Advent 1 2022

 

Advent 1 2022

 

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and, as I am sure you know, Advent means “coming”- from the Latin ‘adventus’. What is coming? Christmas, of course. Baby Jesus. Santa Claus. Presents. Tinsel. Carol singing – possibly a bit too much, in my case. Turkey, if bird flu hasn’t wiped them all out. There may also be indigestion coming, and an extra inch or two on the waistline too. Sadly, for many the anxiety of how they will pay for it all, is coming or the sadness of knowing that they can’t. We may be looking forward with excitement or dread, but we know, more or less, how it will pan out.

 

But our Advent hymns remind us that there is more to this season than simply getting ready to hear the story of the coming of a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. “Lo, he comes with clouds descending,” we’ll sing later. This Christ is “robed in dreadful majesty”, not wrapped in swaddling bands. In our first hymn, “Hills of the North, rejoice” we travelled round all four points of the compass, and heard that “The God whom you have longed to know, in Christ draws near, and calls you now”. Advent isn’t just about the Christ who came two thousand years ago, but also about the Christ who comes to us in the present and the future. Are we ready for him?

 

We’re probably comfortable with the Christmas story. We know how it turns out. There may be no room at the inn, but we know the child will at least have a manger to lie in. Danger my threaten, from kings and emperors, but we know the child will survive. Shepherds will be suitably amazed. Magi will manage, finally, to find the child, and adore him. We know that all will turn out ok, despite the dangers and set backs.

 

But what about now? Where is God now? And where will God be in what is to come? That’s the bit we’re not so sure about, but it’s the bit that matters most, because we can only live in the present and the future. The past is gone – it’s good to look back at and learn from it, but today and tomorrow are the only things we can truly engage with, the only things we can change,

 

The imagery of our Advent hymns and readings deliberately invites us to ask those more disturbing questions. They talk about a second coming, something that may sound uncomfortable to the modern mind, making us think about those Medieval images of the Day of Judgement, with the saved rising up to heaven and the damned going down to hell, or of street preachers proclaiming that the “end is nigh”. People have taken literally the idea that “two will be in a field, one will be taken and one left behind”, and tried to scare people into the kingdom – a tactic that rarely works – by asking what it would be like to be the one “left behind”, but it seems to me that this misses the point.  

 

The Bible was largely written by and for people who were suffering, people who were oppressed, little people in a world where big people ruled, people on the margins whose lives were nothing to the people at the centre. The message of the second coming of Jesus, the Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgement, was one of hope for them, not of fear. It told them that things wouldn’t always be as they were now.  The Book of Revelation, much beloved by conspiracy theorist, who can find almost anything in it they want, is really a message to the persecuted Christians of its time, telling them that Rome wouldn’t rule forever, any more than the ancient power of Babylon, which had once oppressed the people of Israel had. To those who first heard that message, it said that God hadn’t given up on them, and he never would. African-American slaves loved these writings too, and they inspired many of their spirituals, because they heard in them the message that, whatever happened – in life and in death - God had not forgotten them. For us too, the message of Advent is that God has a habit of turning up when we least expect him, bringing love and life and new beginnings into situations that seem hopeless to us. “The night is far gone; the day is near” says Paul.  The message of Advent is a message of hope, rooted in our relationship with a God who loves all that he has made.

 

But if we are going to find that hope, we need first to have the courage to open our eyes, to wake up. “Now is the moment to wake out of sleep,” said Paul. When times are tough, we are all tempted to close our eyes, to hunker down and hope they will all go away, to deny the problems exist.

 

Whether it’s climate change deniers, Covid deniers, or the really odd idea that disasters like the Manchester Arena bombing or the Sandy Hook shootings didn’t happen and were staged by crisis actors, there are always people ready to believe that bad things really aren’t happening, that troubles have just been made up for some strange reason. But even if we don’t believe that, we can all find ourselves minimising or avoiding situations we would rather not think about. We may not be climate change deniers, but often we carry on regardless, not making the changes we need to, because it all just feels too dark and scary to contemplate.  Like the people Jesus talks about who were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day Noah entered the ark” we behave as if its no big deal.

 

Why? I think it’s usually because we feel powerless and hopeless. It’s too big; we’re too small – so the best thing is to ignore it. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”.

 

But Christian faith tells us that while we are often powerless, we always have hope, not in ourselves, but in God – the God who came to us in Jesus, the God who still comes to us, and will never leave us, whether we live or die, succeed or fail. It doesn’t mean that nothing bad will happen, but it does mean that whatever happens we will still be eternally loved, and that can give us the strength to keep loving, to keep living our lives “honourably, as in the day” as St Paul puts it. We may not always see the fruit of our efforts in our own lifetimes, but love and goodness are never wasted, never pointless.

 

The American poet, Emily Dickinson, put it well in her poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, which compares hope to a bird that sings through the night, through the storms. It sings, she says, not because of anything we do, but simply because that is its nature, and so it is unstoppable.

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

 

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

 

In our dark and scary world, Advent, like that bird, sings to us of the love of God, of the worth and belovedness of all his creation, and it calls to us to look up and discover the hope that is rooted in God, who comes to us, today and tomorrow and forever.

Amen

Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday 2022

Psalm 85, Isaiah 61.1-4, Luke 21.6-19

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired, and I don’t suppose I am alone in that.  We’ve staggered through two and a half years of the Covid pandemic and its knock-on effects, the uncertainty, the isolation, the disruption to education, health care, jobs, community life. We’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with many fearing the rising prices,. There has been political turmoil at home, with government ministers and even prime ministers coming and going at what feels like dizzying speed. And, of course, this spring war broke out on European soil as Russia invaded Ukraine. It looks as if it could drag on for a long time, bringing sorrow and devastation to the Ukrainian people – and also many in Russia who don’t want this war too – and displacing many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from their homes. It is destabilising Eastern Europe, and reviving the fears of nuclear war which so many of us grew up with. The Russian invasion of Ukraine affects those beyond its borders in other ways too, causing grain shortages and price rises around the world. And on top of all that, we are already seeing the consequences of climate change, which is fuelling some of the conflicts happening now, and could increasingly do so in years to come, as people compete for ever more scarce fertile land and water.

This Remembrance Sunday we aren’t just remembering wars past; our minds are full of wars present, and possibly future too.

If we’re tired, it’s no wonder. We wouldn’t be human if we weren’t. It is all too much for us to cope with. But we wouldn’t be the first to feel like this.

We got used to hearing the word “unprecedented” in the early days of the pandemic, but the truth is that there’s nothing really new under the sun. Throughout human history, people have faced things that were unprecedented to them; wars and natural disasters, hardship and illness, things that seem to strike out of the blue ripping away life, health and security. It’s just that until they hit us, we don’t really understand what they feel like. We see people suffering on our television screens, but they are a long way away. We read about them in our history books, but they are a long time ago. When it happens to us, though, we discover we aren’t as strong and self-sufficient as we thought we were. In the words of Stevie Smith’s poem, we are “much further out than we thought, and not waving, but drowning.”

The people who wrote the Bible passages we heard today were people like us. The challenges they faced felt unprecedented to them. Most of the Bible was written by people who lived under the cloud of war, persecution and oppression. The Jewish Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, were largely drawn together either during or just after a long period of exile, when Jerusalem had been destroyed, and its people deported to Babylon.  It was devastating; everything they knew was wiped away, just as it must have felt this year to Ukrainian refugees, just as it does to refugees who come to this country from other places too.

And in our second reading today, Jesus warns about persecution his followers will face from often fickle and frankly insane Roman Emperors, of families betraying each other, of hatred and destruction.

Sometimes people think of the Bible as an old, dusty book, irrelevant to modern life, but it’s the testimony of people like us who lived in times like ours, people who knew that their world was in a mess, who knew “the devastations of many generations”, as Isaiah put it, the “wars and rumours of wars” which Jesus speaks of. 

Our Biblical ancestors were frightened. They had no idea what to do next. They were exhausted by the trials of life, too, by the ever-present violence, just as we are. They felt as if they were living at the end of the world.

But in the readings we heard today they tell us that, despite all of that, we can find hope, if our eyes are open to it. It depends, according to them, on learning to draw on strength beyond our own strength, trusting that what we see is not necessarily all there is to see, that suffering and war don’t have to have the last word. 

They found that strength and vision in God. ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, says Isaiah, because he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,  to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners…’ There will be garlands instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning. Just because something looks hopeless doesn’t mean it is hopeless. Jesus read these same words to a rather shocked crowd in his local synagogue at the start of his ministry, applying them to himself. His audience was scandalised – who did he think he was. But those who encountered him found that this was just what he did do. People oppressed by poverty and discrimination, as well as by the occupying forces of Rome – found liberty and dignity in him. Broken hearts were bound up, people were set free. People found hope that broke through their despair and life that burst from the graveyards where their dreams were buried.  And so do many who follow Christ today. They find new life, new birth in the midst of death.

Sometimes that new life emerges in the stillness of prayer, but it can also be discovered through the love of others. And we in our turn, can be good news to them – channels of God’s peace, as the song puts it – inspired to play our part in our community, doing the little things that make life better for others – the kind word, the small act of care, the willingness to take on responsibility for things that might seem dull or trivial, but need to be done if our community is to thrive.

It's ok to be tired, and its ok to say we are, to admit that we have no magic wand, that we can’t solve the world’s problems, that we have no grand answers. In fact, if we can’t admit that, we won’t get far at all. It’s only when we know our hands are empty that God can fill them. The Bible calls us to stretch out those empty hands, to lift up our heads, to open our eyes, and look for the love and kindness which is, in reality, just as real and present as the hatred and sorrow are.  

In a moment, the choir are going to sing a setting by Philip of some words written by Amy Carmichael, who worked in India in the early twentieth century, among the poorest of the poor. She often felt despair, just as we may do when we see the devastation of war, still, again, tearing lives apart in our world. She wrote of her despair, but also of her trust that God heard her. That was what gave her the peace she needed, that gave her strength to go on.

On this Remembrance Sunday, God invites us to bring our despair and our tiredness to him, so that we can find his peace within our turmoil, the peace that passes understanding, that comes from knowing that in life and in death, he is with us and will never forsake us. Amen