Sermon for Sunday 6th December 2009

After I have preached this morning I am going to baptise Ryan McLoughlin and Jack Amos. They are a bit too young to understand the significance of this occasion. But nevertheless it marks a very important moment in their lives. One that will shape both their childhood and their adult life.

Their parents have, by happy coincidence, chosen a very appropriate Sunday. In Advent we look back to scripture to read of people in the Old and New Testaments who prepared the way for the coming of Jesus. The people who urged people to be prepared for God’s intervention in the world. By hearing their words we are encouraged to ready ourselves for Christmas. Not in terms of all the numerous Christmassy things that we do, but ready in our hearts and minds to be renewed in faith as we celebrate Jesus’ birth. Advent is a time for us to be drawn back to God.

One of the key characters in Advent is John the Baptist who appears in our gospel reading this morning. John is described in Luke as ‘proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. Taken at face value we might think that these words might not be aimed at most of us. They might seem more for those whose lives have gone off the rails. They remind us of the days of puritanical churches when people sat in the pews being condemned as sinners by self-righteous preachers.

We are not particularly helped by the words used in the reading - repentance and sins. They immediately makes us thing of all the things that we have done wrong. They can lead us towards a faith driven more by guilt than love of God. But I’m sure that God doesn’t want us to respond simply because we feel guilty. That is a pretty negative image as a response to God’s love. Jesus mixed with lots of people whose lives had gone astray. He reached out to them with concern. Far from trying to make them feel guilty, he tried to remove their guilt by encouraging them to start again.

There are more useful translations and interpretations of these words repentance and sin. They are words that not only crop up in our reading. They are also included in the Baptism liturgy we are going to use in a moment. I will be asking the parents and godparents of Ryan and Jack if they repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour.

Another way to interpret repentance is ‘turning’. Or, as one translation has it, ‘life-change’. And we can take sin to mean everything that happens in our lives which, as the words in the baptism service say, in some way separate us from God. Sin used in this context is really separation, or being apart from God.

When John the Baptist called people to baptism he was asking them to turn their lives around. Turn them around so that they were conscious of and directed towards God. And what he goes on to say, but not until we get to next week’s gospel, is that Jesus was coming and bringing with him the gift of the Holy Spirit.

As Jack and Ryan are baptised this morning, their parents and godparents will be promising to help them understand what it means to be a Christian as they grow up. What it means to be people who respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ through faith in him as the son of God.

John the Baptist is heard proclaiming the words of Isaiah – the words also famous as the opening tenor aria from Handel’s Messiah – The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways smooth. This prophecy is a declaration of the life changing difference offered to us by God through Jesus.

These words are equivalent to the spiritual promise of one of those unerringly straight Roman roads. The references to valleys and hills, rough and smooth are linked to the words repentance and sin. We all know that our world is riven with valleys of sadness and for many people life has its distinctly rough patches. Very often these are of our own making, when we are turned away from God. But frequently they are just the result of the natural traumas of life, such as illness or natural disasters. The message for everyone in Advent, and for Ryan and Jack and their families on this very special day, is that God is in the midst of our lives. In the rough times and the smooth, God is eternally present. He invites us through his Holy Spirit into a living relationship with him. A relationship where we deliberately turn to him, accept the love he has for us and seek to respond by becoming more like Jesus. Give ourselves true purpose and meaning within the protection of the love.

As Ryan and Jack are baptised we are reminded of our own baptisms of repentance. Aware that we have received God’s Holy Spirit, our lives are, to use Malachi’s words, refined and purified by God’s love. In preparation for Jesus coming at Christmas we are called to once again turn to Jesus Christ and to respond his life-changing love.

© Revd Robert Jenkins December 2009