Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Advent

Sunday 10th December 2006

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

Martin Luther King was assassinated on the evening of 4^th April 1968, while standing on the balcony of his room in Memphis, Tennessee. He was about to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers in that city. His campaign for civil rights is well documented and you know it well. At the age of 35, he was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. His fight for freedom from oppression and segregation and for equal opportunities was very obvious and clear. Racism and injustice are still at the top of the political agenda across the world. The quest for freedom is ongoing and I could’ve cited many an example other than Martin Luther King.

Freedom is in the heart of every Christian believer. As we experience the freedom Christ gives, we are challenged to cry freedom for others; Freedom from injustice, from sin, from debt and from addiction.

You see, when I look around at this time of year you witness a kind of madness which has nothing to do with the message of Christmas. I know we say this kind of thing almost every year, but it has struck me more now than ever, that there is a kind of tyranny of consumerism which has some people captive!

I think this was all brought home to me when the appalling Fairpak catastrophe happened. For the hundreds, even thousands of people affected by it, it remains a grim reality. Here were people driven to saving money, often from low-income families it seemed, so that they could buy what seemed to me not just the basics, but extravagant presents and ‘all the trimmings’, as they say, for Christmas. And then for it all to be taken away from them, just like that, seems so unjust. But we are getting ‘trapped’ and held captive by consumerism, and people are captive to debt.

Whatever happened to an apple and orange at the end of the stocking?

We need to be set free from a consumerist society which dictates to us what we are supposed to have, and we have to be able to say no, otherwise this consumerist society will control us!

You know well the old Tony Campolo story of when he was lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania back in the sixties. It was in a huge auditorium, full of students, attending a course on an Introduction to Sociology. It wasn’t going to be an easy ride, because a student near the back started to argue with him, with colourful language. Campolo retorted, “That’s no way to talk to me. Now sit down. And, if you don’t sit down, I’m going to throw you out of this class”.

The young man responded arrogantly, shouting back at Campolo, “Who cares!?” “But if you get thrown out the class, you might get thrown out of the University”. “Who cares?”

And so it would have gone and on, if you get thrown out of the university you wouldn’t get a good job, and if you don’t get a good job he wouldn’t be able to buy all the things this society tells us we have to have, he would have shouted back loud and clear, “WHO CARES?”

Until we are able to say to this consumerist society ‘Who cares?’ then this consumerist society will control us. This ‘society’ will tell us what we are supposed to do! How about that?

This is not popular speak for the business people amongst us, I know, but even you know exactly what I am saying. Someone said to me the other day, “I can’t put stuff out on the shelves quick enough before they’re taken off to buy!”

Which reminded me of the old joke about the Jewish boy in school after the Christmas holidays; and the teacher was asking the children how their Christmas went. She went around all the class until it came to the Jewish boy and the teacher asked ‘And what did you do over Christmas, Joshua?’ ‘Well miss ‘, he began, ‘on Christmas day my dad and I went down to our shop, and we looked at the rows and rows of empty shelves, and then, miss, we sang a hymn’. ‘You sang a hymn?’ the teacher asked in surprise, ‘What hymn did you sing?’ ‘Well miss,’ Joshua said, ‘I think it was, “What a friend we have in Jesus”’.

In our intercessions for today, which we take from David Adam’s series of prayers, the Versicle was ‘Blessed Lord, hear us’ and the response was, ‘and set your people free’.

Freedom is in the heart of every believer. As we experience the Freedom Christ gives, we are challenged to cry freedom for others; Freedom from injustice, from sin, from debt and from addiction.

We also prayed, “Lord of freedom and grace, we pray for all held prisoner by tyranny and oppression, all whose eyes are blind to your glory and deaf to your world. We remember all who do not know or love you, all whose lives are darkened by fear”

Can you try and imagine, for a moment, if we could possibly block out all the ‘rubbish’ and ‘fear’ that seems to come with Christmas these days and simply concentrate on the glory that we are often blind to and the word which we are often deaf to.

What a Christmas that would be.