Vicar’s sermon: Advent Sunday 2024

Stood in the kitchen the other day, Kim and I found ourselves in a conversation with our 8 year old grandson about ‘Providence’. This, you might imagine is not something that happens very often but it sprung out of a discussion that had asked whether kings and queens had any choice about being kings and queens if they didn’t want to do the job or didn’t feel up to it? And so, we found ourselves talking about the abdication crisis of 1936, of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, George VI and a young Princess Elizabeth becoming heir to the throne. This did nothing to help the scramble to get said 8 year old to put his shoes and coat on, grab his bag and climb into the car to get to school but it did raise the question (in the light of princess Elizabeth unexpectedly coming to the throne and going on to become our longest serving monarch) as to whether there might have been some providence at work through the convoluted human and political wranglings of those days.
Providence is the belief that God is at work within His creation. There are one or two assumptions within even that simple sentence. Firstly, a belief in a ‘God’ (however we might conceive such a being). Secondly, that this God ‘does stuff’: He creates. We might then ask: ‘how does God create? How does He ‘do stuff’?’ And you would then have to make some decisions.
Of those people who believe in a God of some kind, my guess would be that the majority of them (maybe you included) would say that God ‘created’ the world. But that that act of creation was a ‘one off’. We could argue about how it took place: through a ‘Big Bang’, through the processes of evolution or through divine command over 7 days but these folk’s doctrine of creation is fixed ‘way back there’ in the distances of time.
This understanding leaves us with a God who sets everything up and running and then sits back and watches from afar. But this understanding doesn’t fit with the rest of scripture let alone our own experience.
A second way, a better way I feel, of understanding creation is to hold to a belief that God created but to fill this out with a belief that creation is still happening, that the God who spoke the universe into being is still bringing it into being and won’t stop doing so. Our every moment is sustained, supported and inspired by Him. What this does is to place God both beyond His creation and within it: every micro-second He is calling new possibilities into birth. What this understanding of creation does is to open up a belief in a living and active God without forcing us to think that His action only takes place through ‘intervening’ in His world. No, God is Present always and everywhere seeking to, to heal, to save, to raise up and to glorify His creation and creatures.
And so, we come back to providence. This is a doctrine that is understood better in retrospect. We look back at our lives, we look back at the story of our family or our nation and (for people of faith) we might discern God’s hand, might be able to say (albeit with humility and a degree of hesitancy) God was at work there….and we did not know it (at the time).
Christian tradition has struggled with this. The danger lies in the extremes (as ever). At one extreme we see no place for God’s action at all. Everything that happens is the result of chance and randomness – there is no purpose or guiding hand at work in the universe, no ‘meaning’ to existence in that sense. This understanding might feel that an active God being in some way ‘involved’ with His universe poses an afront to our ‘free will’. ‘Free will’ insists that we can choose – though, as the assisted dying debate reveals, people’s choices are not free of others’ influences or expectations, ‘no man is an island’ we live within a network of relationships, within a culture that currently seems to see no meaning in life if it isn’t ‘Barbie and Ken’ perfect. Indeed, if the whole created order can ‘choose’ (if that’s the right word to use for cells and atoms that aren’t capable of though), then God really must take a back seat and climb back up into His heaven.
Other Christians find themselves with a belief that everything is pre-ordained. This belief is less popular nowadays but had its heyday under John Calvin in the post reformation years. These Christians believe our fates are predestined, God’s omniscience means that everything that happens was known, foreseen, planned (even) by Him. Que sera, sera…a Christian sort of fatalism sets in. Our eternal destiny is already sorted, we are helpless before it. We are just puppets (not a particularly attractive view of human nature) and God is the puppet master (not a particularly flattering view of God) .
Which finally brings us to the scripture for this morning and the prophet’s belief that God would ‘cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David ‘who would ‘execute justice and righteousness in the land.’ As we turn towards Christmas we will, again and again, hear readings that speak of Jesus being descended from David the King. ‘Once in Royal David’s city’ we will sing. This scripture describes someone finally emerging from David’s family tree who will fulfil God’s promises both for Israel and the world. It’s a scripture that, like so many others, holds within it a sense of purpose to history and a belief in a living, active God bringing his purposes to birth.
A righteous branch? If you were to attempt to draw King David’s family tree, Mary and Joseph would be way out on its farthest fringes, hardly branches at all. If they’d signed up for the BBCs ‘Who do you think you are?’ programme the researchers would have to work pretty darned hard to connect them to royalty. And yet…in the providence of God, looking back, it makes sense. Matthew and Luke both present this in their gospels. They look back and recreate Jesus’s family tree. They trace back his genealogy. Both of them include some surprises amongst his ancestors. With an understanding of God ‘creating’, (present within every moment of His creation), we can understand this ‘raising up of a righteous branch’ to be something that happens within God’s creation rather than through an intervention that breaks into it. If, in Jurrasic Park ‘Life finds a way’ here we see ‘God finding a way’, finding a way to bring His creation back into relationship with Him…and it has taken an awfully long time, no end of false starts and dead ends but finally, finally, with Jesus we get to a point where something new can come into being.
Throughout the long years of history God’s people, (His anointed Kings and Priests amongst them) have shut the door on the Almighty, they’ve not co-operated with Him – BUT GOD still ‘finds a way’. There will come a moment, an ordinary moment that suddenly becomes extraordinary: within the natural, the supernatural; a ‘yes’ spoken by Mary; a ‘yes’ acted out by Joseph and a new possibility opens up that has not been seen before. We don’t have the language for this. And the language we use confuses rather than helps – ‘He came down to earth from heaven’ wants to highlight the extraordinariness of the Christ’s birth but it doesn’t help with how God works within rather than from outside His creation. We sort of get it but struggle to describe it. A belief in providence helps: the purposes of God being worked out within the complexities of creation. …the Holy Spirit finding a way through and around the obstructions and barriers of human disobedience and the Sin of the world. God really in it for the long haul.
Providence, as I’ve already said, is perhaps best understood looking backwards: That meeting that led to us finding a life partner; that friendship that began unexpectedly but gave you a friend who saw you through a most difficult time; that teacher…or doctor who saw something in your child…or on your X Ray. Providence seems to be mixed in with relationships (good and bad), with connections between people, places and things: how can it be otherwise as we reflect on our human existence?
But a belief in providence, the possibility of God being at work around us in our community, our town, our world can also encourage us looking forward: it brings ‘hope’. This meeting, that person, this activity or group can all become freighted with possibility, the whole of life a gift through which (for those with eyes to see) God is at work. In all that is obviously good and wholesome, but also in the difficult and unlovely: God is here, hidden perhaps, but present…we just might have to work harder to find Him.
I don’t know what your week holds but God will be within it and the knack is to find out what He is doing…and to join in.