Sermon For Advent Sunday 2014
Canon Nicholas Jepson-Biddle, Precentor
It is a happy coincidence that winter and the season of Advent coincide. The Benedictine nun and spiritual writer Joan Chittister writes that there are few ways of beginning Advent better than with a fall of snow. Undoubtedly for two or three days it is a beautiful sight, but in addition, there is also a sense in which it both obscures and focusses; covering and accentuating different features of a familiar landscape. Of course, quite apart from making us see things differently, snow also forces us to slow down physically, impeding normal life.
The other thing that snow does, and that Advent encourages us to do, is to wait. I don’t mean planning for and anticipating Christmas. I mean waiting. Not looking forward, not imagining what is to come, but just waiting. To précis T.S.Eliot, we must wait without hope and love, because we would hope in and love the wrong things: but, as he goes on to suggest, we might find faith and love in the waiting.
Waiting, unfortunately is not in the vocabulary of twenty first century life. It is to be avoided; it is the mark of poor service; of life-stopping inconvenience; of the surrendering of control. And as if waiting were not bad enough, to wait for nothing has about it the air of the ridiculous.
This morning’s reading from the prophecy of Isaiah is at least 2700 years old, it could not be described as smacking of modernity and yet it describes an eternal human condition. For those to whom Isaiah prophesied, their experience was of a world empty of God, which was why they sinned. They longed for a God who would make his presence felt and do something. O that you would tear the heavens and come down, is not a polite request, but it does suggest that it might be God alone who can speak to human anxiety about its being and not being.
The Jesus of this morning’s gospel is also distant. The anxiety of those who heard him is palpable. Suffering and darkness, star-fall and the judgement of one referred to as the Son of man will not have eased worry, any more than Jesus’ final command, Keep awake.
One of my Christmas season reads this year is W. H Auden’s long poem subtitled A Christmas Oratorio and entitled For the time being. Its title speaks volumes; its impermanence and its contingence, feed anxiety. In part one, which explores Advent, Auden describes:
Darkness and snow descending on all personality
and humanity as
afraid of pain but more afraid of silence. This is the abomination. This is the wrath of God.
Well, it is easy to see why we have focussed Advent on preparing for Christmas isn’t it? At Christmas, we are more easily focussed on the familiar story of Jesus and the familiar rituals that ease us through what is theologically at least, a cosmic re-creation. In Advent, the voices are various, often hysterical; possibly unhinged; with bitty, unconnected narratives, which conspire to underline a wretched loneliness we would rather not admit.
Some years ago, when I was a Vicar in Putney, at 10 o’clock in the morning on Christmas Eve, the phone rang. There is no such thing as a ‘good’ phone call on Christmas Eve in a vicarage.
The call came for Roehampton Hospital’s secure unit, asking if I might have time to visit a fourteen year old girl, Hannah. Hannah had been sectioned, and because of her mental illness, would not see her family at all over Christmas. She was on only a little medication. She had asked to see a vicar.
Of course I went, and arrived at 2 in the afternoon, and was shown into a small day room in the secure unit. There in the corner sat a girl, in a dressing gown and over-size slippers, looking if anything, younger than her years. She smiled uncertainly, but showed no rush to speak. I sat down next to her, and was ‘beheld.’
Hannah continued to smile in her way, and said nothing. In my anxiety to fill the void with something that would be better than nothing, I rehearsed the rest of my day, the righteous busy-ness of a clerical Christmas Eve. She showed some interest, nodding and smiling as I spoke. Eventually, when my small talk had run dry, I said to her, ‘Hannah, what can I do for you?’ ‘Nothing,’ she replied, ‘just wait with me’.
She picked up my hand and put it on the side of her chair and then placed her hand on mine. We sat there for an hour, waiting, but waiting for nothing. Strange how an hour I couldn’t really afford became one that is unrepeatable in what it revealed of God and those for whom he came.
Here was a girl in an early mid-winter, the loneliness of mental illness, isolated and unbeheld. Around her, the accoutrements of normality; a large television set, tinsel and the blare of Christmas tunes from an unseen radio - and a locked door. Her existence in that place, parodied the life you and I call our own: meal times, bed times. rituals and treats, but in a sense, hers was a life lived because it was all about the waiting, and the realisation that any one story is only ever part of another story, indeed of all stories.
Towards the end of the Advent section of his poem For the Time Being, W. H. Auden speaks of the
magic secret of how to extemporise life.
The magic secret of how to extemporise life. I suppose that is Advent living. The sort of focusthat helps me to imagine what I would be like if I was responsive without being reactive. Like waiting, it adjures me to live in the present: like Hannah, it encourages me to suffer things to be in a way that will not turn my faith into escapism.
Suffering things to be is what causes us to grow in the likeness of Christ. It is what exposes us to riches of our God-given humanity, and uncomfortably perhaps, unveils for us, something of the cost of our freedom.
It may seem like a harsh winter that asks you to give up the hope of controlling anything; that asks you to accept that you will never have the knowledge you crave; that asks you to stop shrugging off your status as sojourner in a strange land.It is these very human anxieties, these half stories, carried through the darknessof Advent that we will lay at the crib of a God whose waits, who waitsto take them all from you in tiny hands.
Canon Nicholas Jepson-Biddle
Advent Sunday 2014