Preached at Christ Church, Worton (Benefice Service)
Romans 13.11–14; Matthew 24.36–44
“Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light…’”
Light in a gloomy advent afternoon, Old St Paul’s, Edinburgh. © Gerry Lynch, 14 December 2018.
I think to many of us, it feels like we are living in a dark time, doesn’t it? And that we just sort of stumbled into it without being aware of it?
When did you notice we were sleepwalking? When the Russians went into Ukraine? When Covid hit and it turned out we didn’t, in fact, have the second-best pandemic preparation plans in the world? Or was it another of the numerous other surprising crises or horrendous wars that have descended upon us in recent years?
In today’s first Bible reading, St Paul tells his readers to wake from sleep. The people he was writing to were a tiny Christian community of perhaps a few dozen souls, living in mighty Rome, which had recently become the first city in the world to reach a million inhabitants. How vulnerable they must have felt and how irrelevant they must have seemed even to the handful of people who had heard of them in that mighty metropolis of commerce and political power.
Yet Paul doesn’t tell them to be afraid, or to hide. He tells them to wake up, for God is on His way to rescue them. Their job, Paul writes, is to live honourably, and decently, and openly – ‘as in the day’ – even when things felt dark, because their hope was in God. Their hope was not in material things that seem secure one day but are gone the next, but in the eternal things. Paul knew that to live like that in a world that was sometimes dark, they would need God’s help. He uses a wonderful metaphor for doing that—that they should “put on the armour of light”.
When did things start seeming so dark in our world? It seems only a few years ago that we were living at a time of optimism: of low inflation, low interest rates, and cheap travel, when the Internet was making the economy stronger and bringing people together. How dramatically the mood has shifted in recent years as these material things have passed away!
As the frontier of knowledge expands, we seem to become a bigger threat to ourselves. I’ve watched interviews on Artificial Intelligence with world-leading computer scientists, sober-minded men, and there is at least a credible risk that we are about to invent something we cannot possibly control. All sorts of other odd things have started happening over the last fifteen years, since smartphones started allowing us to take the Internet with us everywhere, from a collapse in the birthrate in most of the world’s countries, from Argentina to India, to dramatic declines in people’s attention spans. Another advanced technology, genetic modification, has brought enormous benefits to millions but is also an area where one sufficiently serious mistake could be devastating to humanity’s future.
This isn’t one of these “end of the world is nigh” sermons from a vicar who’s slightly lost the plot after watching too many YouTube videos late at night. Maybe it isn’t the end: God is good and human beings have a tendency to look over the edge of the abyss and pull themselves back. Pray that God has fresh wonders for us to see. You don’t know the day and the hour that the end will come. Nobody does – in today’s Gospel, Jesus Christ says even He doesn’t know.
But one thing we do know is that the line we’ve been fed, that science and knowledge could only make things better, no longer holds water. I don’t think we always grasp just how profoundly the mood has changed on that score, and for how long the tide has been turning. From Victorian times through until about the 1970s, many people genuinely thought, for example, that a better understanding of psychology would basically drive crime out of existence. Nobody believes stuff like that anymore.
We need to wake up to the reality that instead of using the pow our intelligence has won for us to create a perfect future, we increasingly find that we lack the wisdom to use it sensibly. We are out of our depth, and we need help—and if there is no God, then God help us.
Today, Advent Sunday, is the beginning of the Church’s year. It is a time for new beginnings. The Church begins a journey that will last a year, which starts with people longing for light to come into a world that was often dark. The light indeed came, but in ways they could never have imagined—in the form of a tiny baby who would grow up to be a King of a realm that was not of this world, who gave His life for His friends, and so opened the way to eternal life for all who trust in Him. God comes to rescue us when we don’t even know we need help, in ways we could never have imagined for ourselves.
And what does all this mean for us, in Wiltshire on a chilly Sunday morning in 2025? I think it’s a challenge to wake up, and like those Christians in Rome that St Paul wrote to all those centuries ago to live as people of honesty and integrity, even in the toughest of circumstances, people who aren’t afraid to own who and what they are. But don’t pretend you can manage to live a life like that entirely in your own strength. Instead, put on the armour of light—put your trust in your heavenly Father through His Son Jesus Christ, and He will lead you living a life that is better and richer and more rewarding than anything you could have imagined on your own.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: The late 15th Century Beauchamp Chapel (pronounced “Beecham”) in St John’s, Devizes. © Gerry Lynch, 6 February 2021.
