Grays InnAdvent Sunday 2014
Romans 13: 8-12 & Luke 1: 67–79
They say that Oliver Cromwell tried to ban Christmas. Cromwell is not usually my favourite person, but I increasingly feel that he may have had a point. To be fair, it wasn’t so much Cromwell as the “Godly Party” in Parliament which clamped down on the celebration of Christmas in the 1640’s, but certainly when he became Lord Protector in December 1653 he supported the enforcement of the existing measures.
The Puritans disliked Christmas because of the high church practices which went on inside church, and the often excessive feasting and drunkenness which went on outside. I wouldn’t normally side with them, being myself rather fond of both catholic liturgy and indeed party-going, but the more Christmas becomes an annual tribute to excessive consumerism and extravagance, the more sickening I find it. Do we really need Monty the Penguin to tell us to spend more in John Lewis? Can Sainsbury’s really justify using the tragic events of the First World War to sell more Christmas chocolate?
Today is Advent Sunday, now squashed between the marketing festivals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year even the Ann Summers chain of shops have an Advent calendar, although I’m sure none of us know what they actually sell! But the season of Advent comes not as an invitation to pre-empt Christmas, or to spend more money preparing for it, but to help us get Christmas into proper perspective. To reverse the old BarclayCard advert, Advent puts the waiting into wanting.
In his poem, Christmas (*), John Betjeman hears “the bells of waiting Advent ring”. It is, like most of Betjeman’s work, nostalgic and rueful, with a touch of gentle satire. But he raises the fundamental question about Christmas: is it true?
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
Advent invites us to face the ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose, judgement and liberation. Advent is about what will come – where and how will all of this end? – but for an answer it points us back to the one who has come, as a baby, born to a single mother in the outhouse of an pub in Roman-occupied Palestine two thousand years ago. And it is an amazing claim:
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
All religions seek to answer the ultimate questions about the purpose and end of life. They all offer two things. The first is comfort: you are not alone, and there is a hope which goes beyond wishful thinking. And the second is challenge, for faith calls us to change ourselves, and to seek to change the world.
But the Christian Faith goes much further. It claims that God is not some heavenly entity far away, whom we may occasionally glimpse and feel, and to whom we may escape through spiritual exercises now and perhaps fully when we die. It claims – and this is blasphemous to some other religions – that this God loved us so much that he became a human person, sharing our life, entering into our suffering, and that he saw it through even to the point of dying with us and for us.
This is earth-shattering stuff. When John the Baptist was born, his father Zachariah began to see it, as we heard in the Gospel. John would be the herald of the One who is to come. Jesus would bring salvation and forgiveness of sins, and a whole new world:
By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
The season of Advent causes us to stop and consider again what all this means. It is, like all of the Gospel, both Personal and – if you will permit the word - Political.
Personally, in a culture dominated by the thrust to achieve and the need for success, what might it mean to accept our weakness and vulnerability, seeing that the God who became totally vulnerable for us – born as a baby, dying as a criminal – offers us his forgiveness and friendship.
And Politically, in a world torn apart by the abuse of power, what might it mean to give priority to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to allow God to guide our feet into the way of peace, to rescue Christmas from material excess to the celebration of life and love?
So maybe if we got Advent right, we might get Christmas right too.
Somewhere, amongst the partying and present-giving, all of which – don’t get me wrong - have their place, we might discover again its true meaning.
So is it true? For if it is….
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
Betjemen takes us to the fundamental meaning of Christmas, and also to this Eucharist which we celebrate this morning
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
*The whole poem can be found at
It is not printed here on the website for copyright reasons.