Advent Sunday (Luke 21: 25-36)

Even then I used to wonder whether those shows were broadcast over at Long Bay gaol, where prisoners would think ’if only we all held hands and...’ I wonder if they ever screened that stuff over in Jerusalem, so that Jews and Muslims might listen together and think ’If only we tried just a little bit harder...’

The Christmas broadcasters this year are bound to fill the airways again with this sort of good-natured twaddle passing itself of as Christianity. And indeed it may warm the hearts of well-healed middle-class families across the country, but it doesn’t work in the kids’ cancer ward. It doesn’t work to dissolve the battle-lines drawn up around Jerusalem. It doesn’t work on most of us I suspect, and it certainly doesn’t work on most of those here that we’re trying to minister to.

There may well be a whole Christian culture growing up that would prefer to take Jesus on as their therapist rather than as their saviour - that would be happy to see Jesus changing the world, so long as it was through the gradual process of democratic social reform. But this is not Jesus’ way. Jesus insists on being Saviour and Lord, and he insists on dismantling this old world before He brings in the new one!

With my dad being in hospital, he’s reminded us more than once of a favourite old comedy sketch he remembers, where two doctors are examining an elderly patient. The senior doctor asks the junior doctor where he thinks they should begin to operate. ’I should make an incision around here’ he indicates with a small movement of the finger. ’Keyhole surgery man, keyhole surgery! We make the incision right across here’ says the senior doctor, drawing a broad line across the old man’s chest.

Jesus, I would suggest too, is no ’keyhole surgeon’. I, on the other hand...

I remember when I was first running a youth group at the Chinese church in Surry Hills, I used to have a local guy come around and see me about once per week. He was a problem guy, using drugs no doubt, violent. I used to talk to him, listen to him, even quietly pray with him. Then he disappeared. About a year later I met him again, as a full-on ’born again Christian’. He’d been contacted by neighbouring fundamentalist church - the fire baptised, Bible believing, washed-in-the-blood Pentecostals. They’d told him that he was going to hell if he didn’t change his ways... so he did. They took him in, prayed for him, taught him the Bible... The man confessed to me that he used to only really come and see me because he was gay and had taken quite a liking to me. I realised on reflection that my approach was like offering a Disprin to someone in need of major surgery.

I’m not suggesting that I do everything now the way that those guys did back then, but I did realise, from that point on, that there was really no way of ministering effectively to anybody if I wasn’t willing to go all the way with them - if I wasn’t willing to take real risks, share the whole gospel, shed some blood.

We remember Jesus discussing His ministry at that last supper. A quiet, genteel affair it was, until Jesus started breaking bread and pouring out wine, talking about his broken body, and his blood flowing out. Salvation, for Jesus, was never something that was going to be cheap and easy. It was bloody and painful. And the final salvation of the cosmos, likewise, will not be something clean and clinical, but is tied up with war and death and blood and pain.