I wonder how your preparations for Christmas are going? The vicarage report card is, I think, pretty good. The decorations are up, thanks to Liz and the kids. I have bought the presents I’m in charge of. There have been a lot of deliveries, so I’m fairly sure that Liz has bought the presents she is in charge of. We have a plan for who’s coming for Christmas Day, and for visits to family afterwards. It feels like most of it is together. Apart from the menu for Christmas lunch. That isn’t sorted yet, but we’ve got a week yet. It’ll be fine.
Of course, on the church front we’ve been preparing for Christmas for quite a while. The first bit of preparation started in November 2022, when we agreed the Civic Carol Service date with the team from the council. Then in the spring of this year, we started the planning for the Community Christmas choir. They’ve had their rehearsals over the last month or so and are all ready for this evening’s carol by candlelight service. Lots of preparation, to help things go smoothly.
Why am I going on about preparation, do you think? Yes, that’s right, it’s Advent. The season of preparation. It’s the time of year when most of our preparations for our Christmas celebrations go on, but it’s also the season in which we have the opportunity to prepare ourselves spiritually for remembering the impact of Christmas. To make space to reflect on what it really means that God became human, came to live among us, as one of us. To realise afresh how amazing it is that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. Advent is a season of preparation for Christmas.
It’s more than that, though, it is also a season of preparation for Jesus’ return as King, to bring in the fulness of his kingdom, that he announced all those years ago. Ellie talked about this on the first Sunday of advent, reminding us that Jesus could return tomorrow, or even this afternoon, and asking if we are living our lives ready for that, prepared for that, as if we believed that it’s true.
This week and last week, the gospel readings have focussed on the ministry of John the Baptiser. This week, we’ve lit an advent candle in memory of John. When I was first thinking about this, I was going to say that John’s story isn’t really to do with Christmas, because John wasn’t announcing Jesus’ birth, but preparing people for the beginning of his ministry. But then I remembered something that happened before Jesus was born. In Luke’s historical account of Jesus’ life, we read that while John’s mother, Elizabeth, was pregnant with John, her cousin Mary came to visit. At this point Mary was also pregnant with Jesus. When Mary arrived at Elizabeth’s home, this happened, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” Even before John was born, he was preparing the way for Jesus, preparation that was empowered by the Holy Spirit.
So, Advent is always a season of preparation for Christmas, and a season of preparation for Jesus’ return. This year, in addition to this, it seems like God has been preparing us as a church for a greater openness to the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in us and in our community. A couple of weeks ago, Ellie shared a picture she had of the Holy Spirit flowing like a river from the front of church, out through the central aisle and into the surrounding area. Last week we thought about baptism, and how in Christian baptism each of us are baptised in the Holy Spirit. If you missed either of those, then I encourage you to go and catch up with them, either the videos on Youtube or Facebook, or listen to the podcasts on our website.
Since we’ve started exploring these things, a number of people have emailed, phoned, spoken to us, sharing words and pictures that have confirmed this sense of God doing something important among us.
Many of you will know that we generally plan our sermon series well in advance here at All Saints, we choose the readings months in advance, and they are usually focussed on a particular teaching theme. This is not the case in the same way at the moment. At the moment we are using the standard readings, set by the Church of England for this year for the season of Advent. We did not pick these readings, or set this theme because we had an agenda, or had a sense in advance that this was what God was wanting to say to us in Advent. It has flowed directly out of the Bible readings, and an openness to what we believe God is saying to us through the word.
Today’s readings a good example of this. When I was preparing for this morning I looked at the gospel reading and, to be honest, thought. Great. It’s John the Baptiser again. I preached on baptism last week. How am I going to come up with something new to say about him this week?
Then I turned to the Thessalonians passage and read this.
“Do not put out the Holy Spirit’s fire.”
Or, as I learnt it, “Do not quench the Spirit.”
Now, I don’t want to get too distracted by the mixed metaphors for the Holy Spirit in Scripture. Sometimes he’s a river that’s flowing freely and sometimes he’s a fire that we’re not to quench. I know those things don’t really make sense together, but we are trying to describe God, so it’s not surprising that language breaks. If we want to stick to the river picture, then perhaps we can recast this as, “Do not block the Holy Spirit’s flow.”
This is what Ellie was talking about at the beginning of Advent when she encouraged us to let God out of the box, and which I reinforced by ripping up the box. Again, if you weren’t there, go back and watch it.
But what does it mean to block the Holy Spirit’s flow? I wonder if there are some clues in the other instructions that Paul gives to the Christians at Thessalonica as he brings his letter to a close. Just before this instruction about the Spirit, he has said, “rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.” These are positive commands, things that allow the Holy Spirit to flow freely. It seems to me that their opposites are things that might block the flow of the Holy Spirit – ingratitude, not talking with God, worrying about everything.
The great thing is, that we don’t have to do these things on our own. The Spirit wants to flow, that is God’s intention, and so as we move just a little way towards him in these things, so he will move those blockages out of the way, and we get a virtuous spiral, in which the fruit of the Spirit flourish in our lives.
In the next few verses Paul goes on. “Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject whatever is harmful.”
I find this really interesting. Paul doesn’t say “do not treat prophecies with contempt, but accept them without question.” He tells his readers to take them seriously, and that means testing them. We test them against God’s word – are they consistent with what God says in Scripture? We test them against Christian experience through the centuries – are they consistent with what God has said before? We test them against their impact on people – are they harmful or life giving?
When Ellie first sensed God was speaking to her about this, she emailed me and asked me what I thought. I prayed on it, and tested it against Scripture, against my understanding of what God has said to the church over the years about the Holy Spirit, and I asked her to preach it. Since then, we have continued to test it. I’ve emailed some of the senior lay leaders in the church to see if this might be a time that God is changing some of our vision as a church. At the moment we think it probably is, and I’ll be saying more about that at the beginning of next year. We’re being careful to listen to what kind of impact this is having on people. We have received some positive testimonies. We know that there are also those who might be a bit anxious. Personally, I’m particularly sensitive to any suggestion that if you don’t “feel” the Holy Spirit moving you’re doing something wrong or God doesn’t love you. I want to say very clearly that I don’t believe that this is the case. I stood in too many tent meetings and church services over the years, with all kinds of stuff going on for people, and nothing going on for me, to be unaware of the dangers of that kind of teaching. We are all individuals, and experience the Holy Spirit in different ways, and that is fine. What we do believe is that we are being called to allowing more space and openness for the Holy Spirit to minister to and through us – whatever that might look like for us as individuals.
So, this Advent, as part of our spiritual preparations for Christmas, and to equip us more fully to be prepared for Jesus’ return, we are choosing to open up to the Holy Spirit, to allow him to flow freely, and are preparing for what that free flow might bring to our lives and the lives of this church and this community.
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