We continue today with our Advent series in which the preacher is asked to reflect on their faith journey. This is to encourage us all in this season of preparation, Advent, to reflect on our faithfulness, and so prepare to stand before Jesus who will come as our Saviour and Judge.
To help us let us look to John the Baptist, (one of) our Patron(s) who is the stand out character in our Gospel reading this morning. He is urgent, forthright, and, indeed, loud. In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, not just speaking, but ‘proclaiming’. He fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah. He is, … the voice of one crying out, not just
speaking but ‘crying out’. It’s a wake up call. Wake up!! John is shouting. Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Get ready! This is the spirit of Advent. Watching and waiting with alert expectation. Ready to hear and accept the call of God in our lives.
So, some moments in my life where I think I was being woken up:
1] I’m a teenager. I’m in my home church on Good Friday. Something was said at that service about the death of Jesus that woke me up to the fact that what God was doing on Good Friday affected me now. This moment has stayed with me all my life. From that moment on God is real, active, pressing into my life and only God will do. There are no substitutes. I am the Lord, there is no other. That’s Isaiah.
2] Being married. I have come to believe that marriage is meant to be a joyful and demanding school of love. Day by day it wakes me up to the gift of love. To receive and offer love. Words from one of the hymns at our wedding ‘O thou who camest from above’: ‘Ready for all thy perfect will / my acts of faith and love repeat / till death thy endless mercies seal / and make the sacrifice complete.’ (Charles Wesley.)
3] On my next birthday I shall be 70. When I was a boy that was the life expectancy for men. Things have changed, I know, but I must be in the last phase of life. Death is the great taboo, especially in our western two-dimensional culture. ‘Face death and get on with living’ I heard someone I respect say recently. I’m being woken up to what C S Lewis believed: the life to come, is the fulness of life; here we are in the shadow lands. I’m being asked to wake up to what eternal life is all about, now and beyond death. ‘Face death and get on with living.’
4] In my 30s both my father and mother died in quite quick succession. For two years I felt physically ‘under the weather’. I went to the doctor several times. He asked me on one occasion if I had been bereaved. I said ‘Yes’ and explained. I could almost see the light bulb go on in his head. ‘That’s it.’
I woke up to the fact that lots in life is way beyond our control. I wasn’t quite that ideal in control person of my fantasies. I was waking up to see who and what I truly was: a child of God. That’s something quite different.
5] In my final paid job as a priest I was asked to train a curate who was disabled. She had / has MS and uses a mobility scooter a lot of the time. I had to wake up, clear out a lot of assumptions and refocus. It was challenging but enriching. Who she was and how she was enabled her to minister in ways I could not. I was being woken up to the fact that the church is a very different sort of group of people, with very different values to the world around. A church full of ‘people like us’ seems to me to be an anathema.
6] For many years I served on Church of England teams in its national ecumenical engagement with other churches: Methodist, URC, Baptist, Moravians. Gradually I was waking up to the truth that the Church is not just what I was used to or things should be just as I want them. I needed to listen carefully to the Gospel as others had received it and how they spoke about it and put it into action. My hearing was being woken up. Listening seemed to becoming more and more important. A course I went on once left me with the line, ‘Just listening is healing’. It is. Just listen. Learn to listen. Risk listening.
7] Before I retired in 2020 I had served in an ordained capacity for 40 years. About half way through I started to suffer with anxiety and reactive depression. Eventually I sought professional help. What was I being woken up to there? Several things, I think, but one was that I couldn’t do everything. If I had gifts that’s for others to discern. But I was learning that I had limitations and they needed to be respected. St Paul in one of his letters talks about having ‘a sober estimate’ of ourselves. I was waking up to the fact that my life and character were of a certain sort. There were boundaries and limits, and that was all right. God knew me before I was born. That’s in Jeremiah.
8] I am now retired. I’ve not found it difficult but it has made me think and has required change. What is my role now? What changes are required in the family, in my church life, in life in general? The pace of life has slowed. There seem to be more opportunities to go deeper into things. Church life for me seems to be more and more about what it means to be a Christian than what it means to be a priest. I am being woken up to what’s important and what is not.
9] Finally, watching a fly-on-the-wall type programme about monks in Leicestershire, something one of them said has stuck in my mind: “It’s all about offering.” I find myself often asking of myself, and things I am doing, the question, ‘Does this look like an offering, Bill?’ It seems to sieve out my motivation in a helpful way. It wakes me up. It seems to make the path straighter.
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Service: Canon Bill Croft, 4th December 2022. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Referenced Scripture: Isaiah 11.1-10; Romans 15.4-13, Matthew 3.1-12