Canon Kathryn Percival

Jeremiah 31.7-14
Ephesians 1.3-4
John 1.10-18

Well, this is a time for all the 2s: Christmas 2, on the 2nd day of ’22. And if the first is a day of celebration, the 2nd is surely where the reality hits that this really is a new year, that the things you were putting off till after Christmas are due now, that the resolutions you might have made in a haze a day or so ago need to kick in about now, or else they won’t amount to much. Happy January!

If your mind is turned towards these things, I wonder where you think God might be in your quest for New Year discipline. Is he adding to that inner voice which is telling you that you’re not good enough? Do you think that you’re failing to live up to his standards? Does God make you feel a bit like a worm and no man, before you’ve even started?

Yesterday, there was a very particular New Year’s Day service – the funeral of Desmond Tutu. Its simplicity and humanity were very much informed by his wishes, and the numbers able to attend were limited, but in one of the reports, the comment was made that the many of the hordes who witnessed the service from public viewing areas were visibly emotional, such has been the impact of his life on the rainbow nation which he helped to bring to birth. No-one who had the honour of meeting him could ever forget the radiance, the love, the down-to-earth seeking of common ground, the impish sense of humour. I have to confess something of which I am to this day ashamed and glad at the same time - that when he visited the university where I was an undergraduate, I switched queues for Communion so that I could receive from him, and for a visceral and sacred moment inhabit that aura for myself. And of course the aura was only enhanced by the mischief. One of my friends remembers passing through an airport in South Africa, seeing Tutu heading in the opposite direction, and hearing a passer-by shout at him ‘Oi, Bish!’ Without missing a beat, Tutu shouted back ‘Archbish!’

Archbish Tutu achieved a great deal politically, in a seemingly intractable situation. But he did so, not as a politician, but as a priest in the Church of God. And that is crucial. All that he said and did came from the great well inside him of the knowledge and love of God. On that same university visit, he recalled with his trademark beaming smile and twinkling eye a previous service at which, he said, ‘I was preaching my usual sermon – about how God…loves…ME!’ And he meant that, of course, for each one of us. His activism, his dynamism, his listening, his speaking, his thirst for truth and reconciliation all came from this boundless spring of divine nourishment – the understanding that God loves each one of us with a love which will not let us go. The priest and theologian Mark Chapman, who will be giving a lecture here later this year, describes Tutu as ‘a true saint with a chuckling passion for justice’.

God…loves….ME. So where does that leave us with regard to discipline and rules? Where is our image of God now? I think Tutu lived out the worldview of this morning’s luminous passage from John’s prologue: ‘From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. The Law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ If the defining thread of our existence is the love of God, earthed for all time and eternity through his Word, then grace must come first. So we have John the Baptist’s dizzying testimony that ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me’. People need laws, and Moses gave the people of God the Law. Yet we are compelled to recognise that it is not the word of the Law which brings life, but the Word of God. Salvation does not come from furrowing your brow and contemplating sub-clauses: it comes from breathing in great lungfuls of light and hope – of grace upon grace. This is in no way an invitation to anarchy – as Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel, he has not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it. This is an invitation to life – the life of the incarnate Word. If you simply follow the rules for their own sake, you will be correct but lifeless; if on the other hand you follow them because you are breathing in grace, life will grow, and the whole world will be changed as a result.

How’s the niggling voice in your head doing? Are you still feeling that you’re not good enough? If you are, then you’re absolutely right. We all fall short all the time. We can’t be good enough. But thinking about that is a dead end. What matters is not how good you are, but how much grace you’re prepared to receive. God’s grace is deluging us, and yet so often each of us turns away rather shabbily. This gift is here in the world, freely offered to us, and yet we find it really hard to accept – an issue which, as the Evangelist notes, has been around since the Word was first made flesh.

Isn’t humanity daft.

All we need to do is to accept this grace, this grace upon grace. Just to say yes to it. And then we receive power. Not the kind of power we’re used to. But the power to be vulnerable, precious, loved beings: God’s children.

That’s it.

So Desmond Tutu says: ‘We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low’.

This incarnate Word, this bearer of hope, has a great deal to say to us as we wrestle with multiple uncertainties at the turn of the year. And I think he brings us both affirmation and challenge. Affirmation, because through him we know that we are each a beloved child of God. All we do, all we say, all we think, comes from this source of life. Challenge, because this compels us to be bearers of hope, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. And the narratives swirling around us make it hard and counter-cultural for us to breathe in this way of being.

Take Covid. We do not know whether we are nearing the end of the pandemic, or whether we are in the middle, or whether something else entirely is about to happen. We do not know. And very often, our fear response to this lack of knowledge, this absence of control, prompts us to see rule following and scientific modelling as our best hope. But actually, this is not the Christian hope. I’m not saying that Christian hope can’t be seen in the work of scientists and medics, in the healing of the sick and the thoughtful drawing up of plans – of course it can. But Christian hope itself is not these things. It is the knowledge that because of the Word made flesh, grace upon grace continues to flood into our precarious fleshly existence. It is the recognition that earthly strength, earthly health, earthly life, are important, but they are always to be seen in the light of eternity – that light which means that death is not the worst thing. It is the realisation that because of this, if we are trying to reduce earthly risks to zero and live an entirely ordered and sanitised existence, we are putting our efforts in the wrong place. Just as we will always fall short, and God will always love us, so we will always live and die with risk, and God will always pull us through our living and dying, into life with him in all its fullness. This is not to say that we mustn’t carry out risk assessments – perish the thought – or take care. But Christian life itself is not these things.

We, as the Church in this country, have not of late been good at breathing in grace and breathing out Good News. We have an immensely powerful message, for which people are gasping: hope is not contingent on the daily Covid briefing. Or measured by where the leaders of the nations have got to in their climate machinations. Or even dashed by reports of yet another young life cut short by gang violence. Hope is here. Stubborn. Unbidden. In the midst of us. Hope is here in the same way that it is present in the book of that uncompromising prophet, Jeremiah. Present, not as a happy ending, but instead slap bang in the middle of anguish. In Jeremiah, this is the anguish of exile, and the hope comes in what is known as the Book of Consolation, or the Little Book of Comfort. This is a vision for the restoration of a broken and banished community. And those returning home joyfully include the most provisional, the most uncertain, the most vulnerable people: the blind, the lame, those in labour. And they sing, and they dance, not because everything is sorted, but because they know that their hope is in the Lord. Hope exists in the middle of uncertainty. Hope exists in the middle of pain. Hope exists in the middle of everything.

So can I suggest to you two New Year’s resolutions. One: don’t bother wondering whether you’re following the rules well enough, whether you’re exhibiting enough discipline, whether you’re good enough – just recite daily, or more often if necessary, ‘God….loves….ME!’ And two – understand yourself to be compelled, by the knowledge of that love, to bring to your corner of the world the hope and love and life of the Word made flesh – whatever the situation, whatever the cost, whatever the risks.

God grant each of us a courageous, grace-filled, hopeful New Year.

Amen