"Trust in the Lord" - a sermon for the second Sunday before Advent

Malachi 4: 1-2a; Luke 21: 5-19

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

….or so I thought as I was put on hold by the bank for the third time!

Whether in our day-to-day interactions, or on the global stage, or in our perceptions of the world around us, the strong and prophetic language of the prophet Malachi has a deep resonance for us. Scientific journals and the popular press are increasingly full of studies that seem to suggest that people’s fear, and so people’s frustration and anger, is increasing because of a perception that things are falling apart all around us.

This is not always as trivial as not being able to speak clearly and easily to someone at the bank – although we are all getting used to the Kafka-like processes that often involves. However, there is clear evidence of “catastrophe anxiety” or “doomsday fear” or even “apocalyptic dread” in our modern lives.

You only have to look at the news this last week to find examples and predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation. For some the inconclusive outcomes of the American midterm elections are evidence of a nation stuck in political ideological gridlock which, for some, is leading inexorably towards public disturbance and civil war.  The urgency around the COP27 summit in Egypt is heightened by predictions of the environmental and climate break down. Every movement in the war in Ukraine is read and interpreted in light in the instability over the leadership and control of Russia’s nuclear arms.

As the prophet Malachi says:

See, the day is coming that shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

In one sense it is important that we are alive to and open to these threats and fears. The world certainly feels a more uncertain place than it did even a decade ago. But we also need to be able to take a broader view of these threats and fears. Certainly, they are magnified through the effects of a culture of polarised twenty-four hour news and social media. I know from my own experience during the pandemic lock-downs that I had to ration my exposure to the news – preferring the hourly updates on Radio 3 to the constant flow of information on other channels – to preserve some perspective and balance.

Equally outside of the lens of modern media and our contemporary experience we could argue that these threats – or those like them –were ever thus. Looking this last week at some of the books in the Cathedral collection with a colleague was reminder that the seventeenth-century intellectual world of Thomas Smith was suffused with the fears of the end of days and collapse of all things wrought by the ravages of the English Civil War. Equally, nearly a thousand years ago, the millennial fears of the end of days informed peoples interpretations of the Norman conquest of this country, and of the harrowing and taming of the north that that led to, of which this Cathedral’s story is part.

So, when we come to the texts that we read today, with their apocalyptic frame and scale, I always need to lift myself from my current anxieties and concerns and remind myself that it was ever thus. There is something, I think, deep in all of us which makes us tack to the response favoured by Chief Vitalstatistix of the Asterix books, and fear that inevitably the sky will fall on our heads.

The source of this fear is often an understandable and evolutionary fight-or-flight response to the world around us. But it is also magnified by our implicit understanding of our own humanity. We fear catastrophe because we know, deep down, that none of us are perfect. We like to imagine that if push came to shove we’d be magnanimous and generous, but fear that we would not. 

Perhaps that profound and inciteful Scottish thinker, imbued I’m sure with a deep and unbending Presbyterian upbringing, was right when Private Frazer said again and again: “we’re all doomed!”

Well that’s a cheerful place to get us to.

But there is hope – there is always hope.

We find that hope implicit in both our readings today. A hope made explicit to us in the book of Psalms and Psalm 42 in particular. In that wonderful Psalm, which are saying each day in our service of Morning Prayer. There we hear these words of assurance:

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,

and why are you so disquieted within me?

O put your trust in God;

for I will yet give him thanks,

who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Or as we hear again in the book of Proverbs:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

    and do not rely on your own insight.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

    and he will make straight your paths.

In both our readings today, we hear this message. That whatever might befall us, whatever the future has to hold, whatever fears we might carry with us – however justifiable or realistic – we need to hold onto one thing and one truth – “Trust in the Lord”.

Now the cynic and sceptic might rightfully say that this teaching is merely a panacea – the opiate of the peoples – to persuade us to look away from the injustice of the world and the failure of others as we put our hope in an unlikely and unknown future.

But those who say that have not known what it means to trust in the Lord. 

To trust in the Lord, to acknowledge him, is by implication to acknowledge our own failures and limitations. To trust in the Lord is to see our own imperfections as clearly and vividly as we see those imperfections in others – now what a difference that conversion would make in our political discourse! 

To trust in the Lord is to trust in the gifts that God has given us, including the wonder of creation and our gifts of ingenuity and innovation and self-control as we seek to live with our changing environment and climate with deeper care and understanding. 

To trust in the Lord is to trust that in a world of palpable evil and malice the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot and will not overcome it.

We live in a changing and challenging world. To place that in a broader frame and perspective is helpful but should not diminish the very real challenges we live with.  But what that broader frame reminds us of is that as we face the changes and chances of this fleeting world we do so knowing one unchanging truth: trust in the Lord, because in that trust is our hope.

Or as the Prophet Malachi puts it rather better than I can:

For you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings