The challenge of love
Fourth Sunday in Advent, 19th December, 2004
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Do you remember the vows in the old form of the marriage service? They were quite uneven. The husband and the wife both promised to love, honour and keep each other, and to be faithful; but the man had also to comfort, and the woman had also to obey and serve.
Clergy are in a similar boat to women married under the old rite – we are called to serve, and have to take a vow of canonical obedience at the time of ordination – except we are to obey our ordinary, our bishop, in all things lawful. Clerical obedience, certainly in the Anglican tradition, is not blind or absolute, but it is based on the covenant principle of lawfulness in the light of the Gospel.
Soldiers and other military personnel are called to a different form of service and obedience. Theirs, of course, can often be rather more absolute – obeying orders without question, submitting to superior officer's knowledge of the greater plan.
Different sorts of obedience apply in different forms of relationship and vocation.
Less prescribed obedience may be divided, for example, into willing and unwilling obedience. I may not wish to do something the vicar asks me to do – like washing his car for example – but because he is my boss I will grudgingly do it, even if with a rather strained smile and gritted teeth. Alternately I may be so in awe and respect of the vicar that even if he told me to perform even some incredibly distasteful task – like, say, washing his car – I would readily and happily do so. The former act of obedience is an act of purely physical assent, perhaps augmented by intellectual justification – if I don't wash his car he might yell at me. The latter, ęthough, is much more: it is a willing act driven by deep respect, even admiration. By the way, just in case you were worried, he's never asked me to wash his car.
There is another level of obedience that is, I trust, the sort of obedience intended by the authors of the old marriage service. This is the sort of obedience I want to discuss today – the sort of obedience that is driven not by fear or respect, but by love.
We are quite used at this time of the year to talking about the obedience of Mary. Driven by the power of St Luke's narrative of events leading to the birth of Christ, some hold up Mary as the model of womankind: submissive, obedient, motherly, pure. Of course such a reading of the stories of the annunciation, visitation and birth totally miss the point of this incredibly strong and forthright woman who rises above social stigma and who gives birth to her child in the most appalling of circumstances, obedient to the will of God expressed by the archangel, an obedience borne of love of God and belief in his providential call. But, anyway, all of this comes from St Luke. What we have this year is St Matthew's story of the birth – and very different it is too. In today's reading the key figure is not Mary, but Joseph. It is he, not her, who experiences the angelophany. It is he, not her, who is obedient to the angel's instructions. And that obedience is driven not by fear, nor out of mere respect but, like Mary in St Luke, out of deep religious conviction as well as out of love for his betrothed. There was a very good reason that Vatican II changed the canon of the mass to add the name of St Joseph. He has been much neglected, like much of St Matthew's version of the Jesus story, and I believe that his obedience has much to teach us still.
Over the past few weeks we have reflected upon different ways of preparing for the Christmas event. We have highlighted the little liturgies that make up our daily lives, we have confronted the challenges of repentance and prophesy. The challenge to love, however, is the greatest of all. Father Maynard, in the quote with which I finished last week's sermon, spoke of speaking the truth in love; of daring to make the difficult and prophetic statement which reads the signs of the times and propels us forward in mission. At the most basic level, the one underlying justification for mission, and only one true basis for prophetic challenge, is love. Without love, we are nothing – love of God, love of neighbour, love of self. The great commandment, which we are all called to obey, must be at all times the driving force behind our mission. Indeed, our mission call is to bring others into the love of God. It is why we repent of our sins. It is why we speak the difficult word of prophesy. To love God, or neighbour, or even self, is sometimes easy, sometime hard. How must Joseph have felt, with his betrothed being found with child? But for the love of God he obeys, and stands by her, risking disgrace for himself and for her and for her child. How do we feel, at those times in life when we find ourselves challenged by love to speak words or perform acts that upset those who mean so much to us?
In this final Advent week, as we prepare for the coming of the Lord, the challenge to obey the call to love is a challenge to imitate God's own work in sending his Son into the world. As individuals that challenge may mean getting our relationships in order, speaking to an estranged friend or relative, putting to rights something that has gone wrong during the year, making our peace with God through confession or by other means. As a parish, the challenge may be to do all that we can to present the most open, welcoming, loving face to those many folk who come here just once a year looking for truth. As a Church the challenge is similar and much more pronounced; to obey God's call to mission and to love by ending the in-fighting over things that are of secondary importance, by repenting of past sins, and by becoming a by-word for challenging love rather than unrepentant privilege and backwardness.
For all of us, though, the challenge to love is also the challenge to obey: not the blind obedience of the soldier, nor even the selective canonical obedience of the priest, but the all-embracing loving obedience of Joseph, of Mary, of the wife and, yes, of the husband, in the marriage service – an obedience born of love for God and for his people which will propel us heavenward, and show others the way to new life, new birth, through that vulnerable child in the manger at Bethlehem.
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