Advent Sunday
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 2nd December, 2007
Some of you may have read in the papers about the tiny village of Collioure in France. It is a village usually known for its anchovies but is now known for something else and all because of the parish priest. Apparently he decided one Sunday at the mass to reveal in the pulpit all the sexual misdeeds and other various sins of the members of the congregation. It looked like a normal Sunday until, in the pulpit, he took out a long piece of paper and started to expose people as they sat there in front of him. One parishioner said afterwards: �By all accounts he knew what he was talking about. You just had to look at some of the faces in church�. Well, as I was a bit stuck as to what to say today, this gave me an idea and I prepared something a little earlier…unfortunately the rain smudged it all so, perhaps another time.
Now, the French priest has been sent off by the bishop for a period of reflection but if he goes to church during Advent he may feel rather justified as he hears the readings from the Bible set for the next four weeks. For there is a definite theme. This season of Advent is a time to wake up, to see the person you have become, the family you have become, the church we have become, the city, the world we have become. As Christians Advent teaches us to realise that just as going into your garage a lot does not make you into a car, so going to church does not necessarily make you into a person worthy of the name of Christ. This season of Advent asks of us to sort out all the straw and hay of our messy lives, in the dark, rough and dangerous stable of the world, and to make a space there for Christ to be born afresh.
There was a fuss three years ago in London when a large crib was put up in which models of David Beckham and his wife, Posh and Becks, were Mary and Joseph, and George Bush was a Wise Man. What became clear was the disappointing observation of ourselves and of how we can even make the holy a dull reflection of our fashions and preoccupations, we are so clever and yet unthinking we can make our religion just a stroking of our ego. Wake up! says Advent. Look beyond yourselves and cry out to the true God. Advent is a season lodged between two worlds, a place poised for decision – will we choose the new world opened up by this newly born child or will we choose the old world where there is no life, no birth but at least no challenge or change either?
So, welcome to Advent. Let us use it well. It is a season only too aware of human restlessness, fragility, change. It is aware that like cool china cups, the closer you get the more cracks you detect. We are fragmented people, full of reverence and rebellion, full of devotion and then a sense of dereliction. We are incomplete. Advent knows all this and at its heart is the longing, the yearning for what is eternal, holy, good and beautiful, the sacred source and stream of life and love. You hear this in the Advent antiphons crying out: “O Wisdom�, “O Desire of nations�, “O Dayspring� come, come to us and touch us into life. It is a season in the vocative, aware of our clutter, aware of our deepest longing. It is a season in purple, aware that if love is to break in there needs to be self-disclosure and a resuscitation of our first love of God. It is a season pregnant with God, God pushing our contours, closer to us than we ever dream.
And because Advent is therefore a season of passion and desire it is, of course, a season of poetry. We know that we never find the words for passion, we dive into the depths of metaphor, intimation, art and non-verbal truth telling. So, it is very difficult being a literalist in Advent. The words that try and capture both our confusion and God´s reality splinter as they work to hold them both. And that reality of God, say the gospel readings of Advent, should terrify us. Not because God is fierce and out to get us like some zealous traffic warden, no, not because he is vindictive but because he is real. Advent is provocative, hard in its demand: are you really ready to meet this God that is coming? In the City of London between 1400 and 1560 it was forbidden to wear masks in the street at Christmastime. It was too easy to hide and mug people on their way to parties. Well, it is true: our masks can eventually eat into our faces and it is difficult to tell the face from the shield. Advent dares to wonder what life might be like without them.
Advent, finally, is a season of promise and expectation. This journey has a purpose, has an end. And on the way, this world is full of signs and windows onto the eternal God, hints and guesses, but we will never possess God fully for our longing is the heartbeat of faith. If our longing for him goes so does our relationship with him. “Such a fast God�, writes RS Thomas, “always before us and leaving as we arrive�. In another image of his, we constantly place our hands in the burrow to find this elusive God, not finding him where we want him but able to feel the warmth of where he has been, before moving on and enticing us to follow. God, said the mystic, Meister Eckhart, “is like a person hlding in the dark who clears his throat and so gives himself away�.
Story of Charles Oakley: Hills of the North (sung soon). I´ll give him the last word:
Isles of the southern seas, sing to the listening earth,
Carry on every breeze hope of a world´s new birth:
In Christ shall all be made anew
His word his sure, his promise true.
May that world begin in us this Advent.
