Sermon Archive
Vote for your aspirations
Sermon preached by John McLuckie at Matins on 22 December 2002
Isaiah 11.1-10 ; Matthew 25.31-45
I've been reading Neal Ascherson's remarkable book, Stone Voices, over the last couple of days. It's a wonderfully readable exploration of the culture, history and identity of our nation and if you're as hopeless as me and still looking for Christmas presents, I'd strongly recommend it! One of the incidents in the book is one that passed me by at the time it happened. During the campaign for a double 'yes' vote in the devolution referendum, an unlikely gang of journalists, ministers and novelists toured the country in a bus to sound people out on their views about their nation and encourage them to vote for the devolved parliament as an expression of hope and investment for the future. They got the idea from a similar enterprise championed by G?nter Grass in the 1960s in Germany. The group included Ascherson himself and, among others, William MacIlvanney, Joyce Macmillan and Will Storrar, who is now a professor at New College and director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues. Will coined a catch phrase during this unusual campaign. He used to say, ?Vote for your aspirations, not your fears.? He was acutely aware of the kind of pessimism and low self-esteem that can affect us and encouraged people instead to see that their values and their hopes, their dreams and their principles were well worth all the energy and confidence, indeed the faith, that we can invest in them. To be guided by our hopes rather than our fears is to make a resounding affirmation of the life that God calls us to lead and an expression of defiance against the sort of energy-sapping negativity that can reduce us to cynicism or disempowered retreat.
At this late stage of Advent, I wonder whether a similar kind of call is being issued to us? As we await the joyful celebration of God's coming among us in humility and hope, we are inevitably drawn to enquire about the kind of child, the kind of promise that will be born among us now. A promised saviour, but what kind of saviour? A child of promise, but what is he promising? A herald of a peaceful kingdom, but what will that peace look like for us here and now? And then there are our fears. Will this celebration do more than just re-enact some rituals for us? Will peace be given even the space of a draughty window, let alone an open door? Will the goodwill of the season dissipate in a fog of animosity or resentment?
Our reading from the prophet Isaiah this morning comes to us like a crystal-clear invitation to invest once more in the celebration of Christmas as a choice for our aspirations rather than our fears. The prophet piles on his hopes for the kind of leadership, the kind of shared values that will mark out his people once more as a people committed to the rule of fairness and gentleness and crowns these hopes with a spectacular vision of a world at peace with itself in every aspect of its diversity. Harm and bias have no place in this order and the strength of the values presented here is in no way dependent on the rule of violence. Instead, the foundation of this grand social vision is the careful exercise of discernment and the solid basis of a vision of how things might be.
Discernment and vision. Values and hopes. We see the same priorities in our gospel reading from Matthew where Jesus shows a final reckoning of things as being based on the same discernment and the same embodied values of care and a sense of the intrinsic worth of all. Can we live without these this Christmas? Can we afford to lose sight of these aspirations in preference for the fears that lurk nearby? Can we give space for our imaginations to see in a vulnerable child the birth of hope and the triumph of life? And can we allow that birth to bring to birth in us all the yearnings, aspirations and faith that will change us and our world?
Let me read you some words from one of my favourite poems. It's by Rabindranath Tagore and has the simple title, New Birth:
New deliverer -
The new age eagerly looks to the path of your coming.
What message have you brought to the world ??
Today we search for your unwritten name:
you seem to be just off the stage,
Like an imminent star of morning.
Infants bring again and again
a message of reassurance -
they seem to promise deliverance, light, dawn.
Tagore sees in the child the possibility of a place of meeting and pilgrimage, a place where the values that will overcome violence can be encountered and strengthened. Maybe when we meet and when we make our little pilgrimages this Christmas we can allow room for our aspirations to overcome our fears like this. Maybe in our meals, in our worshipping, in our more leisurely than usual conversations we can offer to one another the gift that the child will be offering us - the gift of hope and the encouragement to live from the place of hope. War threatens our world this Christmas. The voices of the warmongers need not go unchallenged for there is another voice. It is the little voice of a tender shoot breaking forth from an unpromising tree stump. The voice is full of wisdom and understanding. It says 'Act with justice on the side of the meek'. It says 'Wolves and lambs must learn to eat side by side.' It says 'Inasmuch as you care for the least of these, you care for me.' Let that voice nourish your hopes and ease away your fears this Christmas.
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