Sermon by New Primus of Scottish Episcopal Church

Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 30th November 2008 by Rt Rev David Chillingworth

Readings: Isaiah 64: 1 - 9 and Mark 13: 24 - 37

Sermon

I'm delighted to be here today - or to be more exact. I'm delighted to be here. But not so delighted about today. It's a good day in some ways. St Andrew's Day - marking a missionary apostle - honouring this place and of course Scotland which has been good to me - marking the title of the diocese in which I exercise ministry.

But it's also Advent Sunday. There are some Sundays which present difficulties for the preacher. Trinity is one. Advent is another. But I like Advent. I like the music - rich hymns and minor keys. I like the urgency of the scripture passages and the apocalyptic writing - the drawing back of the veil and the invitation to contemplate what is beyond contemplation. I like the counter-cultural element of it. Even in these straitened times, the world is winding itself up towards Christmas and we are preparing for the birth of the Saviour. But we are also contemplating the end and the four last things, death, heaven, hell, judgement.

I suppose it's not really fair on St Andrews Day in St Andrews in Scotland to say that I find Scotland astonishingly secular. I've lived with enough overbearing religion in my life to be untroubled by that. But it's hard here to get in touch with the extent to which religion is in the air and in the water and just about everywhere else in Ireland. And I'm thinking particularly today of the religious traditions which really live within the paradigm of the scripture today - the people who put notices on trees on dangerous corners saying 'Prepare to meet thy God'. Or the people who would take me aside in the middle of the night when I was ministering as a hospital chaplain to a faithful disciple coming to the end of life trusting in the generous forgiveness of a merciful saviour and ask me 'Do you think he is ready?'

The challenge of those people to me is the implied question about what I see when I look at life. Do I recognise and live in the knowledge that what I see is but a part of what there is to see and know - the whole of which will be revealed at the end. And as I live, trying to be at ease with myself, my fellow man and my God, can I grasp the call to 24/7 waking and watching and expecting - preparing for the breaking in of the kingdom, the judgement, the reckoning and the end.

Archbishop Rowan Williams recently spoke about his meeting with a man who had been the Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at Broadmoor - who carried throughout his working life the line from the Tempest spoken by Prospero to Miranda, 'What seest thou else?' And through the lens of that universal question comes a new way of looking and seeing - seeing disturbed and violent human beings; nations at war; slaughter in Mumbai; cholera in Zimbabwe. And of course there also comes a way of educating our own world view.

What seest thou else? The danger today is that faith is perceived often as leading us into a smaller world rather than a larger one. Faith seen as a suspending of disbelief appears to be the pathway of those who have chosen to view the world through a lens which reduces it and suggests that, whatever the question, there is only one answer.

But on this Advent Sunday we read in Isaiah and Mark of a cosmic view of the universe we inhabit - of a God far greater than the friend in need to whom we often shrink him - or heavens torn open and mountains which quake - of darkness and falling stars - of urgency and readiness.

But what do we see .. can we see, we who are the clay in the hands of God the potter, that we are not the centre of our own world. Can we see - can I see - that my world view is partial and limited because it is centred on me? Can I see that, even as the Hubble telescope gazes out into world far beyond our imagining, that there are other worlds of sense and beauty and experience far beyond the tiny corner of life which I inhabit and make secure by blessing it with familiarity.

Above all can I see that this is the making of a God of infinite power and of infinite love - that even if I am awake 24/7, ready and prepared, I can never be ready and prepared precisely because I am limited, partial, fallible, sinful. And that if I tremble at the scale and the majesty of what is revealed in these scriptures on this Advent Sunday yet I still tremble in expectation and gratitude and above all Advent hope that all this may yet be for my saving - from the very limitedness which denies what I do not see, cannot see and wilfully refuse to see.

Because it seems to me that Advent Sunday invites us to set aside the domestication of God - the shrinking of God to one who suits our personal and individualistic society - the God who is there for me but whom I don't invite to let me see more than I see. And in so doing it brings us back to that sense of smallness, inadequacy and failure which the domesticated God is seldom allowed to mention to us. And we seek forgiveness in a pentitential season.