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By: The Revd Robert Morley
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- Advent 2: Two questions and a story
This morning I have two questions and a story. The first question is this: What is church for? What is its role? One answer might be that the church should be doing exactly what John the Baptist did; it is sent to prepare the way of the Lord. However, what John the Baptist did before Jesus’s ministry, the Church has to do after he has been. And the second question follows on from the first: how is the church supposed to do that? How is it meant to prepare the way of the Lord?
John the Baptist has a bracing and abrasive message, but it is one which we all need to hear from time to time: we must put our houses in order, set our lives straight; if we don’t, God has a habit of doing it for us. I wonder, should the church be equally bracing and abrasive? Repentance is a major theme of the Advent season; however, it is repentance, rather than penitence. What’s the difference between them? Penitence is beating yourself up for past failings, whereas repentance is about making a fresh start. Confusing the two, by the way, was one of the mistakes of the medieval Western church. Repentance is less about dwelling on the past (that’s penitence), and more about getting back onto the path that God intended for us. Repentance begins when we recognise that we are not on the right path.
John’s baptism, what he calls the baptism with water, is a sign of our repentance. Submitting to water baptism is a sign that we want to clean up our act, to make a fresh start. But notice that there is another kind of baptism, a supernatural kind – the one that John calls Baptism with Fire and the Holy Spirit. The fruits of our new start, and the power we need to change, doesn’t just come from within ourselves – God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, as well as a host of angels will come to our aid…
To answer the second question, the one about how the church is supposed to prepare the way of the Lord, to prepare for Christ’s coming, is one that gets its fullest answers in the letters of St Paul. For Paul, the Christian mission is cross-shaped: first comes the vertical reconciliation with God, then comes the horizontal reconciliation with others. Here, in the concluding passage of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul urges believers to “accept one another, just as Christ accepted you” – not merely tolerating others, but genuinely welcoming them as brothers and sisters in Christ. The gospel needs to do two things : to transform individuals while forming communities. Really the process has three steps, because God desires the church to overcome all cultural, racial, ethnic, and theological divisions so that it can act as a model for all human society.
So the first step is to get back onto the path that God intended for us. We have to make straight a road into the desert, and to spend some time alone there – as indeed Jesus was to do as soon as John had baptised him; which is another way of saying that we have to stop and to listen. We need to stop being so busy. Advent is not just the season for buying gifts and writing Christmas cards and switching on the lights of the Christmas tree in Piazza Ferrari. Rather it is the season of waiting for God to do a new thing. What new thing is God doing in your life as the year of our Lord 2025 draws to a close, and what new thing is God doing in the life of this church? If we want answers to those questions we have to listen very closely, we have to listen in prayer. That’s because, if you will permit me to mix my Scriptures, though not my metaphors, what we have to listen for is the still, small voice, one that may be directing our lives and our church in a new direction. So please, don’t neglect this aspect of Advent preparation: slow down, stop, listen; make yourself some desert time.
But let me finish, as I promised, with a story: it is a story about my own baptism. That took place long ago & far away – in a village on the north coast of Cornwall, in December 1958. Not that I remember anything about it – I was only nine months old! However I knew where it took place, and that my father was there, although he died a few months afterwards.
Anyway, as you can probably imagine, about ten years ago, when I was training for ordination I was told I had to produce my baptism certificate, but that turned out to be very difficult. The church had no records, neither did Truro diocese. Indeed a lot of church records had been destroyed in an arson attack in the 1980s. It was suggested that I ask Cornwall County Council. Unfortunately, at the time, Cornwall County Council was having a new records office built, and all their records was hidden away in a warehouse until it was ready. I was desperate. Luckily, I found a man who took my situation to heart & he retrieved my baptism certificate – though it took the best part of two years to get hold of it. When I eventually held it in my hand it was quite an emotional moment – to see my father’s signature, the thought that little church where I learnt my Christian faith – the thought of my parents being there on that day – though neither of them were church goers. But there was something astounding about that certificate. It was the date: I was baptised on 7th December, which of course is today. Now that might not mean a lot here in Genoa – but if you cross the mountains into Lombardy it does – it’s the feast day of St Ambrose, Sant Ambrogio, the patron saint of Milan. Now at the time I had been living in or near Milan for 30 yrs – and for much of that time I had been asking myself why: I’ve always had a bit of a difficult relationship with the city. But to see St Ambrose written all across my baptism certificate was amazing; it felt like God was nudging me and saying, ‘You see, you were in the right place, that’s where I wanted you to be all along.’ That was the moment when I realised that I hadn’t just been baptised with water, but with Fire and the Holy Spirit.
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