Pick Me Up                  

Sermon given on Advent 4, Sunday 20th December, 2009 by Canon Mark Oakley

Earlier this week I was queuing in Mayfair Post Office for about 40 minutes, as one does, and as the queue snaked round past the magazine rack, the woman behind me reached across to get a magazine and managed to bring most of the other magazines crashing down. So I began to help her pick them up and found myself holding about 6 copies of a magazine rather appropriately called "Pick Me Up". Now you don't get many visual aids during my sermons, so here it is - "Pick Me Up" magazine, 92 packed pages. And as the woman and I laughed about the title and its relevance to what we were doing, I noticed the headlines on the front of Pick Me Up. "Dave found one million pounds in the car park",  "Boiled Alive on a Mini Break: Terror in the steam room", "I castrated my rapist Dad" and, at the very top, "I breastfeed my dog to stop her barking". You can imagine my reaction then when I saw the subtitle of Pick Me Up is "Real Life has never been so good!" 

Well, if that's real life I wondered what I'm living...however, lets not be too pompous about it. Imagine what the front page would be if they had followed your's or my life this week: "Ed gets road rage on way to school", "Mark loses patience and nearly flips in Christmas packed Oxford Street", "Vera continues to refuse to speak to annoying neighbour", "Jack wonders whether to send Christmas card to horrible relative", "Peter nods off in front of X Factor repeat", "Lis gives up attempt to find lost sock". Our lives, of course, can be mundane - and they can be demanding in the pressures and problems and fears we end up having to face. The headline might have been "Tony wonders how and why he can get out of bed in the morning". Life is not for beginners. Perhaps Pick Me Up is trying to entice us out of our ordinariness and our problems by focusing on others instead?  

At the heart of our faith is an annunciation, an addressing, a communication, between God and humanity. We are being addressed. Talking to a psychotherapist friend of mine the other day I asked what he thought caused the most damage to the human psyche. He was quick to reply: "The inability to forgive ourselves for being imperfect."  Or, as Freud put it, "anxiety in human beings is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that we are fearing, or feeling, the loss of love: the love that assures us we are valued and valuable." A fear of being worthless can lie at the heart of our need to have more and more in our lives, it can lie as the root of our criticism of others, our lies and pretensions, and our ability to bash ourselves up in ways we can con ourselves into thinking are fun. We want to make our mark and we try very hard to make ourselves visible and audible in some pretty frightening ways.  

Many of us don't think we're very nice people really. We feel inferior, threatened, challenged, afraid, resentful, angry. We see that we are uncontrollably selfish, ambitious, bullying, weak, humourless, or just a mess. However, when someone loves us they tell us a different story. Beyond the initial flattery of romance, we can hear as the years go by that we are generous, compassionate, beautiful, funny, loveable. I believe that our human vocation is to live up to the story that those who love me tell, and not live down to the story I privately tell myself or that which I fear people are saying. It is a slow learning of the lesson of St John that "perfect love casts out fear". 

Christmas is the time when we remember that God is always trying to communicate to us how loveable we are, beyond our failures and regrets, and he asks us to live our lives according to what he is saying, not what others or ourselves tell us. The pages of the gospels tell a story about Jesus Christ but in doing so they reveal the story that God tells about us. It is glorious story, full of dignity rather than depravity, a story that assures us of forgiveness, and of strength to carry on the journey with refreshed hope, of one who lifts us out of dust so that we can dance with him, of a God who bursts in on us with arms wide open when we fearfully crouch behind locked doors. Faith is not telling this story. It is believing it and the uncomfortable but beautiful business of trying to live up to it. 

The 17^th century bishop Jeremy Taylor said, reflecting on today's gospel, that Mary and Elizabeth's meeting was a "collision of joys". An annunciation of love had broken into their lives and their ordinariness, making them blessed. Pictures of the annunciation, of course, often have ancient ruins in the background as if we are showing what an annunciation by God can do in constructing new foundations for a life.

 There is an old legend that when Mary was approached by the angel she was weaving - but not any old garment. She was weaving the curtain of the temple that separates the holy from the human, the sign of the unbridgeable gulf between the holy God and sinful people. She had been given the scarlet and purple thread for the curtain: but she is stopped in her tracks by the angel! Instead of the priest going into the Holy of holies, as he did once a year in the Temple, so instead, God, as it were, steps out and enters another sanctuary, another place to live - a human life. "Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb" (Donne). He takes his throne as it were on a mother's lap. The Annunciation is often painted with Mary at a well. Fresh water is being drawn as the angel speaks  We build our separations, our curtains, our defences, our protections from which we fire our ammunition. But angels interrupt us and remind us that God wants to make his home with us, that is how much we are loved. "Do not be afraid" - the phrase that is scattered amongst the nativity stories. The Christmas question: can you believe this? And if so, what will this annunciation change for you, in you, in your living and speaking and decision-making? Where does God's annunciation need to break in, in you? What does this annunciation need to stop you doing, which particular barrier-making, in order that you can look up and embrace that human dignity and worth that God gives you as his cherished and created child? Mary was eventually to say:"Yes, be it unto me according to thy word" - and the angel departed from her.