A sermon preached on Advent Sunday. Isaiah's words about swords and ploughshares have become iconic. I was stuck by the finale of Les Mis - and by the important work of the Institute for Criminology in Cambridge - in the risk of grace and rehabilitation. The texts were Isaiah 2.1-5; Romans 13.11-end; Matthew 24.36-44
In a few weeks time, a season of waiting will come to an end.
There will be dazzling lights and heartfelt song.
In mid-December, Les Mis reopens at the Sondheim Theatre in the West End.
The tunes: they get us right here.
They tug at us: from 'I dreamed a dream! 'to 'Do you hear the people sing?'
Translating Hugo Victor’s epic novel into musical theatre, draws us into a revolution of the past.
Through song we are drawn into the struggle of the poor getting older and colder; we grapple with law and grace.
That struggle is framed around how to restore order and harmony: the struggle between the idealist revolutionary uprising and the conservative stability of the state.
Both see political power as means to accomplish God’s justice and harmony; both seek to violently take charge of the world in order for God’s Kingdom to come.
Les Mis is also shot through with love, grace and mercy. These things can’t be reduced to politics, law enforcement or economics.
Perhaps it’s the character of Valjean who helps us most vividly navigate a way though the violence of judgement and idealism. It’s through him that the plight of the poor - Les Misérables - becomes personal, rather than abstract.
Valjean’s first experience of grace is when the pries gives back to him the candlesticks he’s stolen. That one act of mercy saves him. The thief is forgiven; he experiences kindness; he sees the world differently. He is restored.
Valjean’s second experience of grace is when he - now a factory owner and mayor - faces his own complicity with the fate of Fantine: her story is one of exploitation; her song is heartbreakingly and soul-crushingly tragic.
In his response to Fantine and Cosette, we see Valjean himself become a channel of the grace, mercy and kindness he’d received himself.
In some way, we might see Les Mis as the archetypal Advent musical. For at its heart is the cry for justice; and such a cry is the thread running through this season.
As we light candles week by week, we are laying claim to the hope of our ancestors in the faith; the prophetic cries for peace and; the joy and love of those who point us to a wordless infant who is God with us.
Our Advent cry perhaps echoes the finale of Les Mis:
They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord.
They will walk behind the ploughshare,
They will put away the sword.
The musical puts on the lips of the chorus the cry of the prophet.
It is a cry that expresses our desire to bring an end to war and injustice; a cry that invites to look at the world around us; to examine our hearts; to name the inconsistencies.
At the very beginning of Isaiah’s witness, this is what he talks about. He brings into the present this future hope; the ultimate decommissioning of weapons. Swords and spear are put beyond use. The means of mass destruction become the means of food production.
| "Swords into ploughshares..." - Wall at Raoul Wallenberg Place, near the United Nations Headquarters, New York City |
The worlds of Valjean and of Isaiah share with us this concern for justice and peace.
Their worlds are marked by criminality and corruption; exploitation and privilege; by judgements and governance that are always imperfect and sometimes unjust.
But these things breed mistrust and fear. Isaiah cries out to a people who’ve drifted away from their first love: who’ve neglected God and God’s ways of mercy and justice.
Isaiah’s cry calls them back to God and invites them to relearn God’s ways, to walk a different path - placing one step in from of the other.
This Kingdom is coming, but it is not here yet. We seek it; struggle for it; glimpse it; build it.
And that is why we need to remain alert; so that we can be prepared; and not taken by surprise.
Today we light the first our of our Advent candles: a glimmer of light which reminds us of the hope of the Kingdom where no one is left behind to grow older and colder; where all are made welcome; where human concerns for status, power and wealth melt away before God’s justice.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel both alarm us and give us hope. The task of the disciple is not to predict the ‘end times’. Instead our task is to live by faith - that means refusing to live by fear and embracing life lived in loving obedience to God. Just like Isaiah and Paul, we are in this for the long haul.
How do we live in these bewildering and uncertain times?
By faithfully embodying the love of God; witnessing, in the power of the Spirit, to that love made manifest in the humility of Jesus.
But what of Jesus’ words about division, separation and the brutal disruption of daily life?
It’s by use of dramatic and apocalyptic language that Jesus seeks to convert the urgency of the situation and the demands of the challenge he presents to us. We are called to be ready and prepared; we do not know how much time is left to us here on earth. We are to use the time that we have to an active waiting on God, which makes hope possible.
All this is summed up in the imperative: keep awake!
We come to Jesus in the hope that he’ll rouse us from sleep: that our hearts might be directed to God in worship; that the Spirit might kindle in our hearts the fire of love; that our wills and desires might be directed to ways of peace.
Perhaps we find in Paul’s letter to the Romans a particularly timely reminder for how to live in the face of upheaval. He asserts that in Christ there has been the ultimate regime change from darkness to light; from night until day. Therefore he urges us to be prepared both inwardly and outwardly.
If we are alert to the nearness of God, if we live in his light. To live in light means that we lay aside the need to gratify temporal desires; jealously, quarrelling and the revelling are distractions.
To live in light means being alert to the risks we take for justice and peace in our own generation. Some of that risk taking for the sake of others was evident on Friday afternoon - as two men used a fire extinguisher and narwhal tusk.
But it was also evident on Friday afternoon in the work that the Cambridge Institute for Criminology is doing as a force for good in seeking to rehabilitate offenders. Jack Merritt lost his life was part of this project - a 21st century version, perhaps, of Valjean being given the candlesticks as an act of grace and mercy.
Jack's father said: ‘Cambridge has lost a proud son and a champion for underdogs everywhere, but especially those... who ended up in the prison system’. The pursuit of justice and mercy is a matter of the personal as well as the policy.
The Eucharist in which we share, restores our hope in God’s kingdom. We hear of God’s work of creation and redemption; of love which patiently reaches out to us in love. Here we come to the one who is to come; here we lament and repent; here we are forgiven and sent out.
Here receive what we are, and become what we receive: the Body of Christ. And bodies live and move and breath and act in the world.
We are a body called to both hope and patience - in world which is often devoid of the former and which has no time for the latter.
And yet, our song is of a hope of restoration, of peace and of justice:
They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord.
They will walk behind the ploughshare,
They will put away the sword.
© Julie Gittoes 2019
