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Advent Bears Sermon preached
at Ripon Cathedral
Bears have been in the news this last week. There has been the controversial class teddy bear in Sudan, the naming of which (Muhammad) led to the school teacher Gillian Gibbons being imprisoned for insulting Islam. After the intervention of a high profile delegation of two Muslim members of the House of Lords she was pardoned and reunited with her family this week. The controversy leaves many of us looking on in wide-eyed bemusement at its absurdity. If it was deemed offensive, and there are cultural differences and sensitivities here that because of our love of bears we miss, a more proportionate way to deal with this would have been for the school to make her aware of it and change the name. But proportionate was not on the agenda. Gillian Gibbons walked into a powder keg of internal struggles and extreme religious politics in a country torn by decades of war. Post-colonial resentment ferments and a Christian teacher is regarded by some with suspicion. Not everyone welcomes our charity. This bear was not regarded as being so cuddly and safe. The clash was much deeper than a soft toy; indeed the stuffed friend was almost certainly irrelevant. The second bear came in the award of the Turner Prize for contemporary art. The winner, Mark Wallinger, displayed a video of a previous work of art, namely him walking around the national gallery in Berlin at night dressed in a bear costume. This bear was the symbol of the city, just like Warwickshire has the bear as its symbol. Mark Wallinger is said to be particularly interested in political and religious themes, belief and disbelief. His award winning work was a recreation of Brian Haw’s one man peace protest in Parliament Square, in London, under the title State Britain. Iraq continues to be controversial and feeling is of course cemented further by the body count. Now a direct link between all of this and the readings comes in a rather tenuous and convoluted fashion with bears being mentioned with cows grazing together. The passage from Isaiah (11:1-10) gave a rather utopian view of wolves living with lambs and not eating them, likewise with leopards and kid goats, calves, lions and fatlings – fatlings by definition being fattened to be eaten, so not sure whether they get a complete reprieve. The king of beasts, the lion, turns vegetarian and children play with asps and vipers. Nothing will hurt or destroy. It is all going to be very friendly. The wonderful world of Disney has broken out throughout the world: ziperdy-doo-daa! The implication is that bears are not normally friendly and if one walked in through the West doors, there aren’t many of us who would hang around for long to put it to the test. There is a deeper link, though, and it comes through the gospel (Matt 3:1-12). John the Baptist is baptizing and calling on those who have flocked to him to repent because the kingdom of God has drawn near. There are cuddly images conjured there: baptism has cute associations of babies being serenely held as a small amount of water is dribbled on their heads. Small and fragile, utterly dependent and vulnerable, the new born is cuddled and adored. This is teddy bear stuff and most baptisms involve a bear somewhere or other. But John is not baptizing babies, he is demanding repentance. What is more he is dressed somewhat disarmingly in camel hair, with a leather belt around his waist. There is code here and it doesn’t take us to gentle and cuddly Old Testament prophets – it takes us to Elijah and he had attitude. That description is how Elijah is depicted in the book of Kings (2 Kings 1:8) and Elijah ordered the slaughter of opposing prophets. He had a body count. The Old Testament ends with words in the book of Malachi that Elijah will come again before the great day of the Lord (Mal 4:5-6). The day of the Lord brings a righting of wrongs and a great overturning of fortunes. Enter, then, stage left John the Baptist dressed as Elijah, the messenger preparing the way before the Lord, and cute baptism is not so cute. It gets even sharper when the Pharisees and Sadducees, those fall guys of the gospels, present themselves. Far from being received with open arms as penitents come for repentance – the invitation was to repent after all – they are sent away with a flee in their ears. They are called a brood of vipers. I don’t think you want a John the Baptist as the next Precentor of this Cathedral – certainly I don’t think that is in the job description – and most parishes would not want him as their vicar. If Isaiah’s vision is going to be realised in any way at all, then John’s stinging repost to the Sadducees and Pharisees has to be taken seriously. ‘Bear fruit worthy of repentance’. There is no space in the kingdom he proclaims to have come near for shallow easy comfort. When things are wrong they need to be righted and the cry of justice is not an optional extra to the Christian gospel. Both bears, the Sudanese school bear and the Turner prize artist, point to this in both Christian and Islamic cultures. Indeed many Muslims in this country have been at pains to point out how the Sudan judgement was itself an offence to Islam. There are many who feel the Iraq situation was not justly entered into and history will make its own judgement there. In the meantime there is a mess to be sorted out. The call to repentance is not cuddly. It does not bring what, as psychologists describe teddy bears, a soft transitional object, a comforter to divert the attention, but the challenge to confront some deeply buried drives and motives. At the same time it does not devour and maul us like a wild bear would do. The baptism of John is for repentance and by implication leads to a life liberated and set free from the oppressive hold lies and distortions can exert on us. So what kind of bear did you bring to the cathedral this morning – metaphorical or literal? What does the call to repentance say to you? Is it a distracting comforter to avoid facing what you must face, to help you keep on doing what you ought not to be doing? It might be that facing up to something is very hard and a religious bear just helps you function at the moment in the same way a child uses a teddy bear to cope with the transition of growing independence. If that is the case, you can only put it off for so long before it will seep out in ways that are unhelpful. It might be that it is a nagging bear, one that growls at you demanding that you confront some deep seated obstacle to bearing the fruit worthy of repentance? It is the first of those that gets you labelled a brood of vipers, paying lip service to repentance with no intention of changing corrupt and corrupting ways. It is the religious leaders of his day who received that tongue lashing from John the Baptist. The others, those struggling to cope or who know deep down that something is nagging away, find that the waters of baptism offer a door way to wholeness and healing, but it is not always easy, in fact rarely is. It can be a very uncomfortable place to sit, but it is how we embrace the kingdom of God which John prepared the way for. Preparing for the kingdom of God is a classic Advent theme. Today, through bears, cuddly and wild, we are confronted to face the challenge of living lives worthy of it. That challenge is both personal and corporate. Not all bears are soft and cuddly – neither are prophets of the kingdom and neither is the call to repentance. ©
Ian Black 2007 |