29 Nov 2009 - "What does Advent as a season mean to you?"

Diane Whittaker - St Mary's
Jeremiah 33: 14-16
1 Thessalonians 3: 9-end
Luke 21: 25-36

Is it a time of frenzied activity as you prepare for Christmas, a time when you try – as in Lent to add some reflection to your daily life, or is it a complete mystery to you why we have this season at all?

Advent is such a strange season that its tempting to try to ignore it all together and just focus on Christmas – only a few weeks away now, but a closer look at the two great themes of Advent may just be what we all need as we begin another Christian year.

In Advent we look towards the coming of the Christ child – remembering the events of 2000 years ago. We also look towards the second coming – the end times. How can we hold these two themes in tension? If we admit the truth, how can we even deal with the second? It’s not too difficult to go through Advent looking towards Christmas – many of the books published to aid us in reflection through Advent cover this theme more than adequately – including telling us to slow down and not be so frenzied in our preparations for the great day – the meaning is in the waiting!

But - how do we go through Advent looking towards the promised return of Jesus in glory – the theme of our readings for today? That theme is far more difficult to tackle – the imagery is so outrageous. How can we even contemplate Jesus breaking into this world on clouds of glory – that sort of thing just doesn’t happen in our experience?  

Reading the commentaries on the Luke passage highlights the problems people have with this sort of apocalyptic material. It is possible to put the passage into the context of Jesus’ prophecy as to the fall of Jerusalem – and one commentator claimed that Jesus’ coming in glory denotes that God showed via the destruction of the Temple that Jesus was indeed his chosen Messiah – thus the survival of the Christian church reveals the coming of Christ. This explanation neatly ignores the fact that the Jewish faith survived the destruction of the Temple also!

Another school of thought is that Jesus came again at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell upon the early Christian church so all of the wild language of the apocalypse has already been fulfilled – indeed he did come into the lives of his followers through the presence of the Holy Spirit and still does today, but does this really complete the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth? If that is the case, why is there still evil, sin, suffering and death in the world? Not quite the Kingdom of God that we were promised in the prophesies recorded in the bible! We only need to look around us to see that by no means has God’s kingdom come on earth yet!

So – we are still waiting for the final completion of God’s Kingdom – what ever form that will take. There are many theories as to when and how this will happen, but to my mind, the important thing about this great theme of waiting for the second coming is not its timing or its nature, but what it teaches about the way we wait.
When Martin Luther was asked how to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ he advised: "We are to believe and live and love and work as though Jesus Christ died yesterday, rose today, and is coming tomorrow."
We can use this period of Advent to remind ourselves that our waiting needs to be active and attentive – that we shouldn’t be so busy in the affairs of the world that we forget to look to our walk of faith today and every day.

One thing we do tend to do when we come close to great seasons such as Christmas is focus so much on plans for the future – for Christmas day itself that we forget to live each day in the present as followers of Christ.

Alternatively we take the attitude that there is plenty of time – and suddenly find ourselves against the event totally unprepared!

I like Paula Gooder’s approach to Advent - in her Advent book “The Meaning is in the waiting” she writes:

Advent, then, calls us into a state of active waiting: a state that recognizes and embraces the glimmers of God’s presence in the world; that recalls and celebrates God’s historic yet ever-present actions and speaks the truth about the almost-but-not quite nature of Christian living, which yearns for but cannot quite achieve divine perfection. Most of all Advent summons us to the present moment, to a still, yet active, a tranquil yet steadfast commitment to the life we live now. It is this to which Advent beckons us, and without it our Christian journey is impoverished.

The meaning is in the waiting….

Kneeling
by R. S. Thomas

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

Meditation on waiting…..