THE REVD JONATHAN AITKEN SERMON Advent 2 Sunday 8 December 2019

The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
We are in the early stages of the holy season of Advent and in the final stages – thank heavens – of the General Election Campaign. So it may be timely to ask this question:
Do the ancient spiritual messages of Advent have any relevance to the secular shambles of our modern Parliamentary democracy?
Now this is my first Advent sermon as an ordained priest.
But “my previous” as we call it at Pentonville included fighting seven general election campaigns as a Parliamentary candidate.
And if any voter had ever asked me on the hustings the question that I’ve just asked you in this church today, I would have thought that I was dealing with a religious nutter.
In the years of “my previous” I would probably have dodged the question or brushed it away with a touch of mockery.
But a journey from politics to priesthood makes one look at life differently.
So I now think if we ponder carefully on all three of our readings we can find intriguing clues that the First Advent and the words of John the Baptist do offer significant sign posts for this weeks General Election and what may follow it.
For example, high on the list of grievances that have been frequently voiced in all parts of today’s electorate are “that the system isn’t working” and that “we don’t trust our leaders”.
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
Well, the system and the leaders weren’t working in ancient Israel either.
The tyranny of Herod;
The occupation of the Romans;
And the uselessness of the political leaders described in our reading as “you brood of vipers” all made the Judeans a restless, unhappy people who had lost trust in their system.
Until suddenly out of nowhere arrives this strange figure of John the Baptist, drawing crowds in the desert with a message far more profound than “Get Brexit done” or “Let’s have a second Referendum.”
John the Baptist had a straightforward uncompromising message: – Repent.
Now Repentance sounds a hard sell to our secular society.
This is partly an English Language problem. The word in our native tongue, never adequately defined, vaguely conjures up a picture of:
─ sayingsorryoverandoveragain, ─ standinginthecorner,
─ writingout100lines,
─ doingpenance,
─ orinoldentimes,wearingsackclothandashes. Not much voter appeal there!
But in the Greek language in which the Gospels were originally written the word for repentance is Metanoia. And Metanoia literally means:
Meta – a change
Noia – of mind
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
More richly translated as
“A change of heart and mind”.
Now that was a much more understandable proposition to the people of Israel. They knew their system was broken. They understood the symbolism of a voice crying from the wilderness of the desert.
And we can grasp it too.
For in our personal lives we all have our crossings of the desert.
Spiritually we can discover that the desert is the place where we meet God.
Moses, David and Jesus himself all found that the barren desert can paradoxically be fertile ground for testing and transformation.
It was from the desert that John the Baptist turned up the volume of his call to repentance by quoting the words of the Prophet Isaiah:
“Make straight in the desert A highway for our God”
These words had a symbolism too.
In ancient Israel there were almost no roads let alone highways – only a few rural sun baked tracks.
However, the Roman historian Josephus tells us that by royal command King Solomon did build certain causeways or highways of black stone on the
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
approaches to Jerusalem in order to give new routes of access to pilgrims coming to pray in the temple.
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So, what new highways or bridges do we need to build in our Parliamentary democracy today?
Let’s start in the unexpected territory of religion.
Last Saturday The Financial Times had a prominent feature article headlined “Religion has returned to the political stage”. The opening line of the article said “Religion has been discussed during this election more than in any election in living memory”.
That’s true. Who could believe that the Chief Rabbi, courageously supported by Archbishop Justin would have felt the need to intervene so powerfully to warn against the scourge of antisemitism.
Or who would have expected, until it was re-ignited by the recent terrorism on London Bridge, that Islamophobia would be rising on the agenda of some far-right groups.
New highways of tolerance and understanding away from both these hateful prejudices need building up in our modern politics.
Our reading from Isaiah is a helpful signpost here.
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
The prophets vision of a holy mountain where wolves and lions live peacefully alongside lambs and goats has a message for our increasingly polarised society, too often embittered by extreme statements on social media.
Isaiah’s message is reinforced in our reading from Romans where St Paul declared:
“May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another”.
Harmony has been in noticeably short supply at Westminster in the past year or two.
So, let’s hope and pray that the new House of Commons will contain fewer MPs convulsed with the roarings of mad Brexit disease – in either direction.
Instead let’s pray for a fresh intake of new legislators who will lower their voices, and deliver their election promises:
MPs who will cooperate with more cross party statesmanship on national issues like expanding social care for the elderly and who will work without Brexit bitterness for the common good under impartial Parliamentary chairmanship.
These fruits of Westminster repentance, if they happen, will not be revolutionary innovations.
These are the paths of trust that have served our Parliamentarians well in the past.
Until recently every daily session of the Lords and Commons commenced with the reading of what was known as the Prayer for Parliament. Father Philip will
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
know it by heart because he often reads the prayers in the House of Commons when the Speaker’s Chaplain is unavailable.
This prayer was written in 1661 after the civil war and the restoration of the monarchy and it calls upon all Parliamentarians “to lay aside all private interests, prejudices and partial affections” and to strive for “the uniting and knitting together of all persons ...in true Christian love and charity towards one another”.
The mission statement of that 17th century prayer for Parliament is not all that far from the opening statements of John the Baptist in the 1st century. After telling his desert audience to repent, John added the command:
“Bear fruit worthy of repentance”.
Then he proclaimed the power of the greater one who was coming after him and declared:
“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”.
Now this is where the Advent message of John the Baptist becomes more uncomfortable. For he shifted, as our reading records, to the agricultural and almost apocalyptic imagery of the threshing floor, the winnowing fork and the burning of chaff “with unquenchable fire”.
What is the meaning of these puzzling words to our modern world?
I don’t suppose many of us would recognise a winnowing fork or a threshing floor if we saw one.
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
And what exactly is chaff?
When I was a young newspaper reporter in old Fleet Street there was a joke doing the rounds:
Question: What does the Editor do?
Answer: The Editor separates the wheat from the chaff – and then prints the chaff.
Still true today perhaps, to judge by the volume of irrelevant chaff in the news reporting of the election.
But God, much more seriously, does want us to separate our spiritual grains of wheat form the unsatisfying husks of chaff in our own lives.
This call for separating the good from the bad, which was made in the First Advent by John the Baptist, was repeated over and over again by Jesus in his parables.
He called for the separation of the sheep from the goats.
He called for the separation of the wheat from the tares or weeds.
He called in the parable of the net for the separating the good fish from the bad fish.
Perhaps it is one of the more neglected Advent messages that we should try to make this separation of wheat and chaff in our own lives.
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
Advent can be the ideal time to do this.
A time when we quieten our souls.
Intensify our prayers.
And wait for the mystical murmurings and knockings which can be the harbingers of the coming of Christ in our hearts.
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Clearing away the irrelevant chaff in our busy self-centred lives is difficult. For Advent is also the season of proliferating seasonal distractions such as:
Christmas shopping life;
Christmas party life;
Christmas Commercial life;
And family gatherings at Christmas can all be full of chaff.
Even church life is not always immune from chaff.
To give an unexpected example of the separation challenges think even in carol services of the difference between the agreeable musical chaff of the lyrics in “Ding Dong Merrily on High” compared to the holy wheat of the mystery of the incantation so powerfully captured in Charles Wesley’s immortal lines:
“Veiled in flesh the Godhead see Hail the Incarnate Deity”.
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The Revd Jonathan Aitken Advent 2 Sermon for Sunday 8 December St Matthew’s Westminster, 20 Great Peter Street
For a few more days we will probably be distracted from the coming of the Incarnate Deity by the cacophony and chaff of electioneering.
But as we move closer to the coming of the word made flesh, may we put aside the distractions of the outside world of politics or anything else.
Instead, may we quietly concentrate on growing the spiritual wheat in our souls so that in the words of our Gospel Reading: “They may bear the fruit of our repentance”. May we rise to the challenge of John the Baptist’s call to us this Advent.
Amen