“Excuse me - we’ve lost something.... oh what was it ?… oh yes GOD - have you seen him anywhere?”
Sounds crazy doesn’t it - how could we not notice God. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence - as when the fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil - to make your name know to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence”
That sort of God … our society seems to have lost him! You turn on TV and watch .. I don’t know … vicar of Dibley or Midsommer Murders … there are plenty of vicars in it. But they don’t seem to have anything to do with that sort of God who makes mountains shake. Who you can’t help but noticing. We live in a society that is becoming increasingly alienated from God. Holy Trinity Barkingside may be growing, but across the country less than 10% of people go to church each week. When they do surveys people just have not heard of stories like the Good Samaritan or David and Golliath. This problem isn’t a new one - it has been going on for almost a century. In the 19th Century, Britain was becoming more and more Christian, and then in the 20th Century, the pendulum swung the other way and for a hundred or so years this country turned away from God.
And now - “o that you would tear open the heavens and come down” - now it is time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Now it is time for our land to turn back to Christ.
This is ADVENT Sunday. This is traditionally when we think of the coming of Jesus -
- the coming of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem
- the coming again of Jesus at the end of time to Judge the world
But I want to suggest this advent that there is a third sense in which we should be longing for the coming of Jesus - the coming of Jesus into a nation’s hearts, the coming of revival, the turning back of a nation to God.
100 or so years ago our nation began to swing away from God. It partly began with the Church swinging away from God. The 19th Century was a century of passionate Christians - like Fr Charles Lowder risking cholera to bring Jesus to the people of Wapping. Or William Wilberforce abandoning a high powered parliamentary career to campaign on the single issue of the abolition of slavery. The twentieth century was a time of “more tea vicar....” - a genteel and establishment religion that had little to do with lives being changed or prayers being answered or the God who shakes mountains. And guess what? The god who serves cups of Earl Gray and cucumber sandwiches has not proved very popular.
And so our lost interest in a God who seemed irrelevant. “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you for you have hidden your face from us”. We see family break down. we see depression, we see loneliness. We see a lack of community. Why does David Cameron call for a Big Society - because society has become so small and fragmented. volunteering is at record low levels. Our country may be materially rich, but it is lonely, it is hurting, it is messed up.
“You have hidden your face from us. You have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity” C.S.Lewis once said, there were two sorts of people. Those who say to God “thy will be done” and those to whom God says “OK, have it you way”. And our society is having it it’s own way, and look at the pain and hurt!
Now the English turning away from God has been going on since our grand parents and great grandparents day. So we start to buy the lie that it is inevitable.
But NOTHING is inevitable.
Things can change over night.
at the first half of the 18th century, England was also in a mess. Gin and gambling were destroying the lives of poor and rich alike. This was the age of Dick Turpin - crime figures were so high, there was so much danger from highway men and footpads that Horace Walpole wrote "One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one were going to battle." . Government did not know how too respond so simply added the death penalty for more and more and more crimes. Meanwhile in 1713 England by defeating France and Spain had secured itself a monopoly in the slave trade. the horrors of unbriddled greed in the early industrial revolution meant that 3 out of every four children died before the age of 5 because of the insanitary slums and poverty. and of course it hardly goes without saying - church going was at an all time low, and clergy were time servers. I have an ancestor Bishop Carr of Worcester - who gambled (and lost) so much, that when he died, his creditors highjacked the coffin, and would not allow it to be buried, until the debts had been paid. That was the state of the church and the nation at the time.
and then, in 1738 a man called John Wesley went to meeting in Aldersgate in the City of London. He heard a reading from a sermon of Martin Luther on Romans and as he listened “My heart was strangely warmed” he said. He felt God - not the god of cucumber sandwiches but the God who tears open the heavens and shakes mountains. And he began to preach. He preached outside the shafts of coalmines and at the doors of factories. He preached not where the church said people should come, but where people were. And lives were changed. Workers who would take their pay and drink it away leaving nothing for their wives and children, put aside the bottle, and turned to Jesus. Families were reunited. child mortality dropped. Literacy grew as people longed to learn to read to read the bible. prayers were answered - people were healed of physical ailments. Church attendance grew - passionate church attendance singing hymns to what at the time were considered vulgar pop-song tunes. parliament itself was effected. The slave trade was abolished. Sending children down the mines or up the chimney was abolished. the death penalty was restricted to truly serious crimes. And the crime rate fell. Because one heart was strangely warmed. And then many hearts were strangely warmed. In one generation a nation was changed.
it’s not the only time this had happened. At American Independence, the USA was one of the least religious countries in the world. a lawless atheistic society that had no place for God. and then there was the so called great awakenings - leading in generation to a change in a nation. Church attendance in the USA is something like 5 times what it is in England. and it’s not because it has been declining slower - its because across the 19th and early 20th century Methodist and Baptist and Pentecostalist preachers turned a nation to God.
Or more recently South Korea - which within living memory was a majority Buddhist country. Then between 1970 and 1990 there was such a great revival - people’s hearts were strangely warmed and they encountered the God who shakes mountains. By 1990 Christianity had become the largest religion ion South Korea. Seoul boasts the largest churches in the world, and, after America, South Korea is the second largest exporter of overseas missionaries. How’s that for a change in just one generation?
The pendulum has been so long swinging against God in this land - people have been so long shutting their eyes to him, that we have lost sight, lost hope that it can be different. But history shows it can change (click fingers) - a nation can turn back to God.
what can we do? What can you do? What can I do?
1) We can pray like the prophet Isaiah. We can can fervently pray “as when fire kindles brushwood, and fire causes water to boil to make you known to your adversaries so that [our] nation may tremble at your presence”
When Isaiah wrote this he writes “there is no one who calls upon your name, or attempts to take hold of you” - so his solution is HE calls on God’s name. when in our nation no one calls on God’s name, WE can call on God’s name and this Advent pray for God to come and shake our land. We can, like Isaiah. repent of our sins and our nation’s sins and call on God to move again in England.
2) We can allow ourself as Isaiah says to be clay shaped by the Potter. Brittle clay is useless. We have to be vulnerable - taking the risk of letting God shape us into what he needs us to be. We have to take a step of faith and TRUST that God will use to shake things up. For example, all of us here pray for our many neighbours in their brokenness and their hurt. But are we willing to make ourselves vulnrable by praying not just for them but WITH them. To pray WITH them though shows a trust in God. We are making ourselves vulnerable to looking stupid in the eyes of the people we pray WITH. We have to trust that God does act and does answer prayers … because otherwise we are going to feel very exposed. To put our trust that God will act - that is faith. And when we trust God, God does act. When we let the potter shape us, he uses us for something amazing.
Let’s do that and we see not just Barkingside changed, but the London borough of Redbridge changed, London itself changed, and our very Land changed.
In the name of the Father....
