Preacher: Revd Canon Karen Schmidt
Date: 25/06/2023
We don’t learn a lot about our patron saint from either today’s reading from Acts or the Gospel of Luke. It’s very much a summary that, as he grew, John became strong in spirit and went into the wilderness until he started his ministry and that that ministry was to proclaim a baptism of repentence and to point to the one who was coming and who was greater than him, someone the thong of whose sandals he was not worthy of untying.
We have to look to the other gospels to put some flesh on the bones of Luke’s brief introduction to John and that’s where we find out about John’s clothing of camel’s hair and his diet of locusts and wild honey. And about his work of baptizing not only those who responded to his urgent call for them to repent but who also baptized Jesus. And in Matthew we also learn about someone who did not mince his words: “you brood of vipers” he called the Pharisees and Sadducees who came for baptism as he questioned their reasons, their motives for seeking baptism, perhaps hedging their bets against what was to come whilst all the while relying on the safety net, as they perceived it, of their ancestor Abraham.
Mark makes a brief mention of John’s arrest. But before that we have, in John’s gospel, John the Baptist’s mission statement
I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “make straight the way of the Lord.”
and, as Jesus came to John for baptism, John’s declaration: “Here is the Lamb of God…”
This is the saint we honour and commemmorate today – the forerunner of the Lamb of God whose work was to prepare the way, to prepare God’s people to receive their long awaited Messiah, their Redeemer.
“Behold the Lamb of God”. And John is still saying that today from his niche on our church tower as he holds out the Lamb to all those passing by. In his sermon last Sunday at Evensong, as we thanked the Friends of this Church for all that they do to maintain this building and support our ministry, Mark Birch, now Precentor of Westminster Abbey but previously a fondly remembered Curate here, remarked that the position of our St John Baptist statue in hurricane alley is the perfect place for him. He is an austere figure. His message is urgent and uncomfortable – repent, change your mind, turn your hearts to God and to your neighbour, because the Day of the Lord is coming and is indeed here.
A very different way of pointing to the Lamb of God from what Mark called the domestication of the Church today. Having started by saying that it is entirely clear why one would want to be a Friend of Cirencester Parish Church – just take a look around you – it was perhaps not so clear why one would want to be a friend of the Church more generally. At this point we were left to insert our own reasons for exasperation with the Church’s national leadership, or frustration at its apparent inablity to connect to most people, or to seize the agenda, being so consistently behind the curve and pushed on to the back foot or, for those of us who remember those places, being in the guards’ van rather than the vanguard. Mark suggested that the problem, in part, might be one of domestication – the Church trying too hard to be too homely and comfortable. Churches benefitting from central church funds to instal sofas, soft lighting, a coffee bar and distributing free croissants and focussing on an agenda of fun. Just look at church advertising of events – you will nearly always find the word “fun”. And the Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating the Eucharist from his kitchen as we went into lockdown despite there being a chapel in Lambeth Palace.
Comfortable domesticity is unlikely to stimulate the change necessary to make us repent, to turn around to face the Lamb of God, to engage with his agenda of bringing about his kingdom. Domesticity protects us, cushions us, sedates us in front of the telly or some other screen. A colleague of mine once remarked that people today go to church to be entertained but to the cinema to be purged. The Baptist insists we have to get up, open the door and face the elements, like John on his windy parapet, if we are going to hear the call of God.
May we, on this our Patronal Festival, make a plea today for the Church to be less domestic – to think about the place of our liturgy, the place of our furnishings, to allow the strangeness, the otherness and holiness of God to confront us, not least through his saint and our patron, the forerunner of Christ. Making our churches the best places they can be can awaken in us a sense of strangeness and holiness, a sense of awe and wonder, a sense of God’s majesty and yet immanence, a sense of coming face to face with the Lamb at the Eucharist, a sense of moving beyond the domestic space, our accustomed home, and into the House of the Lord – from a place of creature comfort into a place of new creation, where we catch something of the nature of God and his kingdom, that place described in today’s reading from Isaiah. Such a place can help us, as we then return to the market place and to our domestic spheres to be, in the power of the Spirit, those who hold out the Lamb of God to our world.
We live in a world of information overload and this carries over into our church culture today – explain, explain, explain. Have plastic ducks floating in the baptismal font, because that makes connections. With what ? is my question. Explain and explain again because those who are not regular attenders, and perhaps some who are, won’t understand what we are about and what is happeneing unless we spell it all out in as simple language as possible. But you just have to witness children – young children – come to the altar rail at the distribution of communion to know that they don’t need a lot of explanation. Some hold out their hands instinctively because that’s what everyone else is doing and, for me, it’s the hardest thing not to be able to give them the bread and wine. In my book the Orthodox church has got it right by giving communion to the newly baptized infant – but that argument is for another day. Back to children who instinctively know that something is happening at the altar rail. They won’t be able to give you a verbal explanation – and I wonder how many of the adults present there would be able to do that – but the children can sense that this place is different from any other.
We need to allow the Holy Spirit to do its work. We need to make sure that in our liturgy, in our worship, we don’t feel too comfortable, too in control. What we do need to do is to explain a little, but not too much – to offer enough so that people can engage with something glorious and mysterious and then relinquish control and allow the Holy Spirit todraw them into the fuller mystery and glory. Our liturgy, our worship, should point us beyond this habitation to our common destiny, our ultimate shared home in God.
Our shared home in God is what the Lamb of God is offering us, a knowledge of our purpose in life, an understanding of the nature of God’s kingdom, a commission to bring that about in our time and our place. To follow the example of our saint in being bold and courageous and not afraid of being different.
As today we give thanks for the life and example of John the Baptist may God enable us to follow in his footsteps to proclaim the Lamb of God and draw others into his kingdom and his glory – and into our home with him.