Down to preach this Sunday on the topic of the return of Christ which always seemed to be to be jammed in far too close to Christmas to be able to look at it properly. Local ministers had done what was termed a pulpit swap so 4-5 of us prepared a sermon on the same bit of the Bible and off we went. I ended up preaching the same sermon a second time at the evening candlelit Advent service - always a hit with the faithful that one. But they were gracious in allowing me to drive a coach and horses (or should that be a hybrid vehicle?) through tradition. I used the JK wedding dance clip which was such a hit over the summer. 32 million people have now seen it. And a powerpoint deck as visual soundtrack to my bit. Here's the original if you haven't seen it but the film I've chosen to embed here is what the wedding party did on network TV a few days later - its another take and I enjoy it almost as much.
The point I was trying to make was that the JK wedding dance is a disruption of what we expect to happen at a wedding. But as we wait to find out what happens we discover that it is still recognisably a wedding. We wait to find out where the groom is and of course the climax is when the camera swings and of course here comes the bride - this time dancing down the aisle on her own. So the normal rules reasssert themselves. Advent is exactly the same. There's lots of argument about when its going to happen, how its going to happen and how close to the end of the created order we are. But what matters at advent time whether we are looking forward to it and whether it shapes the way we live as it shaped the lives of Christians such as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. Which the the film does beautifully because it is all about looking forward.
The second outing of the sermon was somewhat marred by not being able to see my notes too well because the service for the most part runs in low light if not actually darkness as the candles get lit and the light slowly dawns. So no thought given to the preacher not being able to see a thing. A friend said to me afterwards that they had now heard 3 messages on the same passage all being quite different from one another. Which made me realise that we preachers were in the least best position to be able to judge if we had talked any sense or not. So I went home to watch Steve Coogan in Cock and Bull Story that comedy take one the classic novel Tristram Shandy - which takes a long time to make roughly the same point.
