Rev’d Peter Balabanski
Advent Sunday A – Isa 2 1-5, Ps 122, Rom 13 9-14, Mt 24 36-44
Watching; waiting. Time spent waiting is time when I get lots of unexpected things done. I’m at the airport waiting to collect someone and they’re delayed. There isn’t anything else I’d planned. I’d rushed to be there on time, and now as I wait, and everything comes to an unplanned standstill, my thoughts and prayers start arriving one by one as they catch up with me. There’s no excuse for postponing them now. It’s good. God seems to create just such times to help me put my house in order.
Today, we officially start waiting together. It’s Advent. Jesus is on his way. Jesus, the Christ-Child of Bethlehem. But also the Cosmic Christ – the Son of Man who will come again like a thief in the night. We don’t know when, but we’re given an inkling of how. Jesus says, as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. It’s going to be a big change. The end of what we know; a brand new reality. And we need to be ready for what comes; we need to prepare ourselves for it.
How do we make sure we’re ready? Our waiting needs to be active, not passive. What should the Church be up to while we wait for Jesus’s Second Advent? What’s best to be up to as we wait? Sleep’s not an option. Would it be wise to let other people know Jesus is coming – wake them up? Hardly popular, but if we already know about it, and they don’t, we need to try at least. And if we’re looking at a new reality where, as Isaiah promises, peace and justice are to be the way of things, should we be acclimatising to that new situation? It will help people get ready to welcome the Son of Man if they see compassion and kindness as the chief mark of his followers. They might choose to embrace those ways too. A new, good real.
We’re readying ourselves and the world for a reign of peace with justice; utterly different from the reality most people experience. As Isaiah put it this morning, God shall judge between the nations…arbitrate for many peoples; they’ll beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Tyrants may ignore the UNO and the International Court of Justice, but they can’t ignore God.
Today’s scriptures say wrongs will be righted. And we lit a candle to acknowledge our call to be part of that process. We don’t do it for self-preservation. The focus isn’t about our danger, but about God reaching out to the world. We’re called to recognise God’s kindness, and then respond in thanksgiving by shining out with it ourselves. People followed Jesus because they were responding freely to a grace, a truth, a depth, and a love that their deepest selves had always yearned for. And in a fragile, faltering, and yet unmistakable way, we can create and nurture the experience of these qualities as the Church. It means turning from the enculturation that surrounds us in a broken world. It means instead we choose to be formed by God; a community from all nations who live out the grace, truth, depth and love for everyone that God modelled in Jesus.
I only have time today to speak about one way that this choosing can happen in the Church community to distinguish us from the broken world that we live in. We’re marking 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. It’s far more important than we might imagine. I remember being stunned by a study in the early 1990’s which estimated that female infanticide meant there were 100 million women missing from the world. A follow-up study in 2020 revealed the number had risen to 126 million. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/where-are-all-the-missing-girls That’s double the death toll of both world wars! The war against women is the most insidious war Earth has ever known – insidious because it’s fatal, yet so embedded in human cultures that we don’t readily see it.
In Australia, one woman a week is murdered as a result of intimate partner violence. In one such murder in the news over the past week, the coroner concluded that this was a meticulously planned execution after a long period of coercive control. But she said media often disguise this fact by suggesting that such murderers are acting out of character, or just snapping for an instant. That’s a lie.
Where does this start? In war, dehumanising the other – reducing them to an object of one’s contempt – is what makes it okay to do unspeakable things to them.
I’ve seen this dehumanising happen in a lot of workplaces where men are in the majority. The pictures on the office walls are still there. Conversation among the men routinely demeans and objectifies women. A woman walking past the workplace will still be subjected to cat-calling and whistling. But blaming women for the clothes they wear lays responsibility with them. This is de-humanising behaviour, and it lays the foundation for the terrible violence that has long been acceptable in our culture.
The Church is no angel in this regard. A survey recently revealed that the level of domestic violence in the Australian Anglican church is the same or worse than in the wider community. The Church is still patriarchal, and in world terms, still largely dismissive of the idea that God might call a woman to public ministry.
But some churches, including our own, welcome the ministry of women at the very highest level. Here are St John’s we’re glad that the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, is a woman – but it’s not universally welcomed. Some parts of the Anglican Church still offer a model to other churches, and to a world culture of the glass ceiling and wage inequity for women.
The world culture seeps in. Men in church communities still make denigrating references to women as though it’s funny or even normal to do so. That’s not a culture we should allow to shape us. As we stop and wait this Advent, may the prayers and thoughts God sends catch up with us; prayers for a just and safe world for women; prayers that form us into a church that models just that. Amen.