Sermon by the Rev. Dr AKM Adam

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, says the LORD of Hosts.

In Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Some of you may have seen the BBC’s first series of Agatha Christie mysteries made in the 1970’s, the ones featuring her detective couple Tommy and Tuppence. One of the episodes of that series featured a character with a religious mania who was, for a while, the suspect; Tommy thought that her theological fervour concealed the heart of a cold-blooded killer. In his words, ‘You go on muttering bits of the Bible for years, and then suddenly you go right over the line and become violent!’ (We’ll set aside, for the moment, what that implies about somebody like me.) Tommy catches the feeling of suspicion that many of us sensibly feel when somebody seems a little too religious, a little too holy. That impression increases when a religious person develops a fixation on prophecies — when they decide that a passage from Thessalonians refers to Eric Pickle, or that Isaiah was worried about Manchester United, or that John the Baptist had in view Father Nicholas. Prophecies bring out the worrisome side of Bible reading; on one hand, if we are confident that prophecies have come true, we look a bit like the sort of person whom Tommy was worried about — but on the other hand, if we don’t imagine that prophecies come true, if we suggest that the the prophets’ words go unfulfilled, it may cast doubt on the Bible. And what then does that mean about Jesus?

Prophecies make reading the Bible harder for us — it’s harder to read the Bible well, to read it sensitively, if the question of fulfilling prophecies hangs over our heads. A world that’s always looking for the answer presses us to find a particular, definite meaning to any prophetic utterance tempts

readers to identify every symbol, every action, with some specific person or event in this morning’s news. Restless souls, harried hearts reach out for some lifeline of certainty, and if they find such consolation from equating an eagle from the book of Jeremiah with David Cameron, is that so very wrong? Jeremiah may have been thinking about the Prime Minister, I can’t deny that possibility. But I think it’s more likely that the prophets were up to something less concrete, more divine than setting puzzles for their readers, puzzles that nobody whatsoever could possibly have solved before five years ago. If Jeremiah trained his mystic sight on Cameron’s destiny in government in the early twenty-first century, no one who was listening to Jeremiah face to face, no one reading his prophecies in Jesus’ own day, nobody in antiquity or the middle ages or the Renaissance or Enlightenment, no one could possibly have guessed what he was talking about until, let us say, was first elected to Parliament in 2001. This understanding of prophecy is closer to CSI than to Tommy & Tuppence; it makes the prophets themselves into something like weather forecasters, or economic pundits. They’re the sort of people who tells news presenters that unemployment will remain steady for the next three months, or that it will be cloudy and wet tomorrow (though, admittedly, it doesn’t require divine guidance to forecast the weather in Glasgow). is concrete view of prophecy turns the visionary poets of supernatural revelation into ordinary consultants and reporters; we fall prey to a

longing for secure certainty, and we trust God only to deliver on our projections about God, rather than trusting in God’s own promises.

That understanding of prophecy makes it harder to read Malachi or John the Baptist carefully, for it prompts us to look immediately way from the Bible and to ransack the notepads and sketchbooks of history, so that we can guess exactly who or what God had in mind when Malachi said ‘He is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver’. With the wisdom of retrospect, we can see that different readers have supposed that different symbols apply to different

people over the centuries — and never have they been correct in the specific, concrete way that they supposed God wanted them to be.

While it may be that the miraculous kind of way that God wants to communicate with people involves this sort of puzzle-solving and riddles, it may also be — and I think it rather more likely, more brilliant and more lovely — that when God opens the prophet’s mind to what lies behind the appearances of the world, the prophet observes patterns and probabilities, hints and signals of the way that God’s world moves, the way that human life responds to God and creation. The prophets get the idea,

they can anticipate the kind of thing that will happen soon. When the prophets talk about things to come, they recognise the fingerprints of God’s habits, the signature of God’s style. The power of prophetic oracles lies not in their definite specificity, but in their truthful illumination of God’s

characteristic love and faithfulness. Prophecy encourages us to read the Bible gently, to allow the prophets to speak to us in oblique images rather than in precisely coded messages. We hear Malachi and we hear John the Baptist better when we hear them speaking a wee bit unclearly.

The prophet is someone who catches the plot line, and who (sometimes) can predict particular details about how the story will come out — but more often, they relay to us their sense of the prevailing winds, the direction, the outline of what we may expect. If we vest our hope in the forecasters, we’re bound to be disappointed time and again. After all, the CSI investigators

draw mistaken conclusions throughout most of each episode. Even fingerprints, DNA, and eyewitness evidence don’t necessarily suffice to enable them to solve the human mysteries they confront. How much more elusive are God’s intangible, unsearchable ways? Even John the Baptist wasn't sure of who Jesus really was; he had to send his disciples from prison to ask 'Are you the one who is to come, or shall we await another?'

So if we, in turn, are reluctant to credit people who claim to know just what every bit of the Bible refers to — who is the refiner, what the fuller's soap stands for — we have the right idea. We approach the Bible with humble caution, and then we press on, go further to understand that if it’s the patterns that the prophets detect, if it’s the characteristics of God that they recognise, then ‘fulfilling the prophecies’ opens up for us the opportunity to share, in our own modest ways, in the prophets’

vocations. The prophecies are fulfilled uniquely in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberias, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod the ruler of Galilee — but they continue to be fulfilled in the sixtieth year of Queen Elizabeth II when David was Prime Minister of Great Britain and Alex was First Minister of Scotland.

The prophecies have been fulfilled among us, and they continue to be fulfilled among us, wherever we prepare the way of the Lord by enacting, displaying the characteristics by which the Spirit of God can be observed: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for prisoners, revisiting oppression and injustice. What’s more, just as the prophecies are open to even fuller fulfilment in our participation, so too our own truest identities as servants of God haven’t been fulfilled, haven’t been completed apart from our living out the world to which the prophecies point. We share in the prophecies by living in the prophets’ world, in our various ways. As long as we allow the world to

define us simply as Snug the Joiner or Andrew the Lecturer, as long as our days and nights are defined by worry, by desire for things that are passing away, to just that extent we live partial,

fractured lives. But by moving into the prophesied world of healing, of trust, of mutual concern and sharing, we move closer to the fullness of who we are in God's kingdom.

So Tommy was right in a way that he, perhaps, did not fully understand himself (just as the prophets were more right than they could comprehend); in that respect, the fictional detective himself spoke as a prophet! If we go out from here becoming bits of the Bible — healers,consoles, nourishes, peacemakers, forgivers, lovers — then suddenly we may find that we’ve gone right over the line and seen a different world, world past and yet to come and at the same time swirling around us, AMEN.