Plans, Disasters and Fixes
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Amen.
First given at Derby Cathedral 3.4.16.
A sermon for the Eve of the Annunciation
“When the fullness of time
had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”.
In the depths of Channel
Four’s schedules, there is a programme called Tattoo Fixers. In this
programme people arrive with an array of badly crafted tattoos, and those which
are less funny once the owner has sobered up. The programme’s team of tattoo
artists then transform the tattoos into more tasteful and more beautiful tattoo
by integrating the original design into their new art. The original tattoo is not erased, but cannot
be seen any longer.
This evening we celebrate
God’s plan for the redemption of the world.
“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”
as St Paul puts it. This plan is
announced to Mary by the Angel Gabriel.
It is a plan that is not just for us, but which will have an effect on
the whole of creation. We have sung the
Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise which speaks of God remembering his promises
and delivering his people. We gather on
the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation, when God’s plans to restore the whole
of creation in Christ are announced.
We also gather on the second
Sunday of Easter, and so cannot forget that the plans and promises of God
include the crucifixion of Jesus, indeed the crucifixion is pivotal to those
plans. At the heart of the plan whose
annunciation we celebrate this evening is a death. Death is central to God’s plans, because
death is what the plan needs to deal with.
At the heard of the plan is death, and at the heart of the plan is a
girl. “When the fullness of time had
come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”.
The angel does not release a statement onto the internet; or appear to
the ruling elite and tell them of God’s plan.
Instead he appears to Mary, a young girl, but who is central to the
plans of God. What if Mary had said
‘no’?
There are, then, dangers to
God’s plans. Dangers due to the
fragility of the people to whom they are entrusted. Dangers due to the darkness, the death, that
is incorporated in the plans of God.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the first reading this evening
from Genesis speaks of plans going wrong.
We are not three chapters into the Bible before it begins to go
wrong. The man and the woman hide from
God. They are afraid. The man blames his wife - ‘she gave the fruit to me’. The woman blames the serpent – ‘he tricked
me’. The whole thing is rather pathetic, like children in the playground. There is fragility here, there is death, the
plan is going wrong right at the beginning.
And yet, we also begin to see
in this how God will put things right.
God does not simply undo the damage and start again. Instead, we begin to see God at work in the
damage that the eating of the fruit has done.
God’s says to the serpent that ‘I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head and you
will strike his heal.’ On the one hand,
this is a straight forward description of affairs. Human beings and snakes often live in a
relationship of enmity. Humans seek to
kill snakes by cutting off their heads; snakes bite humans, often on the foot. But it is also a statement with stronger
theological resonance. The offspring of
the tempter is death. The offspring of
the woman is the one about whom Paul wrote: “When the fullness of time had
come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”.
Death did indeed strike Jesus, but in doing so Jesus destroyed
death.
God is at work to bring about
his plans. He does not do so by tearing
things up and starting again until he gets a creation that works. Rather, he works with what he has made, even
as it starts to destroy itself, in order that it can be made right once more. Hence Tattoo
Fixers. A more erudite image might
be that of a tapestry. Imagine a
tapestry that has a great slashing tear through its centre, and then imagine
the artist sewing the threads of that tapestry.
They work around and through the cut to make it not just an integral
part of the tapestry, but the part that gives meaning to the whole piece of
art.
In both the tapestry and in Tattoo Fixers, we have analogies for
God’s action in redeeming the world by incorporating even the disasters into
his plans. The good news that we
celebrate on this eve of the annunciation; that we celebrate during this
Easter-tide; and that we celebrate every time we gather on a Sunday, the day of
the Resurrection; the good news is that God in Jesus Christ does not let the
darkness and the disaster, the pain and the evil have the last word. God is working constantly to bring new life
out of death, to bring healing out of suffering and to bring beauty out of the
ugliness of our wrongdoing and sin.
Our challenge is to recognise
the times when we allow ourselves to think that death and despair have the
final word, and to open ourselves again to hope and to the working of God. If
we can learn to see God working in the darkest places of our lives then we have
an important gift to share with others.
So where are we hurting, despairing and thinking that there is no
escape? – those are precisely the places that the God who announces his plans
to Mary and the God who raises Jesus from the dead is at work. More than this, we are called to join in with
God’s plan to bring life, beauty and healing where there is death, sin and
hurt.
Tonight we celebrate the
annunciation of the plans of God to a young woman; we gather to celebrate the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; we gather to celebrate the way that
God works even through our failures and disasters to bring life, beauty and
healing; we gather to renew our commitment to the call of God to see God at
work in our own lives, especially where we are most broken and despairing; and
we gather to hear again God’s call to join in his mission of bringing his plans
into being in a world that badly needs them.
“When the fullness of time
had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”.
First given at Derby Cathedral 3.4.16.
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