Sermon at St John the Evangelist on Advent Sunday, 3.12.17
‘Half, or more than half, my life is spent
In waiting: waiting for the day to come
When dawn spills laughter’s animated sun
Across the rim of God into my tent.
In my other clock, sin, I put off
Until I’m ready, which I never seem
To be, the seizing day, the kingdom dream
Come true. My head has been too long in the trough.’
Advent, which begins today, is full of poetry and symbol. Words and images and music and drama which speakto the depths of the heart – and to the reality (beyond all our struggle) of God coming among us. Yes, Advent is filled with yearning and longing and expectation, as well as lament for the state of our world; and somehow it’s poetry and sign and symbol that move us into a different place, where we can begin to acknowledge our need, and be opened afresh to the mystery of God.
‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down (prays Isaiah) so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil.’
‘Come, thou long expected Jesus,
Born to set thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
Let us find our rest in thee.’
There is a power and a passion and an elemental trust in God, in these Advent hymns and readings, which speaks into our hearts, like water falls onto parched land; or air animating tired lungs; or love rekindling weary hearts. And in all of this, as we venture into Advent, acknowledging both (with St Paul) the enduring grace and love which is ours in Christ, and (with the prophets) the reality of life not yet being as it should be, we find a common theme, namely the invitation to patience – to waiting – to watching, for the God who will come to us again, and refresh and restore dried up hearts and frustrated wills. As Mark has Jesus say to us, at the end of that dramatic and apocalyptic lesson from our Gospel, ‘what I say to you, I say to all: Keep awake!’ In the words, be patience, for God is still working, and Christ (the Son of Man) will one day return, at an unexpected hour.
So I want, today, to invite you all on a journey, a journey of the heart, a journey of waiting; and I want to suggest, this morning, that this journey (of Advent) involves daring to enter a different kind of landscape. A terrain which we call, in Biblical terms, ‘the wilderness’. An inner landscape, akin to the great Biblical deserts of Moses and Elijah and John the Baptist; a landscape of prayer – of daring to look and listen and wait on God, for reasons which we will begin to explore, in this first of our four Advent sermons on prayer. A landscape which will be nourished, not only by our prayer, but especially by our silences, our listening and engaging with the great poetry and music and symbolic spaces of this holy season. Which is why we are offering, this week, an Advent School of Prayer, and an Advent Quiet Morning, as well as our Advent Carol service tonight, and our special services throughout this season.
As an Advent prayer from Leicester Dioceseputs it:
O pilgrim God
Come with us on our journey
Come with your saints and prophets and angels
Come with bread and wine and stories
Come be our light, our hope, our healing
Come lead us safely home.
So my question is, this morning, as we begin our Advent journey and as we enter the wilderness of waiting, why wait? Why, in a culture so conditioned to instantaneous pleasure and reward (for those that can afford it), spend four weeks of waiting? Why not enjoy the festival of Christmas, with all its glitz and glamour, now? And this takes us to the heart of the matter.
Advent reminds us of something profound about our human condition and about the way that faith and prayer works. It reminds us that there are times when we suffer, when we struggle and feel lost – and when God, as a result, feels distant from us... And yet God is never distant, he is never absent, he is always with us, he always comes to us, as he came in the child Jesus, born of Mary, all those years ago.
But the point is – and this is why Advent is so important and necessary – that we have to keep going, even when we don’t feel God’s presence; we have to journey, to enter seasons of stripping back to life’s bare essentials; we have to examine our hearts, daring to trust, in order to rediscover God’s presence, and be filled afresh with his love. We need to trust the steady undertow of God’s Spirit at the root of our lives; his saving presence and transforming work, as we dare to co-operate with him. As the poet W H Auden so helpfully put it, in his poem ‘In Memory of W B Yeats’
In the desert of the heart let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise.
In other words, prayer is about staying with God, even when we don’t sense his presence. It’s about daring to enter that stark inner wilderness – without instant gratification – in order to journey, with the patriarchs of old, and (over time) rediscover what really matters. Yes, it’s about daring to create an inner space (of prayer, and silence, and searching) – apart from our usual compulsions - in order to meet our heart’s desire. And it’s only if we do that, following the journey traversed by those men and women or old, represented by our Advent candles, that we will be made ready to greet Christ, afresh at Christmas.
So I invite you, this Advent, to take the opportunity to pray in new ways; to discover, even in the midst of your struggles or pain, that prayer really works; that in spending time with God, bringing your needs and your yearnings to him, you will (over time) bear abundant fruit. That when you don’t feel God’s presence, this isn’t a cause for concern or panic, rather you are being tested, and encouraged to journey into depth, to find (over time) the one foundation and rock that really matter: God’s love, his presence, his grace, daily at work in you, even when you can’t see it – like a seed, buried deep within the winter soil, putting out hidden shoots.
+Let me end with a story, a light-hearted story, which illustrates the point I am making, about prayer, about daring to trust God, about journeying into the wilderness – of watching and waiting for the coming of Christ:
“It is important to accept one’s passions, and not to lose one’s enthusiasm for conquests. They are part of life, and bring joy to all who participate in them. The [pilgrim] never loses sight of what endures, nor of the bonds forged over time. He knows how to distinguish between the transient and the enduring.
There comes a moment, however, when his passions suddenly disappear. Despite all his knowledge, he allows himself to be overwhelmed by despair: from one moment to the next, his faith is not what it was, things do not happen as he dreamed they would, tragedies occur in unfair and unexpected ways, and he begins to believe that his prayers are not being heeded. He continues to pray and attend religious services, but he cannot deceive himself; his heart does not respond as it once did, and the words seem meaningless.
At such a moment, there is only one possible path to follow: keep practising. Say your prayers out of duty or fear, or for some other reason, but keep praying. Keep on, even if it all seems in vain.
The angel in charge of receiving your words, and who is also responsible for the joy of faith, had wandered off somewhere. However, he will soon be back and will only know where to find you if he or she hears a prayer or a request from your lips.
According to legend, after an exhausting morning session of prayer in the monastery, the novice asked the abbot if prayers brought God closer to mankind. ‘I’m going to reply with another question,’ said the abbot. ‘Will all the prayers you say make the sun rise tomorrow?’ ‘Of course not! The sun rises in obedience to a universal law.’ ‘Well, there’s the answer to your question. God is close to us regardless of how much we pray.’ The novice was shocked. ‘Are you saying that our prayers are useless?’ ‘Absolutely not’ the abbot replied, ‘If you don’t wake up early enough, you will never get to see the sunrise... And although God is always close, if you don’t pray, you will never glimpse His presence.’”