emerge. John is again standing still, again testing his beliefs, again working out what God is doing now. He must, surely, be wondering whether he was right to take King Herod on so bluntly, whether he chose the right issue, whether Herod’s marriage is worth his own life. And he knows that Jesus is not living up to what he expected, is not acting as he thought he would. He had proclaimed the coming of a man who will separate the sheep from the goats, who will destroy those who oppose him, who will come with power and might and authority to judge, and to sentence.

But instead it seems that Jesus is about relationships and love and healing, about kneeling in the dust next to the least and the lost and the lonely, about forgiveness more than condemnation. John had expected a ravening wolf: instead, Jesus seems a friendly meerkat. Simples. And the question John asks from his dank cell, is: Was I right about you? Are you the one who is to come?

Two years ago he was absolutely convinced: but now, in the darkness of a tiny, barred room, abandoned and alone, he is not so sure. Are you the One? And Jesus replies, beautifully, majestically: The words of the prophets, and the hopes of the people, and the promises of God are being fulfilled this very day. And if John had lived longer he would have seen his hopes fulfilled and surpassed on a tomb-shattered cross.

Like John, we too might find that God is doing things which confuse and anger us. We too might find that our timing doesn’t match God’s, that things are moving too slowly, that we can’t see what our effort and energy has achieved. John can’t see that the coming revolution he proclaimed is any nearer now than it was before he started. We too might feel, sometimes, as if we’re stood in the middle of the Sahara emptying cup after cup of water into the thirsty sand. We want to see the fruit of our faithfulness and love now, today, and God doesn’t really work like that. Something we said five years ago, something someone saw in us a decade ago, might mean that someone kneels down and prays to God today. And we might never know.

A Primary School teacher will never know how the time they spent with a six year-old, and the example they gave, helps them to make good decisions at 16, and helps them to make good life decisions at 30. A grandparent may perhaps be dead before the time and energy they invested in their child’s child bears fruit. It’s just the way things happen.

But like John we are usually given enough signs of hope, of new life, to keep going. For John, the report that the blind see, the lame dance, the lepers are restored to their families is a sign that God is at work even if it doesn’t match John’s expectations. It may not happen as we want it to, or as quickly, or as slowly even. But God is at work, and God is in action, and God is God.

It’s good to know that God is in the driving seat. But it’s immensely challenging when God doesn’t act as we expect him to, in the timescale we’d assumed. It’s disorientating and scary when what we think it means to follow God crashes into the dazzling reality of God himself.

Sometimes when God does something new we can adjust quickly, as Mary did when God sent Gabriel to announce that she was to be the Christ-bearer, to which Mary replied immediately: Let it be to me according to God’s will, and, later, My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my Spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

And sometimes it can take an absolute age, like Paul who spent months persecuting the church and killing Christians before Jesus appeared to him in a ball of light and shattered his old conviction and gave him a new Gospel to proclaim. John the Baptist comes somewhere in the middle, I think, as he comes round to the fact that God has not sent a merciless General or a hanging Judge in his wake, but something entirely new, unexpected, exciting: that God has come himself. God himself comes.

It can be intensely reassuring to know that it is God’s plan which matters: it can also be intensely disorientating if what we expect and what’s happening don’t fit together, if we can’t reconcile them. But the bottom line always is that God is God and we just have to join in where God is already at work around us and through us and in us to others. And to that, let all of God’s people say Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.