Matthew 3.1-12

Did you hear what John said? The wrath of God is coming. It doesn’t matter who you are or who your family is. The axe is out and ready. Right now the blade is against the tree. And the chopping is about to begin. Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is being cut down and burned.

The unquenchable fire is raging, waiting to be fed the chaff. And that’s just the beginning. He said a greater one is coming, one more powerful than himself is on the way.

After listening to John it’s tempting to look at the advent wreath, with its two lit candles, and see the season of Advent as merely the countdown to Christmas.

It’s tempting to leave this wild man behind. We know Christmas came last year. It will come again this year just like it has for over 2000 years. It’s only a few more weeks away.

So maybe we can dismiss John’s message as allegory, metaphor, or symbolism. Maybe it’s the rambling of a man who’s spent too much time by himself in the desert eating grasshoppers.

Or perhaps we hear the message and think about all those other people to whom it applies. You know, the Pharisees and the Sadducees; someone other than us.

But do you know what? We can’t do that. The Church says this viper sermon of John’s is the gospel, the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew. For most of us, though, threats, anger, and judgment are not good news.

We would rather hear and think about the sweet baby Jesus.

But John is not preaching a Christmas sermon. John doesn’t mention a beautiful night with a bright shining star to guide us. There are no humble and gentle shepherds guarding their flocks by night. No wise men bearing gifts from afar. John’s not looking at a manger scene where the little Lord Jesus lays down his sweet head. He seems to have forgotten the innocent and faithful Virgin Mary. And the name Jesus isn’t even mentioned in today’s gospel. This is Advent, the season when wrath, axes, and unquenchable fire are talked about as good news.

John is looking for God to do something drastic right now. John’s message is quite literally, “Repent – turn or burn!” His refrain is, “Wrath, axes, and fire. Wrath, axes, and fire.” God’s coming and He’s going to get you.

I suspect that part of our discomfort with John and his name-calling, his preaching of wrath, axes, and fire is, or at least should be, that at some level we know he’s right.

When we look around our world, read the newspapers, watch the evening news, or examine our own lives we’re confronted with the reality of John’s sermon.

Our world and our lives are not as they should be, as they can be, as God wills them to be. We could each name the sinful or broken places of our lives and our world: anger, violence, greed, poverty, homelessness, war, lives controlled by fear, years of guilt that have crippled us. The list could go on and on.

There’s only one sin worse than the evil itself and that is indifference to that evil. Indifference is more insidious; more universal, more contagious, and more dangerous.

Often we live such busy, exhausted lives that we have become indifferent to what is happening in the world, indifferent to the needs of another human being.

Maybe our world view, even our church view, is so small that if something does not directly affect our lives or the lives of those we love then it is of no consequence to us.

Sometimes the pain and fear in our lives causes us to be indifferent to those relationships that need forgiveness and reconciliation. Maybe you have become indifferent to yourself and can no longer see the original beauty with which God created you. Perhaps indifference has convinced you that your life is meaningless. Indifference comes in many different forms. It is always sneaky, often disguising itself as freedom or independence.

John’s cry of repentance is the call to turn away from our indifference to engage, at a life-changing level, with the coming kingdom and the way that kingdom reorders our relationships and priorities. John’s words are words of interrogation. Do we care enough to change our lives and the world in which we live? Do we love enough to get angry about the suffering and plight of other human beings – even if we’ve never met them?

God does. That’s why divine wrath, axes, and fire are good news. God loves enough to get angry. The good news is that our God is not indifferent. God is not indifferent to creation. God is not indifferent to the evil and suffering in this world. God is not indifferent to His people. God is not indifferent to your life or my life.

God’s concern and love for creation are the source of His anger and Anger is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love.

God’s anger is the rejection of indifference. God is paying attention and is present in our lives. The anger of God is a form of His presence and love in this world. God’s anger is not offered as a punishment but as an encouragement to change, to turn our lives around. That can be frightening and even painful. But there is an agony even more excruciating. That is the agony of being forsaken, discarded, rejected, and abandoned. It is the agony of being the object of indifference.

God’s anger is never the goal. The goal of divine anger is not punishment and retribution. Divine anger is the means, the instrument. The goal is love and relationship. Divine anger recognises and celebrates the existence, the sacredness, and the value of every human life.

Divine wrath is God’s expression of longing for us. It is God saying to you and me, “You are worthy of my time and attention. Your lives are worthy of being judged. I care for and love you enough to get angry when you settle for less than I am giving you, when you accept being less than you are called to be.”

Wrath, fire, and axes are God calling us to turn away from, to repent of, our indifference. Where does indifference rule our lives? How have we become indifferent to ourselves, to others, even to God? In what ways does indifference deny you the Kingdom of Heaven?

Wrath, fire and axes are not about destruction or punishment. They are about life, love, and relationship. The unquenchable fire of God’s love burns away our indifference. The healing axe of God cuts away all indifference. The wrath of God reminds us that God cares and that we matter.

To name the places and ways of our indifference is the beginning of repentance and the Kingdom of Heaven has come just a bit nearer than it was before.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

As we journey through Advent, towards the Nativity, there is little doubt what many of us will be doing  – there is the rush to get everything organised for Christmas – cards written, gifts bought and sent, the preparation of food, plans about whose turn it is to go visiting and anxieties about who’ll be offended if we don’t pay them enough attention etc etc…. The rush is on and it’s not surprising that there’s often a hint of panic in people’s conversations – “I’ll never be ready!”

But pretty soon, it will all be over! In a few weeks a new year will have brought us another set of resolutions, in a few more the decorations will have come down, the furniture of life will be back in place and we’ll be back to – well, back to what?

Will life be just the same, or will we be changed?

If we take Advent seriously, there is a chance we will be changed because we will have had an opportunity to reflect again on what it means to say that God came into the world in the humility of the birth at Bethlehem and that he still comes into the world in all its mess and pain and joy, longing for us to recognise Him.

Advent is a godsend, a gift which stops us in our tracks and makes us realise that we hold dual citizenship (of this world and His kingdom) in awkward tension. We are all part of the scene – as Christians we can sometimes appear to be rather superior about what we call ‘commercialisation’ and say that the real Christmas isn’t about that. But actually, if you think about it, the real Christmas is about precisely that: it’s about God coming into the real world. Not to a sanitised stable as we portray it in carols and on Christmas cards, but to a world that needed, and still needs, mucking out! Advent reminds us that the kingdom has other themes to add to the celebration, themes that are there in our scripture readings for the season: Repent, be ready, keep awake, He comes!

Advent reminds us that not only do we live in two worlds – the one that appears to be going mad all around us and the one that lives by the kingdom of God’s values, but that we operate in two different timescales, in chronological time and beyond it. And the point of intersection – where these two worlds meet is now. Scripture readings and prayers which are often used during Advent, remind us that now is the time when we have to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light. Now is when we meet God, because we have no other time.

At whatever level we operate, it’s a time for preparation – a time to put things right – to repair broken relationships or reach out to those with whom you have grown distant – and that might include working on your relationship with God.

Whatever else we have to do, there are only so many praying days to Christmas. It is prayer that gives us the opportunity to focus our recognition of God in every part of our lives. Prayer is not just what we do in what we call our prayer time. Prayer is how we give our relationship with God a chance to grow and develop and, just like any other relationship, it needs time. We don’t stop being related when we are not with the person concerned. We don’t stop being a partner, a wife, husband, child, parent or friend when that person is out of sight or when we are concentrating on something else. But we do become less of a related person if we never give them time.

So, Advent says, make time, create space so that our understanding of God’s love for us (and our love for God in response) can grow. The world is saying “Get on with it – don’t wait for Christmas to hold the celebrations”. Advent says, “Wait, be still, alert and expectant.”

The shopping days will come to an end – there will come a moment when we really can’t do any more. The point of praying or making a space is that we get into the habit of remembering God who comes to us every day and longs for us to respond with our love and service. And so, my dear friends, Heed the voice of St Finnbarr and those like him, “Repent, be ready, keep awake, He comes!”

When I was a child, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s,  growing up on a council estate in Rotherham in South Yorkshire, I remember that my friends and I used to play all sorts of games in some rather dangerous places.

One of my particular memories is of us running wild on a building site when the estate was being expanded – no security fences in those days of course – those golden days of yesteryear when we didn’t  feel it was necessary to keep the estate kids safely away from the piles of bricks, rickety scaffolding, rusting machinery and half completed buildings.

One of the games we loved playing involved finding a huge  heap of sand or half completed wall – anything we could climb up on. The first one to the top of the heap or wall would claim the kingdom and shout, “I’m king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” The rest of us would charge the kingdom. Some tried pulling the king down. Others tried pushing the king off the castle. We all wanted to take over the kingdom.

Each attack on the king was in some way an unspoken demand for proof. “If you’re really the king, prove it. Defend yourself. Show us your power and strength. Save yourself and your kingdom. Because if you don’t I’ll take it for myself.” Each one of us wanted to climb the heap of sand and proclaim that we were king (or queen of course) of all that we surveyed!

It was a great game. We had a lot of fun and I’m sure many of you played very similar games, if not the same!

But when we look back and reflect on how we played, I wonder if it did begin to nurture in us an outlook that has become a bit of a problem.

You see from being children we have grown up – but many of us have never stopped playing the game. We have become adults and ‘King of the Castle’ has become a way of life.

Our heaps of sand or half built walls, our high places are now made up of our personal success and money, power and control or reputation and popularity.

For some of us, the heaps of sand have become our families, our children, or the fairy tale of living happily ever after. Others have climbed the walls of being right, holy, or respectable.

Often our kingdoms have become ways of thinking, political parties, or social groups. Our nation and even our church have become king of the castle playgrounds.

There are all sorts of kingdoms. Each one of us can probably name the sand heaps of our lives, the sand heaps on which we have played king or queen of the castle.

The adult version of king of the castle has become about filling our emptiness, fighting our fear, and ultimately establishing some type of order and control.

What began as a child’s game has become the reality of our adult lives.

For many of us life is a constant scrambling to establish and maintain our little kingdoms, to convince ourselves as much as anyone else that we are okay, we are enough, we are the king or queen. And isn’t that a hard way to live?

Today, the Feast of Christ the King, celebrates and reminds us that playing king of the castle does not have to be the final reality of our lives.

Life can be different. We do not have to spend our lives trying to get to the top of a three-foot heap of sand. We do not have to spend our lives trying to keep our balance on top of a half-built wall as others try to push us off.

Christ the King invites us to stop playing the game. Life does not have to be, was never intended to be, an ongoing game of king of the castle.

If we choose to stop playing the game, it means we must give up our little kingdoms. We cannot celebrate Christ the King if we continue fighting our way up the sand heap.

We can have one or the other but not both.

Today in our service we will again pray, “your kingdom come.” It rolls off our tongues with ease and familiarity.  But I wonder if we really know what we’re asking for and do we really mean it? Implicit in that prayer is the request, “my kingdom go.” “Your kingdom come, my kingdom go.”

It’s one thing to pray for God’s kingdom to come. It’s another to let our kingdom go. After all we’ve been kings and queens of our own castles for a long time. Or at least we’ve convinced ourselves that we have.

It’s not easy to let go of our kingdoms and more often than not I think we try to negotiate a deal with God. “Ok God. Prove you are the king and then I’ll step down. Show me evidence of your kingdom and then I’ll let go of mine.”

The leaders, the soldiers, one of the criminals – they all want the same thing. They want to see proof that Christ is the king. They want to see evidence of his kingdom. We all do. After all, if Jesus is really the king, the one to rule our lives, and we are supposed to believe that – then let him prove it. “Save yourself if you are the Messiah of God. Save yourself if you are the King of the Jews. Aren’t you the Messiah? Then prove it. Save yourself and me.”

At one level I think we want to see Jesus come down from the cross. We want to see his wounds disappear. We want to see a well-dressed king – one with physical strength, military might, and political power. We want to see something spectacular, something beyond the realities of our ordinary lives.

At a much deeper level, however, these demands are about more than just Jesus saving himself from death, from physical pain, from political defeat.  At this deeper level we are crying out: “Save yourself and us from our own unbelief. Save yourself and us from our need to control. Save yourself and us from the fear that this little heap of sand I call my kingdom is all that there is to my life. Show me. Right now. Prove who you are.”

But you know what – he won’t do it – at least not in the way we usually want. Jesus will not offer us proof of his kingship. Instead he offers us the kingdom. He invites us to share in his kingship.

That happens in the silence of the deepest love.

The leaders are scoffing at Jesus. He responds with silence. The soldiers are mocking him. He responds with silence. One of the criminals derides him. He responds with silence. All are demanding proof. None are getting what they ask for. Jesus does not take himself or the criminals off the cross. He doesn’t answer the leaders. He refuses to respond to the soldiers. He is silent.

In that silence the other criminal begins to understand. It’s not about getting proof of Christ’s kingship – it’s about letting go of our own kingship. It’s about coming down from our little heaps of sand and realising that we already are, and always have been, royal members of God’s holy kingdom.

This realisation underlies the criminal’s cry, “Jesus remember me. Remember me not because of what I have done or left undone. Remember me in spite of those things. Remember me not because of who I am, but because of who you are.” His cry to be remembered is the cry of one who has emptied himself of everything, has let go of every last kingdom, and whose very life and existence are entrusted to the God who remembers. That is the reign of Christ.

The reign of Christ does not mean we now have all the answers, that everything is fixed, that there is no more pain, or that every problem has been eliminated. Jesus will not take us off our crosses. Instead, he gets up there with us. He does not fix our lives. Instead, he enters into the reality of our ordinary existence. We are remembered – and right here today, in the reality of our everyday lives, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our dying, in the midst of our brokenness, in the midst of our guilt – Christ the King says to us, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Who was Margaret of Scotland? I wonder what you already know about her – or what you think you know about her?

It’s strange to start at the end, but Margaret died on 16^th November in the year 1093 and that’s the reason that her feast day is on this day.

She’s not one of particularly well-known saints, especially outside of Scotland and many people don’t have any idea about who she was or what she did, but as we learn about her today and we get to know her story better, I’m sure most of us will come to admire her, and maybe even see her as a role model for ourselves and for our lives as followers of Jesus.

So let’s take a brief look at her life. Margaret was the granddaughter of the English king Edmund Ironside, but because of dynastic disputes she was born in Hungary, in the year 1047. She had one brother, Edgar, and a sister, Christian, and many people in England saw her father Edward Ætheling as the rightful heir to the throne of England. Those of you who know your history  will confirm that Edward the Confessor became King of England in 1042, but that he never had children, and in 1054 the parliament of Anglo-Saxon England decided to bring Margaret’s family back from Hungary so that her father could inherit the throne when King Edward died. So, the three siblings were brought up at the Anglo-Saxon court under the supervision of Benedictine monks and nuns, who trained them according to the Benedictine ideal of a life of work and prayer.

It’s hard to overstate the influence of those Benedictines in Margaret’s life. From them she learned the importance of balancing times of prayer and times of working for the good of others.

Margaret’s father died in 1057, and her brother Edgar became heir to the throne. But his succession was not to be – King Edward the Confessor died in 1066, and we all know what happened in that year? Of course, William the Conqueror invaded England and claimed the throne for himself. Edgar and his sisters were advised to go back to Hungary for their own safety, but on the way their ship was blown far off course by a fierce gale. They spent some time in northern England and then sailed up the coast to the Firth of Forth in Scotland, where King Malcolm gave them a warm welcome to his kingdom.

Margaret was now about twenty years old; Malcolm was forty, and unmarried, and he soon became attracted to her. But she took a lot of persuading because she herself wanted to become a Benedictine nun, and besides which Malcolm had a very stormy temperament! It was only after a very long time of reflection that she finally agreed to marry him, and their wedding took place in the year 1070, when she was twenty-three. In the end, although she was much younger than him, she was the one who changed him; under her influence, he became a much wiser and godlier king.

Of course, Margaret was now in a high position in Scottish society, and was very wealthy according to the standard of the day. But she continued to live in the spirit of inward poverty. She saw nothing she possessed as belonging to her; everything was to be used for the purposes of God. As Queen, she continued to live the ordered life of prayer and work that she had learned from the Benedictines. In a very male-dominated society she was only the wife of the king, but nevertheless, mainly because of her husband’s deep devotion and respect for her, and because of her own personal integrity, she came to have the leading voice in making changes that affected the social and spiritual life of Scotland.

Margaret would begin each day with a prolonged time of prayer, especially singing the psalms. In this she was following the example of the Benedictine nuns; the Rule of St. Benedict prescribes seven prayer services a day, and in this way the whole book of one hundred and fifty psalms would be prayed through once a week!

After her prayer time, we’re told that orphaned children would be brought to her, and she would prepare their food herself and serve it to them. It also became the custom that any destitute, poor people would come every morning to the royal hall; when they were seated around it, the King and Queen would enter and ‘serve Christ in the person of his poor’. Before they did this, it was their custom to send out of the room all other spectators except for the chaplains and a few attendants because it was important to Margaret that what they did was done for the love of God and the poor, not to win spiritual brownie points from admiring onlookers.

The church in Scotland had been formed in the Celtic way of Christianity. But Margaret had been raised in the way of Rome, and she was keen to bring Scotland into unity with the rest of the world. However, she didn’t do it in a domineering or authoritarian way. She often visited the Celtic hermits in their lonely cells, offering them gifts and caring for their churches. But she also held many conferences with the leaders of the Church, putting forward the Roman point of view about things like the date of Lent and the proper customs for celebrating the liturgy and so on. In the end she convinced them—not so much because of the strength of her arguments, but by the power of her holy life.

In those days many people in Scotland used to go on pilgrimages to see the relics of St. Andrew at the place now called ‘St. Andrew’s’. Margaret wanted to help the pilgrims, so she had little houses built on either shore of the sea that divided Lothian from Scotland, so that poor people and pilgrims could shelter there and rest after their journeys. She also provided ships to transport them across the water. And interestingly enough, that place in eastern Scotland is still called ‘Queensferry’!

I think it’s fair to say that most people from the past who are recognised as saints were monks and nuns who lived lives of celibacy, far removed from the demands of the world and the pressures of family life. But Margaret is remembered as having a happy family life. She had eight children—six sons and two daughters and her three youngest, Edgar, Alexander, and David, are remembered as among the best kings Scotland has ever had.

I love hearing about the lives of the saints, not just because of their intrinsic value as stories about people who have gone before us in our lives of faith, but because there is always something we can take, reflect on and use to shape our own lives as followers of Jesus.

Like Margaret, we’re all busy people. Many of us work long hours at demanding jobs. Some of us are retired of course, but so many times I hear retirees claiming they’ve never been so busy and wondering how they had time to work!

So, how are we to avoid becoming burnt out? Where can we find strength from God to deal with the everyday challenges that life sends our way?

Surely our answer as Christians is that we need to stay in touch with God so that we come to know his presence in our daily lives – God loves us and wants each of us to experience his love. One of the best ways of staying in touch with him is prayer. In prayer, we can lay down our burdens in God’s presence. We can bring our requests—for others and ourselves—to the one who’s best able to deal with them. We can thank God for the blessings we receive and ask God’s forgiveness for our wrongdoings and shortcomings. We can listen to the voice of God in Scripture and in silence and seek a word from God to guide us through our day.

Now praying seven times a day, as Margaret did, might be a bit much for some of us! But maybe we could manage once or twice? Perhaps at the beginning and end of the day, we can turn to God for strength and peace.

‘Love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself’.

Jesus’ vision is a life of loving relationship with God and our neighbour. Many of us are getting better at doing a lot to help our neighbour, but my friends,  let’s not forget about our relationship with God. Margaret of Scotland was a very busy person, but she never forgot her daily time with God in prayer. Let’s follow her example, and be people of prayer as well as people of good deeds. The two belong together, and when we combine them, like St Margaret, we’ll find richness in the life for which we were made.