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The Warning Voice from the Future

Advent 2 : 8 December 2013  : Matthew 3: 1-12

Shortly before his death from lung cancer the movie star Yul Brynner made a short film that he requested be shown widely immediately after his death. In it he chronicled the harm done to him by his chain-smoking habit of an adult lifetime and concluded, as the camera zoomed in for a close up headshot, with these words, "Don’t smoke."

Occasionally funerals include a film clip presentation made by the deceased in which he or she directly addresses the mourners with a few well-chosen words from, as it were, beyond the grave. I am pleased to say that this eerie and slightly ghoulish procedure has never happened at any funeral I have presided at.

What introduces our sense of unease and disquiet about these kinds of messages is the way they cross-frontiers and boundaries zones between life and death, time and eternity, in a somewhat managed and artificial sense. The past has come into the present in a non interactive sense – we cant talk back to these electronic messages, or dialogue about the future that might be forged on the basis of the warnings that have been offered.

Warnings were the specialty of John the Baptist, presented to us in the gospels as the last and the greatest of Israel’s prophets, and as the anticipator of the next big leap forward in Israel’s relationship with God. In addition to their telling off messages, prophets are often thought of as predictors of the future, the kind of people who have got a Divine hot line on what comes next. Alternatively they are seen as conservers and interpreters of the religious traditions of the past, who make received wisdom come alive in an intense contemporary application. Either way they are thought to be working from the past to the present, telling the people of God to stay off certain roads and wrong turnings on the basis of insider knowledge received at some prior point.

Yet those who have looked more deeply in to the matter have come to different conclusions on what prophets are about. Abraham Heschel talked about prophets as those who have been admitted into the counsels of God, they have been taken behind the scenes as it were, so that God can have a heart to heart with them about what is on his mind with reference to the goings on of the people of God. Although the message that will flow from this sharing of confidences and concerns may well reference the past, it does not originate from there. That is because the dimension that God is above all present in is the future.

It has been said that God the Father originates the work of our salvation, that God the Son develops the work of our salvation, and that God the Holy Spirit completes and perfects our salvation. In this reckoning of things God is most powerfully present in the future – that future where Jesus the Son now lives having gone to that dimension and that place after the resurrection. It is the space where the Spirit is above all present since he sees and knows there what we shall be in our completed state. What is more the divinely inhabited future draws us towards it with its tractor beams of truth, beauty and goodness. We are being hauled in to our final homecoming in the life of the world to come, the kingdom realized in all its fullness.

Advent is the season of the Kingdom, the rejoicing in that full realisation of God’s purposes that always lies just over the horizon of history. John the Baptist, and the prophets of Israel, spoke their urgent warnings to the people of Israel on the basis of the glimpses they had seen of what was in store as they took counsel with God in that future dimension from where God called them briefly into his presence. The disastrous results of present folly were revealed in their full outworking as the prophets looked back through God’s eyes on a history yet to be that they would soon be returned to. That is why I have entitled this sermon, "The warning voice from the future."

Christianity is a religion based on a consideration of ends and the end. All creatures have an end that they made to develop into. History is developing towards an end that God has in mind for it. The human story means something, it has purpose, and it requires an appropriate response from us if it is to get the place intended for it. John Zizioulas writes:

’The truth of history lies in the future– history is true, despite change and decay, not just because it is a movement towards an end, but mainly because it is a movement from the end, since it is the end that gives it meaning.’

What is being asked of us this morning is to change our perspective – to stop thinking about the world of time as a past we know a lot about, a present we know a reasonable amount about, and the future as a totally mysterious and unknowable dimension. The future is in fact the most firmly realised dimension of reality there is, since it is the place of God’s abiding, the Kingdom come to life in its fully deployed form, the life that really is life present in its most vivid and radiant reality. Present reality is being influenced and reorganised by God as he scatters intimations of this future glorious reality amongst us now. Some of the first fruits of that dynamic and abundant land of light and joy and peace are being experienced in various nooks and crannies of our world.

That is especially true of the Sunday liturgy when it is celebrated with that full sense of theatre and spiritual reality that it is capable of. We are in a sense experiencing in minor key the life of heaven in our time together this morning. In our prayer we are, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "appropriating by faith the powers of the age to come." We are acknowledging that the age to come is what really matters, and that we can’t wait to fully inhabit it; we are as Paul puts it, "impatient to be away from the body and with the Lord." This liturgy is a brief stepping through into that other world of the Kingdom both in its future glory, though juxtaposed also with a heightened awareness of the world of suffering humanity around us that desperately needs the healing message of the gospel, and in which the Kingdom is at work.

So John the Baptist is not a far distant figure in the past calling faintly to us from the closed canon of the prophetic tradition. He is in fact speaking to us directly and with power in this liturgy from the immediate future that is itching to come among us as the Kingdom the power and the glory. He knew that future in glimpses in his earthly life. Now he knows it in its completeness, and on the strength of that has words of urgent and abrupt wisdom for our immediate attention.