The hope of new life

Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

25^th December 2020

Christmas Day

Reading: Luke 2:1-20   

The virus that has dominated global affairs this year,

            reminds us of our physicality;

we are born, we live, and we die.

 

And there is a truth in this notion of physicality

            that we often miss or even deny.

We are not disembodied minds, nor are we trapped souls.

            We’re not ‘passing through’ this life

                        on our way from somewhere to somewhere else,

            and neither are we able to transcend the messiness of our mortality

                        by escaping to our higher minds.

 

We are embodied beings, and despite the fantasies of science fiction,

            there is no way to separate us into our component pieces

            of mind, soul, and body.

 

We are holistic beings.

 

The incarnation, the story of God becoming fully human

            in Bethlehem two thousand years ago,

speak to us of a God who enters into the experience

            of what it means to be human;

embracing the fullness of humanity, with nothing held back.

 

This, of course, is why the early explorations in theology

            that came to be labelled ‘heresy’,

            in the end, failed to convince.

 

This is not God pretending to be human, or a human aspiring to divinity;

            the baby-in-the-manger, God-made-flesh,

                        speaks to us of God’s utter, total, and complete commitment to humanity,

                        from birth to death, with all that this entails.

 

So, why does this matter?

            What’s it to you? Or to me?

 

I was talking with David Shapton this week,

            and those of you who remember David will know

            that he has the ability to go deep, and go there quickly.

This is still true, despite him now being 94 years old!

 

And he said to me that, for all the familiarity we have with the Nativity story,

            a lot of people miss an aspect of its significance that gives us hope in our lives,

            and this is the message that there is always new life coming into being.

 

There is always new life coming into being.

 

I’ve said before that my favourite carol is In The Bleak Midwinter,

            and I’m always surprised that some people struggle with it

            on the grounds that it isn’t historically realistic!

Which, of course, it isn’t… but then it’s not supposed to be.

 

I mean, yes, we all know that Jesus wasn’t actually born

            in the middle of a deep snowy winter in Palestine;

for starters it rarely snows in Bethlehem, and when it does, it melts in a few hours.

            Snow doesn’t fall snow on snow in Bethlehem.

 

But this isn’t the point of the Carol.

            Christina Rossetti was using the Victorian ideal

                        of a snowy wintry English December

            as a metaphor for the world into which the Christ-child was born,

                        offering a beautiful and hopeful image

            that even in the depths of winter-darkness,

                        when all life and light seems to have left the world,

            nonetheless God is still at work

                        bringing new life into being.

 

And this God-given gift of new life

            is still at work in our world, in our lives.

 

The second  verse of the carol captures something of this conviction

            that God still comes to our world:

 

‘Heaven cannot hold him’ - God comes to us today, and every day,

            bringing new life to birth in our lives and our world.

 

God may be the almighty,

            attended by angels and archangels,

            serenaded by cherubim and seraphim,

but God is also found in the cry of a tiny baby, in a stable in Bethlehem,

            fully embracing humanity in all its diversity of creed, colour, and status.

 

And, as the carol finishes,

            it asks each of us what our response will be?

 

Our reading gave us the story of the shepherds,

            and how they brought their gifts to the stable,

and it asks us to consider how we will respond

            to the good news of God coming to us,

            bringing the spark of hope and the promise of new life.

 

I’m sure that today isn’t what any of us

            would have planned and hoped for, for this year.

‘Life’ sometimes just gets in the way, doesn’t it?

 

And the image of a dark snowy winter

            may seem particularly appropriate for Christmas 2020,

as we find ourselves confined to our homes

            by our common biology and the forces of nature and evolution.

 

But it is to a world in lockdown that Christ comes,

            again and again and again,

bringing to each of us the hope, the promise, of new life.

God's Midwives

  Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20^th December 2020

Luke 1.26-56 

Well, I guess maybe they’re like buses…

 

You don’t get any miraculous pregnancies for centuries,

            and then suddenly two come along at once!

 

Our reading for this morning skipped over the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah,

            of how they had got to old age without having children,

and then suddenly the Angel Gabriel appeared

            to say that God had heard their prayers,

and that Elizabeth was pregnant with the child

            who would grow up to be John the Baptist.

 

Instead, we picked up the very similar story of Elizabeth’s cousin Mary

            and her visit from the Angel Gabriel,

            giving her news of her own miraculous pregnancy.

 

These two stories,

            of women unexpectedly ‘with child’, as they say,

are part of a long tradition within the Hebrew Bible,

            of God giving miraculous children

            to women who shouldn’t by rights be pregnant.

 

And in each of these stories, the point is fairly consistently the same,

            which is that God can do what is impossible for humans.

 

So Sarah, wife to Abraham,

            laughed when she was told that she was going to bear a child,

            because she knew that age was against her.

But, nonetheless, Isaac was born (Genesis 21).

 

A generation later, Rebekah, wife to Isaac, wasn’t too old,

            she just didn’t seem to be able to conceive,

until Isaac prayed to God,

            and then she became pregnant,

and in due time, Jacob and Esau the twins were born (Genesis 25).

 

And then a generation further down the line,

            Jacob’s wives, the sisters Rachel and Leah, competed for his love,

and whilst Leah bore him children,

            he loved Rachel more - but she remained childless;

until, after a massive row

            which led to Jacob having children by both his wives’ slaves,

God remembered Rachel

            and she became pregnant with Joseph (Genesis 30).

 

And then, some while later in the Old Testament story,

            we get to Hannah, one of two wives of Elkanah

            who, like Rachel, was the preferred but barren wife.

After promising God that, if she became pregnant with a son,

            she would dedicate the child back to God,

sure enough she gave birth to Samuel, who became the prophet

            who anointed both King Saul and King David (1 Sam 1)

 

And then there’s Samson’s mother, unnamed,

            and childless until she was visited by an angel,

            who told her she would conceive and bear a child (Judges 13).

 

And then there’s that other unnamed childless wife,

            known only as the Shunammite Woman,

offering hospitality to the prophet Elisha,

            who, in return, prophesied that she would become pregnant,

            which, of course, she did. (2 Kings 4)

 

Now, forgive me, but today I’m going to note, but not explore in depth,

            the deeply problematic attitudes in these stories towards women,

            and the value that society placed, and often still places, on childbearing.

 

But I will say, and say very clearly,

            that the stigma of childlessness, often perpetuated in Christian circles,

            is something that we need to challenge.

A woman’s value is not found in her reproductive ability,

            and neither is marriage predicated on procreation.

 

After all, the emphasis in Luke’s gospel is not on Mary’s virginity per-se,

            with all the ‘body is bad’ connotations

                        that have preoccupied so many

                        who have wrestled with this passage down the centuries.

 

Rather, it is on the power of God to bring life

            where life has no right to be found.

 

So whilst I firmly believe that children are a blessing to be celebrated,

            a lack of children does not equate to a lack of God’s love or favour,

and those who long for children but are unable to conceive

            are not in some way being punished by God.

 

So whilst we should certainly bring our hurts and concerns to God in prayer,

            the solution to infertility, in our world of modern medicine, is not in prayer alone.

 

And neither am I going to delve into the murky waters

            of whether these stories are historically accurate.

If you want to hear me waxing lyrical

            about the scientific improbability of a virgin birth,

            check out my sermon from last year,

                        which is on our Bloomsbury sermon webpage

                        and the Christmas.org.uk website

 

Instead, I want to focus today on where God sits in these stories,

            to see if we can hear something from them

to help us explore for ourselves the significance of Luke’s story

            of the miraculous pregnancies of Mary and Elizabeth.

 

And, as I said a moment ago,

            the key point seems to be, fairly consistently,

            that God is able to do what humans cannot do.

 

So I want to suggest that we take a step away from the literal,

            and instead engage these stories

            at the level of their literary meaning.

 

Which leads me to ask the question of myself, and each of us:

            What is it, in your life, in our community, or in this world,

                        that seems impossible for humans to achieve?

 

Where do we see or experience a stubborn unwillingness

            for new life, and new hope, to blossom and come into being?

 

Sometimes it can seem as if God’s promises have failed,

            and that some other, more malign, force

            is writing the narrative of our lives and our world.

 

Certainly this was the experience of Israel of old.

 

If you remember our journey with Israel over the last few weeks,

            we’ve been hearing from the prophets of the exilic period,

and we’ve seen how their hope for a king who would restore David’s throne

            had dissolved into the tragedies of war and exile.

And then we’ve seen how their bright hopes for a return from Babylon,

            became a disappointment of infighting and continued oppression.

 

So, as we come to Luke’s account of Elizabeth and Mary,

            written some six centuries after the return from exile,

we find that he is still wrestling with this issue

            of whether God’s promises had failed.

 

This means that when Luke says that Joseph, Mary’s husband-to-be,

            is ‘of the house of David’ (v.27),

and that Mary’s son will be called ‘the Son of the Most High’,

            and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David (v.32),

            and that his kingdom will have no end (v.32),

Luke is telling his readers

            that God’s promises have not failed;

            rather they are coming to fulfilment, fully and finally, in the person of Jesus.

 

And Luke’s story of Mary and Elizabeth

            can help interpret these promises for us too,

as we, with Luke’s first readers,

            are invited to grapple with the significance

                        of God’s unexpected, life-giving, life-affirming,

                        intervention in human history.

 

And do you know what? Mary gets it!

            She understands that the God who is faithful

                        is still working in unexpected ways

            to bring about the fulfilment of ancient promises

                        and the dawn of a new, hopeful, peaceful way of being human.

 

She sings of it, in the passage now often called the Magnificat,

            which includes the following lines

            speaking of a world turned upside down by the intervention of God

 

⁵² [The Mighty One] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

 ⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

 ⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

 ⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

 

This is the new life that God is bringing to birth in the world,

            it is the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven,

            coming into being through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

 

It is the new life of justice for the oppressed,

            of food for the hungry,

of a new world being made

            and brought to birth in the lives of those

            who have already had it born in them.

 

So, for us this morning,

            I return to my question:

 

What new thing is God bringing to birth in your life,

            in our church, in our community,

and how can we play our part,

            in the coming of God’s kingdom

            on earth, as it is in heaven.

 

Many of us have a tendency to see ourselves

            as those who are active in the service of God,

and Bloomsbury has been blessed over the years

            with a talented, hardworking, motivated congregation,

            who gladly give their time and resources.

 

However, this can generate a context,

            where we also see ourselves

            as those who are, how can I put this? ‘God’s fixers’.

 

We see a problem, an injustice, a need,

            and we move quickly to a solution

            which inevitably comes from our own position of strength.

 

And I wonder if Luke’s story of Mary and Elizabeth

            can challenge this way of understanding our role

            as those who participate in the coming of God’s kingdom.

 

You see, the significance of God bringing life where it has no right to be,

            is that God does this, not us.

 

And so I wonder if there is an invitation here for us

            to re-think the way we see ourselves.

 

What if we aren’t ‘God’s fixers’ after all, but ‘God’s midwives’.

 

If a new life is coming into being,

            you want a good midwife on hand to make sure it all happens safely.

 

There is a place here, for competence, and skill, and training,

            but it’s always God who gives the gift of life.

 

So as we consider our lives, our community, and our world,

            and as we look for those places where life and hope have no right to be,

            we will, I am sure, see God at work bringing new life and hope into being.

 

This is the message of the Nativity,

            it is the good news of Jesus coming to our world.

 

And our role, maybe, is to be those,

            whose calling is to ensure that new life doesn’t die prematurely,

                        that it is safely brought to the world,

                        and carefully nurtured to maturity.

 

It’s not all down to us,

            in fact it’s never really down to us at all.

It always begins with God,

            through whom the impossible becomes possible.

 

Light in the Darkness

 Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

13^th December 2020

Isaiah 9.6-7; 61.1-11

 

Listen to this sermon here:

This week, we are bringing to a close, for now,

            our journey through the Old Testament prophetic literature,

            which has been carrying us through Advent.

 

If you remember, we have been hearing how different prophets

            helped the people of Israel deal with the trauma and grief

            of their experience of the Babylonian exile;

and last week, with the prophet Joel,

            we saw how even after the return from exile,

things weren’t all plain sailing for those who came back from Babylon

            to their task of rebuilding the Temple and City of Jerusalem.

 

Well, this post-exilic period is the historical context

            for the main part of our reading for today

            from chapter 61 of the prophet Isaiah.

 

You may have heard me say this before,

            but the book of Isaiah as we find it in the Old Testament

            is actually three books edited together.

 

First Isaiah, which take us up to chapter 39,

            is set in the time before the exile.

And our first shorter reading from chapter 9 this morning,

            with its messianic expression of hope

                        for a child born to re-establish the kingdom of David

            comes from this period of the text.

 

But then, instead of a new David,

            what Israel encountered was a time of exile in Babylon;

and Second Isaiah, which take us from chapters 40-55,

            is a word of prophecy to the exiles,

and it’s in here that we find the wonderful suffering servant passages

            that we often read at Easter.

 

And then we come to the final section of the book, chapters 56-66,

            which is a prophecy to those who have returned from exile,

and it’s from here that we get today’s main reading, from chapter 61.

 

And the key thing I want us to take away from this, today,

            is that those who are tasked with rebuilding after a period of trauma,

            need a strong sense of vision if they are to rebuild well.

 

This was true for the ancient Israelites,

            and I suspect it is true for us too.

 

So let’s spend a few minutes now with Isaiah,

            to hear what word from God he brings

            to those tasked with rebuilding after a time of exile.

 

Well, he begins with a passage

            that we probably know better from Luke Chapter 4,

where Jesus reads it from the Isaiah scroll

            at the start of his public ministry in Nazareth.

 

We’re coming back to this passage in a few weeks’ time,

            so I won’t spend too long on it now,

but what strikes me as significant

            is that Isaiah recognises

            that all is not well with the world.

 

There are people who are oppressed,

            people who are broken-hearted,

people who are held captive to forces beyond their control,

            and people who find themselves deprived of their liberty.

 

And the vision that Isaiah offers is of a society renewed,

            of a social order rebuilt,

which starts with a recognition of what is still wrong with a world

            where people stand in need of mercy, restoration, and comfort.

 

This centring of the vulnerable at the heart of the rebuilding project

            is where Isaiah believes the people of God should always start.

 

And so Isaiah offers a way for us, with the ancient Israelites,

            to hold space for grief, lament, and mourning,

but into that space to hear words of hope,

            and a promise from God of restoration.

 

And this, in a nutshell, is how we experience the season of Advent;

            it is a time for recognising the darkness and pain of the world,

            but daring to believe that there is a promise of new life from God,

            coming to birth as hope in the midst of hopelessness.

 

Just as Isaiah whispered words of divine restoration to the dispirited exiles;

            just as the Christ child came to a world of poverty and people displacement;

so God continues to come to us in Christ,

            as we too live in a world that is not yet the world as it should be.

 

And the challenge for us, as it was for ancient Israel,

            is to grasp this vision as we play our part

                        in the continual rebuilding of the world

                        that we are called to participate in with Christ.

 

And whilst this is always the calling of the people of God,

            there are some years where it feels more true than other,

            and I suspect that this is one of those years.

 

We may not have to rebuild the walls of our city,

            or reconstruct our holy sanctuary,

but we have certainly experienced a time of exile

            with many of us not having been into London or Bloomsbury

            for a considerable period of time.

 

Well - as I speak to you this morning from the church,

            I can bear the good news that the building is still standing

            and the heating is still working!

 

But this doesn’t mean we don’t have our own rebuilding task ahead of us

            as we look forward through to 2021.

 

I’m reminded of one of my predecessors, Townley Lord,

            who was minister at Bloomsbury in the 1930s and 40s

 

In the church history, Faith Bowers tells the story:

 

Alice Lord felt they had virtually to begin again in 1930. The active membership had dropped and Dr Lord overheard someone outside the chapel observing that the church was finished and would become a cinema within two years. (p.333)

 

How alive a church is depends on one’s perspective. There was life in the old church yet, but it needed to be rejuvenated to serve the new generation. (p.333)

 

Over the next decade, the church saw some growth,

            but then the second world war came, and things changed again.

 

Faith continues the story:

 

War was declared on 3 September. Attendances at Bloomsbury dropped to forty almost overnight and everything changed. Only three deacons remained. (p.336)

 

Dr and Mrs Lord, with the handful of remaining helpers and the faithful caretakers, kept the church open throughout the war. Residents and tourists vanished, but many service personnel passed through London and were glad of a welcoming church. (p.336)

 

As the victory celebrations faded, it became clear that people were not returning to live around the church in the old way. Office blocks replaced residential tenements. After those heroic years, there must have been a sense of anticlimax as the church grasped that there could be no return to the ‘good old days’. Alice Lord recalled the heartbreaking realization that they had to start again from scratch in these inauspicious circumstances. Committed to Bloomsbury they were determined that this church should not die. (p.337)

 

My point is this, the people of God have been here before.

            There are times of exile, and times for rebuilding,

            times of sorrow, and times of joy.

There is a time, as the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it,

            for everything under the sun.

 

And right now the vaccine promises us a hope

            for the end our time of pandemic-related exile;

in the next few months we will be returning to our sanctuary,

            and rebuilding our community.

 

But as those who returned to Israel from Babylonian exile discovered,

            we will not be able to rebuild exactly as before.

 

Through our time of exile, some things have died,

            projects have ended, ways of being have ceased,

and we will mourn their passing,

            and then we will build anew.

 

One of the positive things I think we have discovered

            during our exile to the land of Zoom

has been that our faith community can withstand

            a time of extended exile from our sanctuary.

 

If you had asked me this time last year,

            whether it was possible to sustain Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

            away from our building, and without meeting together for the best part of a year,

I would have said that I very much doubted it.

 

But just as the Jews exiled to Babylon

            developed new ways of practicing their faith

                        that not only allowed them to survive the exile

            but which sustained them through the millennia that followed;

 

so I believe that the way our community of faith at Bloomsbury

            has responded during the last year

            will create in us a robustness that will sustain us in the years to come.

 

And as we seek to rebuild ministry in Central London,

            we will need to keep our God-given vision for Bloomsbury before us.

 

Just as the exiles needed Isaiah to set before them

            a vision for their renewed society,

so we too will need

            to keep our vision for Bloomsbury before us.

 

All that work we did in 2019

            arriving at our values, vision, and mission statements,

can be for us our call to a different future

            where God’s promises are made real in our time,

            through our community, in our church, and in our city.

 

If you haven’t read these words of values, vision and mission recently,

            I’d encourage you to go to the church website,

and spend some time prayerfully re-reading them,

            and also reading the commentary that accompanies them.

 

We will need these words before us

            guiding our decisions and our prayers

            as we move forwards from where we are, to where we will be.

 

Just as Isaiah’s vision called the Israelites

            to discover that God’s values are for a reorientation of society

                        to one where the poor are empowered,

                        the enslaved are liberated,

                        and money is used to build equity;

            so we too can be part of building a better world,

                        where the present does not get to define the future,

            but rather where the present becomes the occasion

                        for thinking about what God is calling us to in the future.

 

The financial instability caused by the current political situation

            and the ongoing impact of the pandemic

means, I suspect, that our wider society

            is going to need people of faith and vision

            to help rebuild in ways that centre the vulnerable

                        and care for the weak and the oppressed.

 

And just as the trauma of the second world war

            gave rise to the systems of social security and healthcare provision

            that many of us are so proud of in our country to this day,

I wonder what visions for renewal and rebuilding we can advocate

            that will benefit those who would otherwise face isolation and exclusion.

 

From our work with Citizens UK on homelessness,

                        climate change, and community building,

            to the possibilities raised by a renewed attention to a Universal Basic Income,

our world needs people of faith, who dare to believe that a better future can be built

             from the ashes of destruction and the trauma of exile,

because we dare to believe

            that God isn’t yet finished with remaking the world.

 

And so Isaiah calls to us, as he calls to the faithful in every generation,

            and we hear an encouragement to live in hope

            that God is able to do far more abundantly

                        than all that we ask or think,

            according to the power at work within us,

                        as the writer of Ephesians put it.

 

So as we gather today, both online and in person, on the third Sunday of Advent,

            this is a time for looking back at the difficulties of the last year,

                        and being honest about the losses, the sorrows, and the troubles.

            It is also a time for being honest about today,

                        about where we are, in terms of our personal faith, our community of faith,

                        and the difficulties facing our church both practically and financially.

 

            But it also a time for looking forwards with Isaiah,

                        to the promises of God that call us ever onward,

            offering us a profound hope that God has not finished

                        either with us, our church, or our world.

 

Next year will bring its own troubles, I’m sure,

            but if we remain faithful to God’s call and trust in God’s promise,

            we will continue to be God’s people,

called and commissioned to work and live in faith ,

            that through Christ, God comes again to our world of darkness

            to bring in our time the eternally-renewed glimmer of new light.