When I was still living with my parents, one of the highlights of the year was our family holiday. For a number of years, family holidays meant boating holidays on the Norfolk Broads, and whenever we were on the Broads, one of the must do things was to visit the seaside town of Great Yarmouth. Like pretty much everywhere on the Broads, Yarmouth was easy get to, you just spent a couple of days chugging along the river at 5mph and you were there. But once there, Yarmouth was one of the more challenging places to be moored at. It was easy enough to moor up, but with it being a seaside town and the river being tidal because of that, the river rose and fell by about 6 feet over the course of the day, so the mooring ropes had to be constantly adjusted to allow for the rise and fall of the river. The easiest way to do that was to pay one of the harbour staff to do it for you but some people preferred to do it themselves, which was fine so long as they did do it. But not everyone did and quite often you’d come back to the moorings during the day or wake up in the morning to find a boat either somewhere in mid-stream because the mooring ropes hadn’t been pulled in as the tide came in or hung up on the harbour wall because the ropes hadn’t been let out as the tide went out. It was very amusing for those of us who’d paid attention to our mooring ropes but not so funny, I’m sure, for those who hadn’t. Perhaps especially for those who’d gone to bed in a boat gently rolling on the water and woken up in a heap on one side of a boat hung on the harbour wall!
Today is Advent Sunday, the day when we of the Church start our preparations for Christmas, and I’ve mentioned this story about holidays on the Norfolk Broads today, because I think it can help us with those preparations in some ways. First of all, it’s a reminder of the need to be alert to what’s going and what to what’s going to happen, which is the theme of this morning’s readings, and the meaning of the parable in this morning’s Gospel – ‘Stay awake!’, be ready at all times. But it’s also a story that, I think, can help us with being prepared to do what it takes to stay awake and be ready at all times because it’s a story that tells us of the need to be ready to adapt to changing circumstances. And it can do that because it’s a story that can say something to us about one of the main reasons we often aren’t ready and don’t stay awake in the way that Jesus urges us be and do. Because this story about people not paying attention to their mooring ropes in Great Yarmouth harbour, says something to us about the dangers of being unwilling and unable to change. It can tell us something about the dangers of tradition; either being too closely tied to our past and the danger of not being tied to the past closely enough.
We can think of tradition as a mooring rope on a boat. If we pay attention to the rope, it will keep us safe and secure as the tide rises and falls. And in the same way, our tradition will keep us in the Church safe and secure as the world around us changes because it will keep us close to the truth of the faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. But, if we’re tied too closely to our tradition, so tightly that we can’t ride the tides of the world, we risk being left high and dry as the world around us changes. We’ll end up hung on the harbour wall while the world has moved away from us and, unlike the tide, the world probably isn’t going to come back to us. But, on the other hand, if we stray too far from our traditions so that we can go with the flow, so that we can go with the world, wherever the world is moving, we risk becoming too detached from the truth of our faith. And then we risk being stranded, like a boat in mid-stream, in danger of being sunk by the passing traffic, or in the case of the Church, by the passing whims and fancies of the world.
So we have to remain true to our traditions, but that doesn’t mean we should refuse to change. We can’t change of compromise our faith for the sake of the world because that is abandoning the way the truth and the life that Christ came to earth to teach us. But we can change the way we do things to share that faith and express that faith. And that is something we must do as the world changes. It’s something, in fact, that the Church has always done.
We may like, and even want, to look back to past times and see them as some kind of golden age in which everything was rosy. But that is never the way things really were; the Church has always had problems and it’s constantly changed through the years. And in part that’s because the world has changed, and the Church has adapted to those changes. But historically, the Church hasn’t changed its faith or teachings, it’s changed the way it’s proclaimed and taught those things. One of the main ways the Church has done that is by looking at what the world is doing and then found a way to preach and teach the faith through what the world is doing. Christmas is a prime example.
We really don’t know on what day Jesus was born but the Church had to choose a day to celebrate his birth and the reason they chose the 25th of December was because it was in the middle of the great pagan, Roman festival of Saturnalia. The Church saw that people were having a party to mark the winter solstice and what they did was Christianise it. They didn’t tell people not to party, they simply gave them a Christian reason to party and turned a great pagan festival into a great Christian festival.
We know too, that when Pope Gregory sent a mission to England to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons, they came with instructions not to stop the local people from holding their festivals, but to Christianise those festivals; not to destroy pagan shrines but simply to remove the pagan statues and images from them and replace them with Christian statues and images and then allow the local population to carry on using their shrines and holy places, but for Christian rather than pagan worship. This is a tradition of the Church that has worked for centuries, and yet it’s one that seems to have been, or at least is being, abandoned. Today the Church seems to be more willing to change the faith it proclaims in order to fit in with what the world believes, or simply what the world wants, rather than try to Christianise what the world is doing.
And there are many ways to Christianise what the world is doing. Our late friend Fr Neville Ashton was a great believer in visiting the pubs and clubs of his parishes. He did receive criticism for it, but he did it because that’s where the people went to socialise and by being there he met them and had the chance to speak to many people that he would never have spoken to if he’d waited for them to come to church. So, in a sense, by visiting pubs and clubs he Christianised them, he made something that many people did for social purposes, an opportunity to be exposed to the Christian faith and learn something about it. It’s actually something that the ex-archbishop of York, David Hope, urged the clergy to do. But whilst that worked 30, 40 and more years ago, it wouldn’t work in the same way today because the pub isn’t the great centre of community life it used to be. A lot of pubs have closed and those that are still open aren’t as busy as they were 30, 40 and more years ago. Nevertheless, there are still pubs and clubs in these parishes and people do still go into them but how many Church people go in them? And even if they do, how many go in them and are open about their Christian faith and are willing to speak about it? How many of you do that?
Another problem we have, perhaps especially in the Church of England, is that we have vicars who stay in post for many, many years. People get used to their way of doing things. So if that vicar did something, it’s highly likely that the people there will be happy to do it. But if that vicar didn’t do something, it’s unlikely that the people there will want to do it. But what past vicars did or didn’t do is irrelevant, in some senses at least because times change. What they did might not be so effective now as it was in their day, and what they didn’t or perhaps wouldn’t do might be more effective now than what was done in the past. The problem is of course that people do tend to look back through rose tinted glasses and think, or at least think they remember, how wonderful they thought things used to be. And because of that they’re unwilling to change and don’t want to do things differently now than they’ve been done in the past. In many cases and in many parishes they’re not even prepared to try, or even try to oppose and obstruct any change.
But this is really like getting in your bunk on a boat and going to sleep without paying attention to the mooring ropes. You might think you’ll still be in your bunk when you wake up, and perhaps for a few nights you will, but sooner or later the tide is going to turn and you’re going to wake up in a mess because your boats hung, high and dry on the harbour wall while the thing you relied on to keep you afloat, and in the case of the Church that’s the people you need to build a congregation, has moved away and left you and your boat behind while you were sleeping.
Today, we begin once again the season of Advent and the Lord’s call to us is to ‘Stay awake!’ To be alert to what’s going on around us so that we’re ready to respond to whatever happens, whenever it happens. So let’s do just that, stay awake, read the signs of what’s going on in the world around us and then be ready to respond by changing to meet the challenge of the day. Let’s not pretend things are the way they were, even if that is the way we’d like them still to be; there’s no point whatsoever in being ready to meet the challenge of yesterday, we need to be ready and willing to meet the challenge of today so that we can be ready for whatever tomorrow may bring.
Amen.
Propers for Advent 1 3rd December 2023
Entrance Antiphon
To you, my God, I lift my soul, I trust in you; let me never be put to shame.
Do not let my enemies laugh at me.
No one who waits for you is ever put to shame.
The Collect
Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light,
now in the time of this mortal life,
in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;
that on the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1, 3-8
Psalm 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:33-37
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-8, 18-20
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 