SERMON AT FARLEY ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, MORNING WORSHIP
– SUNDAY 14
DECEMBER 2025 – ADVENT 3
Isaiah
35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11 (incorporating parts of
Sermon 178 and 179)
May I
speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may my words be a
blessing to all who listen to them.
Today we lit
the third Advent candle known as the Candle of John the Baptist or Candle of Joy
or sometimes Candle of Love, for in love we find joy, reminding
us of the proclamation of John the Baptist that it wasn’t him who was the
long-expected Messiah but the one who now appeared before him to be baptised by
him in the Jordan.
But, we are
ahead of ourselves for, like last week, we must return to the period of the
Babylonian Exile and the words of that great prophet of that time, Isaiah, from
whom we heard in our first reading this morning. Many of the prophesies, at
that time, related specifically to the Jews’ return to the Holy Land and the
rebuilding of the Temple. However, the
prophesies of Isaiah go well beyond just this more immediate restoration but
look to a time when the Jewish people’s long-awaited Messiah will appear – a
prophesy and proclamation well ahead of John the Baptist’s!
For many
centuries after Isaiah, the Jewish people looked upon many candidates for their
Messiah as is recorded in the Apocrypha – those books which plug the gap
between Malachi in the Old Testament and Matthew’s Gospel in the New Testament
– which are usually excluded from most copies of the bible.
So, for many
Jews, the period of waiting had been very long indeed and we read in the Book
of Malachi how the people, including the priests, were indolent or casual in
their worship of God. Their Faith had
become stale because nothing seemed to be happening and their prayers did not
seem to be answered. We read in the Book of Malachi how they offered defective
goods as burnt sacrifices and kept the best for themselves. Their worship was half-hearted and lacking in
conviction.
Isaiah,
though, tells the Jewish people that “the wilderness and dry land shall be
glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom
abundantly.” This is a reference to
those dry stagnant times described in Malachi when the Jewish people thought
that they were in a time of great wilderness. Perhaps we feel a bit like that
too as we see the world in turmoil and the difficulties facing not only our own
country but those even more dangerous and destructive places like Sudan, Gaza,
Ukraine, Venezuela, Tanzania, Nigeria – the list grows ever longer!
Isaiah gives
encouragement to his readers or listeners by telling them that something great
and wonderful will occur in the fullness of time and that God’s glory shall be
revealed and “he will come and save you”. What wonderful words of joy and encouragement
after many years of captivity in Babylon; and so for us, we now await Jesus’s
promised second coming but, like our grandchildren awaiting their Christmas
presents, we need to be patient for the greatest Christmas present humankind can
ever receive!
This is the
message, then of both Isaiah and John the Baptist. John went around preaching the baptism of
repentance by which Jews could seek atonement for their sins. The actual washing in the river, the baptism,
was an outward sign to others that they had truly turned away from evil and
washed away their sins. Hence John the Baptist called for people to
repent. You will recall, although it
does not appear in today’s gospel reading, that the Messiah, Jesus, would
baptise in the fire and spirit – i.e. not simply an outward symbolic gesture of
water cleansing the physical body but that, inwardly, people would receive the
fire of the Holy Spirit as we will see later at Pentecost, and be cleansed
inside as well as outside.
Of course,
we do read at the beginning of the gospel passage today that John, having heard
of the ministry of Jesus from his prison cell, was still not entirely sure
whether he was the true Messiah – God’s chosen.
Had his own ministry been in vain, he must have wondered. There had been
so many pretenders in the Apocrypha, as I mentioned earlier, and the Jews
seemed to have been waiting for a very long time – time for them to be overrun
and occupied by stronger nations culminating with their absorption into the
Roman Empire. They must have really been feeling that God had left them to
flounder. Jesus’s response to those disciples of John was that they should
report back all that he was doing – the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, the
dead being raised, the poor hearing good news and so on. John had lived, but
only just as we know from the story, to know of the coming of the True Messiah.
In our
Second Reading, James in his letter, to the Jewish diaspora implores them to be
patient in their waiting for the Lord to return. He uses the example of the farmer waiting for
his crop to grow, waiting for the rains to arrive. Our house in Downton backs onto a field of
various arable crops and it always amazes me how the crop develops from a muddy
field into small shoots, then tall shoots and eventually the ears of corn or
maize or whatever was planted and to be harvested. Year in, year out this occurs, with me, in those
early days of planting wondering what the seeds the farmer has just sown will turn
out to be.
Advent is a
time of waiting. It is a time of
expectation. It is a time of preparation and it can also be a time of healing.
A word used
a lot by theologians is “liminal”. It is
a word I wasn’t all that familiar with until I started my training as a
minister and later, even more so, as a spiritual director. I knew of its devolved word “subliminal”
better in the context of “subliminal messages” – those being messages which are
conveyed to you, often in adverts, which are not in the forefront but hidden
and conveyed very subtly. A classic one is the smell of bread upon entering the
supermarket making you feel hungry and thereby probably putting more foodstuffs
in your trolley than you intended!
“Liminal”
means “on the edge” or “on the threshold”.
It has been described as the “no longer, but not yet”. It derives from
the same root a lintel – that stone that you find above a door separating the
outside from the inside – neither itself wholly inside nor wholly outside. Likewise being in a liminal place means we
are ourselves are in the “no longer and not yet” place. That is really where Advent
is too. We are “no longer” in a place of despair not knowing if and when our
Saviour is coming but in the not yet knowing how long it will be. Of course, today we know that Jesus has been
and we also know, those who believe that is, that Jesus rose from the dead and
is alive today seated with God in Heaven and he has promised to return. Now we
await his second coming and so we are today still in a liminal space with the
exception that Jesus and thereby God can be manifested by the Holy Spirit –
that same Spirit that John the Baptist promised the Messiah would baptise us in
and which came down for all at Pentecost.
How many of
us long for that now? We live with ever
increasing tensions in a world with much hostility towards our fellow humans.
We would do well to go back and read the teachings of Jesus in the New
Testament and recall how Jesus told those in the synagogue that he had come to
fulfil the laws and the prophesies not to tear them up. It is no coincidence
that the passage Jesus read in the synagogue in Galilee was from Isaiah’s
prophesy.
I cannot end
this short homily better than by repeating the words of Paul at the end of last
week’s reading and by recommending that whenever we feel lost or lonely in our
Faith or want to tell others about it, these words may be a blessing and
encouragement to us and those around us who need to hear the Good News –
“May the God
of hope fill you with joy, love and peace in believing, so that you may abound
in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
So let us
look upon our Third Candle today with the joy and love which it represents. The
joy of the knowledge that Jesus remains with us through the power of the Holy
Spirit.
Let us
pray:
Father God
for whom we watch and
wait,
you sent John the Baptist to prepare the way of your Son:
give us courage to speak the truth,
to hunger for justice,
and to suffer for the cause of right,
with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen MFB/11122025/228
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