[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]
Today’s Gospel reading is Luke 3:1-6. You can read the text here.
Introduction
In the sixty-seventh year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II – when Theresa May was Prime Minister, Craig Tracey was Member of Parliament for North Warwickshire and Chris Watkins was Mayor of Nuneaton and Bedworth – during Christopher Cocksworth’s term as Bishop of Coventry, the word of God came to the people of St Giles’ church, Exhall, in the Diocese of Coventry.
That’s how today’s Gospel reading might have begun had Luke been writing about the twenty-first century West Midlands. But he wasn’t: he was writing about first-century Palestine, and he was careful to attend to the historical details, listing no fewer than seven historical political figures.
The question is, why?
God acts in history
As I was doing some background reading in preparation for this sermon, I read one commentator who suggested that if you daydream during the first verse of the Gospel reading – the verse where Luke lists all these political bigwigs – you miss the whole point. And that point, of course, is this: all the events Luke is about to narrate, concerning the coming – or advent – of God, will occur in history, in a time and place with which Luke’s readers are familiar.
We’re not dealing here with a god or gods acting in a far-off, disembodied realm, a god whose actions only tangentially affect the real, physical world. No: Luke is at pains to make clear that the stage on which God is about to act is human history, the world of people, societies and nations. Whatever form God’s salvation is going to take, it isn’t going to involve inviting people to detach themselves from and escape from the world. God is stepping right into the world, to be a shepherd to his people and to share in history with them.