Gail Partridge
Last before Advent 2009
22nd November 2009

We don’t need reminding these days.  There’s no chance of forgetting that Christmas is on the way.  The shops are already full of Festive fare and the high streets hung with decorations.  But the Collect for this Sunday used to be a good reminder of the imminent festival.  Today was known affectionately as ‘Stir up Sunday’ and housewives would hurry home after hearing the Collect, to assemble the ingredients for the Christmas Pudding.  ‘Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’ and the Collect goes on with another plug because it refers to the ‘fruit’ of good works.  And there was a further reference to food as the BCP gospel set for this Sunday was the Feeding of the Five Thousand.
Then in 1925 Pope Pius XI, decreed that this Sunday should be dedicated to Christ the King.  I’m sure there was a good reason why, but personally I don’t get it.  We are anticipating the dark season of Advent: Christ hasn’t yet been born.  Wouldn’t a better time to remember his kingship be after his Resurrection and Ascension into heaven….?
The Feast of Christ the King wasn’t immediately transferred into Anglican liturgy.  We still had ‘Stir Up Sunday’ in the Alternative Service Book.  But we have now made a concession to Rome, and today, the Last Sunday Before Advent, is dedicated to Christ the King, the old collect has become the post communion prayer, and suitable biblical passages have been chosen to support this theme.
For centuries the controlling power in Europe was not the government, democracy (when it finally came) didn’t reach down to the man in the street, or the labourer in his cottage, few of the ordinary people had the vote.  It was the Church that controlled their lives.  If you were ill or old or infirm and you wanted to move to another parish you would need the permission of the vicar in case you might be a burden on his parish resources.  There was no Welfare State and it was the parish that supported the deserving poor (and decided who these were, as opposed to the undeserving) the parish kept the records of births, marriages and deaths, cared for the ill and dying, maintained the roads and made sure the parishioners came to church, even if they had to walk miles in the wind and rain.  To be excommunicated for some perceived sin was a dreadful fate.
The Church was a powerful presence both spiritually and physically.  The church tower or steeple could be seen from miles away, there was no escaping its presence.  From Constantine onwards the Church was synonymous with Power: and power is a Vain Thing.
Bishops dressed expensively in splendid garments and lived in palaces; rules and doctrine were drawn up which had to be obeyed and believed.  Those who didn’t were burnt at the stake as heretics.  The finely robed and adorned clergy were embarrassed by the stories of a baby born in poverty, or a betrayed man dying a shameful and agonising death on the cross, so artists were commissioned to enhance these images, with richly robed courtiers attending the birth in a spotlessly clean stable, and a benevolent Jesus hanging in apparent ease from the cross surrounded by choirs of angels and all the heavenly throng.  And O deary me!  To have Christ sitting down on the ground, sharing a picnic of sardines and bread with the people, or touching lepers were uncomfortable images, and best ignored.  He had to be presented as a gloriously adorned and powerful King.
When Jesus stands in humility before Dostoyevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ the Grand Inquisitor has no option but to order him burnt at the stake because of all he stands for.  His teaching of humility and love is so contrary to the rules and doctrine with which the Church has surrounded herself, that the Inquisitor condemns him to death as a heretic.  The Church had moved so far from ministering to the poor and dispossessed that Jesus could no longer be recognised by it.
And even in the 20th century, the last pope was known to have stated that where Church doctrine contradicts Scripture, Scripture is wrong.
My kingdom is not of this world’ Jesus says.  No, it isn’t.  It isn’t of a world where power and wealth rule.  It isn’t of a world where people are frightened into believing.  Nor does it seek what the world today thinks so important, ‘success’.  In the past the Church used fear, and the threat of eternal damnation, to keep people faithful.  It wowed people with riches and spectacle.  Today it uses the tools of the market place, it courts ‘success’.  It tries to tempt people in by competing with mini-rugby, or football on the ‘box’, or the bustling Super Stores.  It offers innovation, excitement, entertainment for all the family.
Again Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor gets exasperated with Jesus for not astounding people into believing in him.  Why did he refuse to turn stones into bread?  Why did he resist the challenge of the mocking crowds to come down from the cross?  But as the Grand Inquisitor knows full well; he didn’t because he thirsted for a faith that was free, not miraculous.  He didn’t, he still doesn’t force belief upon us, he leaves us free to chose, to come to him not in terror, but with love.
Two weeks ago when I opened the door after Evensong I saw a young woman sheltering from the wind and rain in the church porch, apparently intent on reading the church notices.  She waited until the church had nearly emptied, and then tentatively asked me if I was about to leave.  She was in tears.  We went into the quiet of the Lady Chapel and she told me that the grandfather she adored was dying of cancer and wasn’t expected to see the week out.  We said a prayer together and I suggested she wrote his name on a card and put it on the prayer board so that he would be remembered in the intercessions.
She had freely chosen to come into the church building, she hadn’t come to a service, she didn’t want to be entertained, or to join a club, she didn’t even want to be told what to believe, but she knew the church to be a holy place, a place where ordinary people with all their gifts and faults, all their joys and sorrows, all their sin and goodness, all that makes them fully human come to find healing and peace.  It is people who make places holy; ordinary people, and she in her great need had added to this great well of faith.  She didn’t need a powerful king to meet her and demand she believe in him.  She needed a gentle Jesus who would come alongside her in her grief.
I do not believe there is a divide between the sacred and the secular.  If the whole world is the Lord’s, everywhere is sacred.  But George Macleod, whose love for Iona has made it a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of people, once described places where we feel the presence of God very close to be ‘thin places’.  Thin because the divide between heaven and earth is indiscernible.  Where heaven seems to come down to embrace the earth and the earth is lifted up to heaven.  I’m sure we all know such places.  Places where you feel drawn to your knees, places where the presence of God feels very close.  It might be a mighty cathedral or an ancient ruined abbey; it needn’t be an ecclesiastical building at all, it could be contemplating a magnificent sunset, or the peaceful beauty of a garden.
I will conclude with a story about a garden.  It was last year when we went back to Afghanistan for the second time, primarily to visit the Lapis Lazuli mines high up in the Hindu Kush.  Once in Kabul we decided to visit the British War Graves cemetery.  Going through a huge wooden door in a high wall, we found ourselves in a garden which was being cared for by an old man.  His little grandchildren were running joyfully around, flying their kites, and the birds were singing.  It was a gently peaceful and joyful place: undoubtedly a ‘thin’ place, which we all felt reluctant to leave.  When the Taliban had arrested the old caretaker and demanded to know what he thought he was doing tending the graves of Christians, he had replied ‘Because it is my duty to do so, and Allah has no favourites’.  Amazingly the Taliban left him alone.
The kingdom of God may not be ‘of this world’ but it is most certainly in it.  And this is surely what the world needs above all today.  Not a kingdom for the rich and powerful, but a kingdom of freedom and love, where god has no favourites.
Amen.

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