Waiting itself

I’d like to pick up the idea of waiting as something of value in itself — not waiting for something, or waiting as a form of “deferred gratification”.

I remember an article by Stephen Sykes where he referred to St John’s gospel as coming from “the community around John” and forming part of “the long history of God’s patience with God’s people”. That’s a long way from concrete certainty, but catches something of the other side — the God not understood — and holds a space for a messiness that we do well not to try to hide from.

The Fourth Lateran Council, writing against a tendency to be too certain produced a comment that “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them”. That’s an elaborate way of saying that people might find it helpful to talk of God as “father”, but we need to not push it too far — that’s an understanding that’s helpful to us, thinking with our human limitedness, but if that tipped over into suggesting that God is “only” father, we’d be missing something. There’s always a “beyondness”, something more than the words hold.

On Tuesday, Fleur Houston quoted a phrase from the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”. That document is an important part of our history, but that sentence is ambiguous because it doesn’t try to restrict what we mean by God. Fleur rightly pointed out that, in today’s world, the absence of inclusive language in that sentence grates: for all their attempt to not restrict God, our forebears still managed to fall into the trap of using language that turned out to be too restrictive.

That might offer a way of thinking about the Trinity — three different ways of thinking that hold a space for being open to a God that’s always a little more than we understand.

We also need to be able to keep God at a safe-enough distance. None of us would survive if our lives were turned upside down by profound religious experiences too often. I remember once saying to someone on retreat that one of the functions of religion is to keep God at a safe-enough distance. Surprised, he asked for an example. He was a Roman Catholic priest, used to saying Mass daily, and I pointed to the opening words “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” and suggested that, if anyone took that at its full depth it would be too much — who is any of us to claim that — but somehow the familiarity tames the sentence and makes it bearable.

This week we’ve spoken quite a lot about Sarah and Elizabeth — two women described as “barren” who become miraculously pregnant, as if the thing that mattered — was being waited for — was the pregnancy. But that understates the value of what went before, as if all that mattered was pregnancy. Perhaps there’s something coded in the text about miraculous births. Perhaps there’s something about the wisdom of the one who’s waited. When Mary went to see Elizabeth, might this have been a frightened pregnant teenager going to see someone whose depth and wisdom she trusted?

To wait for something is to know it

I think of a close friend who lives in Singapore. Distance means we meet rarely. But he’s in my mind. I’m living with what people sometimes call “the presence of an absence”: the waiting says a great deal about the friendship.

There’s something to be learned from Judaism here. There’s the idea that one day the Messiah will come — there’s a presence in the waiting. Some sources frame this as the Messiah will come if the whole Israel keep just one Sabbath correctly — so what happens Sabbath by Sabbath is linked to the waiting. There’s also something outside time in the way the Law is engaged with — with the idea that the aural tradition of interpretation was given to Moses on Sinai, so they’re engaging with something present and past — like the words “My father was a wandering Aramean” at Passover, connecting each Passover with the first one. That collapsing of time gives a different light on waiting — a sense of the thing waited for being present. Some Christians tend to be dismissive of Judaism, but I suggest the religion of Jesus has a lot to teach us.

There’s a problem if things are too certain. I remember an occasion where some words about communion tripped off my tongue: “this is a table where all are guests, who is one guest to exclude another”. Someone from another tradition disagreed. In the heat of the moment his argument ended with “but this is ours”… He was rattled and it seemed indelicate to push the point — but the obvious response would have been “if it’s yours, is it also Christ’s?” From where I’m standing there has to be space for the unknown, for what’s outside what we expect, rather than putting a limit on God.

In retreat-giving I find that some people talk as if there’s a constant and profound experience of God, but others talk as if it’s much less than that. I’ve come to suspect that this is often the opposite of what it sounds like: that those talking as if it is “much less” know what a profound experience of God is like, and know when “this is not the time” where those who talk as if it’s always there might actually be in the foothills and have yet to find the mountains. I suspect that someone who has a profound experience of God once a year will find themselves described as a spiritual giant, but spend 264 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes of the year knowing “this is not the minute where it happens”.

Scripture

Flipping this into a biblical context, there’s an ever-present risk of being too certain — of jumping too quickly to an “understanding”. One example is what’s said about resurrection. The actual biblical evidence that people believed in this is that we have a New Testament at all: the disciples didn’t slink away at the end of Good Friday concluding it had all been a mistake. The bit we often miss when we hear the resurrection narratives at Easter is that they are all stories of people not believing and then being surprised. Clinging to them too tightly doesn’t leave room for surprise. I could say something similar about the Psalms — there’s a richness on offer if it’s possible to hear them after the event as the words of people who’ve been through tough times.

I’m also thinking of John Bradbury’s sermon when Nigel Uden was inducted in Cambridge, in December 2010. John drew a parallel with John the Baptist — of a minister as one who points to Christ, not as one who claims to stand in his place.

Kataphatic and apophatic approaches

The words just mean “with images” and “without images” but writers on spirituality tend to broaden them a little to think about prayer that starts with images, words, texts, ideas etc and prayer that starts with emptiness. The distinction’s a little artificial — no prayer is ever entirely at one extreme — but its a helpful reminder because the apophatic is often a little out of sight. Sometimes people feel the need to stay close to things to pray with, or find the apparent emptiness of the apophatic to be unsettling. That’s been with us for a long time. One of the classic texts is the fourteenth-century Cloud of unknowing which is anonymous. A few hints in the text imply he was a priest in the English midlands, but there’s a theory that he hid his identity to avoid getting into trouble. In our own time, I wonder how many of the people who turn from Christianity to Buddhism are actually just getting in touch with the apophatic strain that’s in both. I remember a conversation with a “radical” theologian who was talking about what Christianity has to learn from Buddhism and found myself thinking that the “Buddhism” he described was sounding rather like another English mystic, Julian of Norwich.

This approach is typically to sit for a while and use something to settle the mind — perhaps a few words, repeated over and over, or observing one’s breath — and let go of thoughts that come along. It often feels like clearing a space for something. In a sense it is waiting, without knowing what one is waiting for.

This can sound like an advanced way of praying, but I remember introducing someone to the idea of a breathing meditation, who began our next conversation saying “I’ve been breathing”. Tongue in cheek, I replied “I’m glad to hear it”. As we both laughed, it struck me that this is a method of prayer available from our first breath to our last — but we don’t always notice.

But I’ve also known a surprising number of people for whom this is their default method of prayer and whose experience has been marked by sexual trauma. These are people for whom the analogy of prayer and a close personal relationship, as if with another human being, is not so straightforward, and another way has come along. That’s a reminder for all of us that there are more ways than we are used to.

The burning bush (Exodus 3) almost a Reformed emblem. It’s over the gate at Westminster College and on the Church of Scotland’s logo. It’s a story of Moses being taken by surprise — or confronted by God in a way he’d not expected. But it too is a story starting in emptiness — the emptiness of the desert. It makes sense if it’s told backwards — from the perspective of us knowing the story — but the bit what is easily missed is the surprise of Moses in a remote place of emptiness.

In retreat-giving I’ve had a surprising number of experiences of working with people from a Reformed background whose first reaction to this approach to prayer is anxiety — but who then take to it like a duck to water. It’s as if the wordless place is a complement to the wordy one, or the place of waiting is the complement of the place of achieving.

There’s a richness in praying that is about simply attending.

Session 1

‘The origins of Advent: past experience and present spirituality.’

We live our lives by rhythms – of light and darkness, of the seasons of the year – rhythms of time. Once they had no names, although the existence of ritual landscapes like Stonehenge, which dates from the late Neolithic (about 4,700 years ago) shows just how skilled our ancestors were in judging and measuring their passing.

All religions harnessed themselves to these rhythms, creating measurement of time by the phases of the moon, or eventually by events. The migration of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 was deemed so significant that it became the beginning of Muslim time, which is why this is 1444 for Muslims. Over three hundred years before that, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (in 313), and it is a measure of the might and reach of Rome and later of Western Christendom, that time took a Christian shape – either ‘before Christ’ or ‘Christ’s time’. So it has been for nearly two thousand years, albeit that the more sensitive in a time of post-imperial guilt now prefer ‘Before the Common Era’ or ‘Common Era’.

Time, as we know it, is Christ shaped. First, in the days of the New Testament, Christians gathered together on the first day of the week to break bread as Christ had instructed and memorialise the day of resurrection (John 20:19 and Acts 20:7). By the middle of the second century, all those weekly celebrations coalesced into a yearly one day celebration of Easter. Granted there was little agreement on the date, and its relationship to the Passover, until the Council of Nicea imposed the system that we know today in 325, and in the years that followed the pattern of Lent and Holy Week was created and fixed by about 400.

When we think about the church of the early middle ages – say from around 400 to 1200 – we are inclined to think of a great monolith called ‘Christendom’, directed from Rome and all national churches obeying head office’s directions. It wasn’t like that at all! For a start there was no internet, and letters could take weeks or months to get from Rome to Tours or Canterbury. One of the great historians of the period suggested that we should think rather of a series of ‘micro-Christendoms’. That will help a great deal as we try to work out how the Christmas cycle developed and how Advent was created.

The first part of the Christmas cycle to emerge was Epiphany and it began in the micro-Christendom of Egypt – more specifically in Alexandria in the second century. It commemorated Christ’s baptism, and so it was seen as a suitable time for the baptism of new converts. In other places in the Christian world, like Milan in the 370s and 380s, it was linked to the journey of the magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. Already a dual focus was emerging – the baptism of Christ and the coming of the magi – Epiphany was never going to be simple!

Christmas, on the other hand, was. It was a Roman invention, sometime before the 350s, probably as an evangelical wheeze to point out to their pagan neighbours who celebrated December 25^th as ‘…Dies natalis solis invincti’, the birthday the invincible Sun, that the true light of the world was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and this was actually his birthday. Good mission skills! The Roman Christmas then was a simple, stand-alone, one day feast. So, where does Advent come from?

The first inklings are to be found in another micro-Christendom, France and Spain in the middle of the fourth century. Like the Egyptians, the Gauls believed Epiphany to be an ideal time to baptise new converts because it was the time in the Christian year when Christ’s baptism was recalled and remembered. And if baptism was to be observed properly, it needed to be preceded by a time of preparation. The Council of Saragossa in Spain in 380 refers to a three week period of preparation, extending from the 17^th December to Epiphany on January 6^th. The faithful were charged to be assiduous in their daily worship during this period, doubtless to support the candidates. About a century later (490), we know from the regulations of a bishop of Tours that that period of preparation was extended from three weeks to forty days, beginning with the feast of the local saint St Martin of Tours on 11^th November, and ending not at Epiphany but Christmas. It was known as the Lent of St Martin, but in reality Advent had arrived.

It took roughly another century, until the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604) for the season of Advent to become part of the Roman liturgy, and that involved another twist. Rome’s evangelical success was Christmas, and for them it had come to mark the start of the Christian year. Because they read the Bible continuously through the year, there was a natural tendency for the readings in December to be about the last things, and that was to lend to Advent worship a flavour of waiting for the return of Christ in glory, as well as waiting for the birth at Bethlehem.

And so, slowly, the whole Christmas experience was fixed – the four weeks of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. As we’ve watched it evolve, we’ve been seeing the slow Christianising of time, and something of the fluid dynamism of Christian experience.

First came Epiphany and the importance of journeying from unbelief to faith in Jesus and its impressive, dramatic expression through the ritual of baptism, which in those days meant long preparation, fasting and the drama of baptism into new life itself. Then there was the shrewd imposition of Christmas onto the pagan feast of the birth of the sun. And finally Advent developed a ‘whole Christ perspective’ – concentrating not just on birth, death and resurrection, but the role of Christ in God’s purposes for the whole of creation in that focus at Advent on the second coming, as well as the first.

Slowly, over centuries, the experience of the worldwide church in all its diversity coalesced into something greater than the sum of all its parts. All that was established by about 700, and the Christian year came to have something of the shape that we recognise – as it were the ‘Christ-cycle’ which runs from Advent through to Pentecost of Trinity, or perhaps Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and then what we call ‘ordinary time’ which runs from about midsummer through to the beginning of Advent once more. Half the year following the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ, half the year working out how that affects our ‘ordinary’ time.

Advent has always been a time of waiting. In the ancient ‘micro-Christendoms’ of Egypt, Gaul and Spain, it was a time of waiting for baptism at Epiphany. As the Roman church developed its liturgy in the six and seventh centuries, it was a time of waiting which looked forward to the Second Coming of Christ with a sense of longing and dislocation from the world, which is caught beautifully by the ancient Advent hymn:

O come, O come, Immanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear..

In the medieval church it was a waiting for Christmas. Advent was a time of fasting and penance, waiting for Christmas Day, with its three masses at midnight, dawn and mid-morning, St Stephen’s Day, St John the Evangelist’s Day and the feast of the Holy Innocents (or Childmas as it was known) when the festivities included the election of a Boy Bishop, and the children took the place of the adults in church, seated in the chancel and choir. It was a holiday and fun – and it lasted to Epiphany, with gifts given on New Year’s Day rather than Christmas Day as now. Like today though, there were carols and there was feasting.

We have inherited the ambiguities of Advent’s history. Our experience is on the one hand like that the ancient churches of Egypt, France and Spain. They were Christian minorities in a pre-Christian pagan world; we are a Christian minority in a post-Christian pagan world. As they waited for the union with Christ which baptism would bring at Epiphany, so we wait once more this year for the coming of the Christ-child at Bethlehem, to welcome him to our hearts and enthrone him. Yet our experience is also like that of the early Roman Church. We too know that the world is out of joint, ravaged by climate abuse, war, and famine, full of the greed and folly of humanity, and we too long for the day when Christ’s rule will be all in all. We too wait for Christ to come again, even if our poetry and language is a little different to that of the book of Revelation. And our experience of waiting is also like that of the medieval church. In the deep darkness of winter, we long for a feast, and much as we might find the commercialisation of Christmas distasteful and damaging, we rejoice that there is a dim memory of Christ in there somewhere which produces chords of generosity and kindness.

The ambiguity of Advent – waiting for the Second Coming, and for the First. It is well expressed in the collect for Advent Sunday:

Almighty God,

give us grace to cast away the works of darkness

and to put on the armour of light,

now in the time of this mortal life,

in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;

that on the last day,

when he shall come again in his glorious majesty

to judge the living and the dead,

we may rise to the life immortal;

through him who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

An ambiguity caught by the Lectionary – the first two Sundays concentrating on the Second Coming and the last days, the final two anticipating our journeying again to Bethlehem. And so we hold the totality of the Christ-event together – from the beginning of our salvation to the redemption of the world. I want to use two poems to help us explore that tension.

The first is by Anne Bronte, the middle Bronte sister, author of Agnes Grey and The tenant of Windfell Hall, as well as an accomplished poet. Its called A word to the Calvinists and it was written, remarkably, in 1843. She was 26 when she wrote it, and she died three years after it was written. Like many sensitive religious souls before and after her, Anne was much exercised by questions of salvation and judgement. She loved the poetry of the eighteenth century hymnwriter and poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), author of ‘God moves in a mysterious way’. Cowper was a depressive who suffered long periods of believing that he was eternally damned for his sins – a belief that was nurtured by a crude interpretation of Calvin’s understanding of predestination. Anne struggled with Cowper’s beliefs through a series of poems in the early 1840s, until she arrived at this secure and profound understanding that God’s love can never be defeated and that all be held within the eternal love of God. The poem is in two halves. In the first half she lambasts the Calvinists, secure in their own sense of salvation, yet seemingly unconcerned that other innocents were damned:

You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,
You may be grateful for the gift divine,
That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine.
But is it sweet to look around and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness,
Which they deserve at least as much as you,
Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?

And wherefore should you love your God the more
Because to you alone his smiles are given,
Because He chose to pass the many o’er
And only bring the favoured few to Heaven?
And wherefore should your hearts more grateful prove
Because for all the Saviour did not die?
Is yours the God of justice and of love
And are your bosoms warm with charity?

Say does your heart expand to all mankind
And would you ever to your neighbour do,
— The weak, the strong, the enlightened and the blind -­
As you would have your neighbour do to you?

And, when you, looking on your fellow men
Behold them doomed to endless misery,
How can you talk of joy and rapture then?
May God withhold such cruel joy from me!

That none deserve eternal bliss I know:
Unmerited the grace in mercy given,
But none shall sink to everlasting woe
That have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven.

And then she turns her mind and heart towards Christ:

And, O! there lives within my heart
A hope long nursed by me,
(And should its cheering ray depart
How dark my soul would be)

That as in Adam all have died
In Christ shall all men live
And ever round his throne abide
Eternal praise to give;

That even the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies
And when their dreadful doom is past
To life and light arise.

I ask not how remote the day
Nor what the sinner’s woe
Before their dross is purged away,
Enough for me to know

That when the cup of wrath is drained,
The metal purified,
They’ll cling to what they once disdained,
And live by Him that died.

Anne lived in a different age to ours. She had different battles to fight, yet there is something beautiful and wonderful about a young woman in 1843 asking those questions so profoundly and clearly. As Advent guides us to think about last things, about the final vindication of Christ’s mission, she invites us to focus our thinking on God’s love, God’s limitless grace. We worry unduly about the fate of those beyond the family of the faithful. Anne reminds us that we shouldn’t, for we can safely leave them in God’s loving hands – as in Adam all die, in Christ shall all be made alive, as Paul put it.

And so to the other pole of Advent tension, the first coming. U A Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was a Quaker, poet and school teacher. She used to write a Christmas poem to put inside her Christmas card to friends. This one is BC:AD, and it’s a meditation on that moment when time changed and the Christ was born.  Click here to read this.

A meditation on the most important fulcrum in history – the birth of Jesus. A landscape of nothing. Up in the heavens tomorrow’s physicists and time experts, clock-makers and calendrists leapt to attention, presenting arms. But down on earth? From the perspective of the Roman empire, nothing much happening. Just a dull peace, no skirmishes, border disputes or wars, just lethargic tedium. An ideal time for a census in far off places like Judea. Just the kind of nights for walking ‘haphazard by starlight’ and finding yourself in the kingdom of heaven.

We know where the Christ-child is to be found. That is the goal of our Advent journey, to travel again to Bethlehem, one eye on the manger, the other on the clouds of glory of the End Times. But the risen Christ, who comes to our hearts, speaks to us from everywhere and nowhere, in the plight of the poor, in the suffering of the ill and needy, in the joy of lovers and the tears of the sorrowful, and just when we are so self-obsessed, or so focused on something else, when all around is dullness and nothing is happening, then too he is there, surprising us with his advent, inviting us to walk ‘haphazard by starlight’ into his kingdom.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Sources

This paper is unreferenced, but these are my principle sources:

Vincent Ryan OSB ‘Origins and development of Advent’ – available on line at www.catholicireland.net

Nicholas Orme Going to Church in medieval England (London, Yale UP 2021)

Peter Brown in many books for ‘micro-Christendoms’

The poems are readily available online; I’ve drawn a little on Janet Morley Haphazard by starlight: a poem a day from Advent to Epiphany (London, SPCK 2013) for what I say about U.A. Fanthorpe.

Session 1: The origins of Advent: past experience and present spirituality.

We live our lives by rhythms – of light and darkness, of the seasons of the year – rhythms of time. Once they had no names, although the existence of ritual landscapes like Stonehenge, which dates from the late Neolithic (about 4,700 years ago) shows just how skilled our ancestors were in judging and measuring their passing.

All religions harnessed themselves to these rhythms, creating measurement of time by the phases of the moon, or eventually by events. The migration of Mohammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 was deemed so significant that it became the beginning of Muslim time, which is why this is 1444 for Muslims. Over three hundred years before that, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (in 313), and it is a measure of the might and reach of Rome and later of Western Christendom, that time took a Christian shape – either ‘before Christ’ or ‘Christ’s time’. So it has been for nearly two thousand years, albeit that the more sensitive in a time of post-imperial guilt now prefer ‘Before the Common Era’ or ‘Common Era’.

Time, as we know it, is Christ shaped. First, in the days of the New Testament, Christians gathered together on the first day of the week to break bread as Christ had instructed and memorialise the day of resurrection (John 20:19 and Acts 20:7). By the middle of the second century, all those weekly celebrations coalesced into a yearly one day celebration of Easter. Granted there was little agreement on the date, and its relationship to the Passover, until the Council of Nicea imposed the system that we know today in 325, and in the years that followed the pattern of Lent and Holy Week was created and fixed by about 400.

When we think about the church of the early middle ages – say from around 400 to 1200 – we are inclined to think of a great monolith called ‘Christendom’, directed from Rome and all national churches obeying head office’s directions. It wasn’t like that at all! For a start there was no internet, and letters could take weeks or months to get from Rome to Tours or Canterbury. One of the great historians of the period suggested that we should think rather of a series of ‘micro-Christendoms’. That will help a great deal as we try to work out how the Christmas cycle developed and how Advent was created.

The first part of the Christmas cycle to emerge was Epiphany and it began in the micro-Christendom of Egypt – more specifically in Alexandria in the second century. It commemorated Christ’s baptism, and so it was seen as a suitable time for the baptism of new converts. In other places in the Christian world, like Milan in the 370s and 380s, it was linked to the journey of the magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. Already a dual focus was emerging – the baptism of Christ and the coming of the magi – Epiphany was never going to be simple!

Christmas, on the other hand, was. It was a Roman invention, sometime before the 350s, probably as an evangelical wheeze to point out to their pagan neighbours who celebrated December 25^th as ‘…Dies natalis solis invincti’, the birthday the invincible Sun, that the true light of the world was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and this was actually his birthday. Good mission skills! The Roman Christmas then was a simple, stand-alone, one day feast. So, where does Advent come from?

The first inklings are to be found in another micro-Christendom, France and Spain in the middle of the fourth century. Like the Egyptians, the Gauls believed Epiphany to be an ideal time to baptise new converts because it was the time in the Christian year when Christ’s baptism was recalled and remembered. And if baptism was to be observed properly, it needed to be preceded by a time of preparation. The Council of Saragossa in Spain in 380 refers to a three week period of preparation, extending from the 17^th December to Epiphany on January 6^th. The faithful were charged to be assiduous in their daily worship during this period, doubtless to support the candidates. About a century later (490), we know from the regulations of a bishop of Tours that that period of preparation was extended from three weeks to forty days, beginning with the feast of the local saint St Martin of Tours on 11^th November, and ending not at Epiphany but Christmas. It was known as the Lent of St Martin, but in reality Advent had arrived.

It took roughly another century, until the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604) for the season of Advent to become part of the Roman liturgy, and that involved another twist. Rome’s evangelical success was Christmas, and for them it had come to mark the start of the Christian year. Because they read the Bible continuously through the year, there was a natural tendency for the readings in December to be about the last things, and that was to lend to Advent worship a flavour of waiting for the return of Christ in glory, as well as waiting for the birth at Bethlehem.

And so, slowly, the whole Christmas experience was fixed – the four weeks of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. As we’ve watched it evolve, we’ve been seeing the slow Christianising of time, and something of the fluid dynamism of Christian experience.

First came Epiphany and the importance of journeying from unbelief to faith in Jesus and its impressive, dramatic expression through the ritual of baptism, which in those days meant long preparation, fasting and the drama of baptism into new life itself. Then there was the shrewd imposition of Christmas onto the pagan feast of the birth of the sun. And finally Advent developed a ‘whole Christ perspective’ – concentrating not just on birth, death and resurrection, but the role of Christ in God’s purposes for the whole of creation in that focus at Advent on the second coming, as well as the first.

Slowly, over centuries, the experience of the worldwide church in all its diversity coalesced into something greater than the sum of all its parts. All that was established by about 700, and the Christian year came to have something of the shape that we recognise – as it were the ‘Christ-cycle’ which runs from Advent through to Pentecost of Trinity, or perhaps Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and then what we call ‘ordinary time’ which runs from about midsummer through to the beginning of Advent once more. Half the year following the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ, half the year working out how that affects our ‘ordinary’ time.

Advent has always been a time of waiting. In the ancient ‘micro-Christendoms’ of Egypt, Gaul and Spain, it was a time of waiting for baptism at Epiphany. As the Roman church developed its liturgy in the six and seventh centuries, it was a time of waiting which looked forward to the Second Coming of Christ with a sense of longing and dislocation from the world, which is caught beautifully by the ancient Advent hymn:

O come, O come, Immanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear..

In the medieval church it was a waiting for Christmas. Advent was a time of fasting and penance, waiting for Christmas Day, with its three masses at midnight, dawn and mid-morning, St Stephen’s Day, St John the Evangelist’s Day and the feast of the Holy Innocents (or Childmas as it was known) when the festivities included the election of a Boy Bishop, and the children took the place of the adults in church, seated in the chancel and choir. It was a holiday and fun – and it lasted to Epiphany, with gifts given on New Year’s Day rather than Christmas Day as now. Like today though, there were carols and there was feasting.

We have inherited the ambiguities of Advent’s history. Our experience is on the one hand like that the ancient churches of Egypt, France and Spain. They were Christian minorities in a pre-Christian pagan world; we are a Christian minority in a post-Christian pagan world. As they waited for the union with Christ which baptism would bring at Epiphany, so we wait once more this year for the coming of the Christ-child at Bethlehem, to welcome him to our hearts and enthrone him. Yet our experience is also like that of the early Roman Church. We too know that the world is out of joint, ravaged by climate abuse, war, and famine, full of the greed and folly of humanity, and we too long for the day when Christ’s rule will be all in all. We too wait for Christ to come again, even if our poetry and language is a little different to that of the book of Revelation. And our experience of waiting is also like that of the medieval church. In the deep darkness of winter, we long for a feast, and much as we might find the commercialisation of Christmas distasteful and damaging, we rejoice that there is a dim memory of Christ in there somewhere which produces chords of generosity and kindness.

The ambiguity of Advent – waiting for the Second Coming, and for the First. It is well expressed in the collect for Advent Sunday:

Almighty God,

give us grace to cast away the works of darkness

and to put on the armour of light,

now in the time of this mortal life,

in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;

that on the last day,

when he shall come again in his glorious majesty

to judge the living and the dead,

we may rise to the life immortal;

through him who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

An ambiguity caught by the Lectionary – the first two Sundays concentrating on the Second Coming and the last days, the final two anticipating our journeying again to Bethlehem. And so we hold the totality of the Christ-event together – from the beginning of our salvation to the redemption of the world. I want to use two poems to help us explore that tension.

The first is by Anne Bronte, the middle Bronte sister, author of Agnes Grey and The tenant of Windfell Hall, as well as an accomplished poet. Its called A word to the Calvinists and it was written, remarkably, in 1843. She was 26 when she wrote it, and she died three years after it was written. Like many sensitive religious souls before and after her, Anne was much exercised by questions of salvation and judgement. She loved the poetry of the eighteenth century hymnwriter and poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), author of ‘God moves in a mysterious way’. Cowper was a depressive who suffered long periods of believing that he was eternally damned for his sins – a belief that was nurtured by a crude interpretation of Calvin’s understanding of predestination. Anne struggled with Cowper’s beliefs through a series of poems in the early 1840s, until she arrived at this secure and profound understanding that God’s love can never be defeated and that all be held within the eternal love of God. The poem is in two halves. In the first half she lambasts the Calvinists, secure in their own sense of salvation, yet seemingly unconcerned that other innocents were damned:

You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,
You may be grateful for the gift divine,
That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine.
But is it sweet to look around and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness,
Which they deserve at least as much as you,
Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?

And wherefore should you love your God the more
Because to you alone his smiles are given,
Because He chose to pass the many o’er
And only bring the favoured few to Heaven?
And wherefore should your hearts more grateful prove
Because for all the Saviour did not die?
Is yours the God of justice and of love
And are your bosoms warm with charity?

Say does your heart expand to all mankind
And would you ever to your neighbour do,
— The weak, the strong, the enlightened and the blind -­
As you would have your neighbour do to you?

And, when you, looking on your fellow men
Behold them doomed to endless misery,
How can you talk of joy and rapture then?
May God withhold such cruel joy from me!

That none deserve eternal bliss I know:
Unmerited the grace in mercy given,
But none shall sink to everlasting woe
That have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven.

And then she turns her mind and heart towards Christ:

And, O! there lives within my heart
A hope long nursed by me,
(And should its cheering ray depart
How dark my soul would be)

That as in Adam all have died
In Christ shall all men live
And ever round his throne abide
Eternal praise to give;

That even the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies
And when their dreadful doom is past
To life and light arise.

I ask not how remote the day
Nor what the sinner’s woe
Before their dross is purged away,
Enough for me to know

That when the cup of wrath is drained,
The metal purified,
They’ll cling to what they once disdained,
And live by Him that died.

Anne lived in a different age to ours. She had different battles to fight, yet there is something beautiful and wonderful about a young woman in 1843 asking those questions so profoundly and clearly. As Advent guides us to think about last things, about the final vindication of Christ’s mission, she invites us to focus our thinking on God’s love, God’s limitless grace. We worry unduly about the fate of those beyond the family of the faithful. Anne reminds us that we shouldn’t, for we can safely leave them in God’s loving hands – as in Adam all die, in Christ shall all be made alive, as Paul put it.

And so to the other pole of Advent tension, the first coming. U A Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was a Quaker, poet and school teacher. She used to write a Christmas poem to put inside her Christmas card to friends. This one is BC:AD, and it’s a meditation on that moment when time changed and the Christ was born.

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment

When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

A meditation on the most important fulcrum in history – the birth of Jesus. A landscape of nothing. Up in the heavens tomorrow’s physicists and time experts, clock-makers and calendrists leapt to attention, presenting arms. But down on earth? From the perspective of the Roman empire, nothing much happening. Just a dull peace, no skirmishes, border disputes or wars, just lethargic tedium. An ideal time for a census in far off places like Judea. Just the kind of nights for walking ‘haphazard by starlight’ and finding yourself in the kingdom of heaven.

We know where the Christ-child is to be found. That is the goal of our Advent journey, to travel again to Bethlehem, one eye on the manger, the other on the clouds of glory of the End Times. But the risen Christ, who comes to our hearts, speaks to us from everywhere and nowhere, in the plight of the poor, in the suffering of the ill and needy, in the joy of lovers and the tears of the sorrowful, and just when we are so self-obsessed, or so focused on something else, when all around is dullness and nothing is happening, then too he is there, surprising us with his advent, inviting us to walk ‘haphazard by starlight’ into his kingdom.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Sources

This paper is unreferenced, but these are my principle sources:

Vincent Ryan OSB ‘Origins and development of Advent’ – available on line at www.catholicireland.net

Nicholas Orme Going to Church in medieval England (London, Yale UP 2021)

Peter Brown in many books for ‘micro-Christendoms’

The poems are readily available online; I’ve drawn a little on Janet Morley Haphazard by starlight: a poem a day from Advent to Epiphany (London, SPCK 2013) for what I say about U.A. Fanthorpe.

Good evening. You can see on screen that my name is Kathryn. I live in Flint, North Wales, overlooking the castle and the Dee estuary. I retired from full-time ministry last year and can now pick and choose what I do – for the most part! I am part of the group that planned this week’s retreat and this evening’s session, though it stands on its own, complement’s the session led by Ann this lunch-time. Then she looked at what is formally called ‘The Visitation’ – that episode when Mary went to visit her older cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant under mysterious circumstances. Ann focussed on Elizabeth, I will draw our attention to Mary. I’ve called the session ‘Waiting with company’.

This is what I plan to do – and I say this so you can relax and not be on edge wondering what comes next:

I will read again the passage from Luke’s first chapter, that Ann took as her starting point, though I will take us back to the beginning of Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel and end a little sooner

Then I will take you through my reflections, based on a few questions –

What do I know – what makes little sense – what questions do I have – what has leapt out or surprised me?

We will explore creative responses to this part of the story – in art and poetry and song and then spend time in small groups reflecting together

Finally we will pray – beginning with a version of the Magnificat and ending with a night blessing.

So settle down and listen again to Luke chapter 1, beginning in verse 26 and continuing to verse 45. I’m using, as I often do, the Contemporary English Version. And you might like to jot down a word or an idea that jumps out at you as you listen.

Pause

So – first thoughts:

What is familiar to me here – after all I have been reading this passage in different translations for decades and have even translated it myself! And there it is – that pesky word ‘virgin’, but I’m not going down that rabbit-hole tonight. Though it did make me wonder if Mary’s ‘How can this happen?’ refer not to her getting pregnant, but to God honouring a poor girl who her village would look down on if she was pregnant and not married.

What makes little sense and what questions do I have – for me trying to explain the technicalities (I have grown up trying to explain miracles and avoid the supernatural): how old was Elizabeth actually and was it physically possible for her to conceive at her age; what actually was Gabriel saying to Mary? Was she already pregnant when he visited – the text suggests not. But she surely was ‘a short time later’ when she went to Elizabeth’s. And going back to my first question – we do know that Joseph wasn’t told until she definitely was pregnant.

What has leapt out at me – what a wise woman Elizabeth was, recognising God’s part in our lives, giving Mary comfort and confidence. And it struck me that in the Beatles ‘Let it be’ it is Mary that does this – When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom. There is this cascade of grace that goes from one to the other and then another.

Pause

Often I find it helpful to my own understanding to see how others have responded to the text. I looked up images of Mary and Elizabeth – and many came up of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots! – and I’ve chosen three. A piece of sculpture and that 3D concreteness grounds the story in reality. The painting of Elizabeth greeting Mary is just such a joyous image – and you can imagine Mary arriving footsore and weary, dusty and dry, having her spirits lifted by such a welcome. Finally an odd, to us though traditional, picture that reminds us of the unseen two at this meeting – John and Jesus.

Dan is going to show them as I read a poem – entitled The Visitation – by Malcolm Guite, which you can find on his blog and then sing one of John Bell’s songs for Christmas – My bonny boy

The Visitation – Malcolm Guite

Here is a meeting made of hidden joys

Of lightenings cloistered in a narrow place

From quiet hearts the sudden flame of praise

And in the womb the quickening kick of grace.

Two women on the very edge of things

Unnoticed and unknown to men of power

But in their flesh the hidden Spirit sings

And in their lives the buds of blessing flower.

And Mary stands with all we call ‘too young’,

Elizabeth with all called ‘past their prime’

They sing today for all the great unsung

Women who turned eternity to time

Favoured of heaven, outcast on the earth

Prophets who bring the best in us to birth.

My Bonny Boy by John Bell (in Innkeepers & Light sleepers)

Pause

Questions for discussion – go back to your first impression, take that thought deeper with the others, who might you share this advent with, or comment on anything else you have heard this evening. I won’t ask for feedback, so if you wish you can declare your room a confidential space. But you have 10 minutes to reflect together.

Turning from each other to God, we hear Mary’s song of praise, which we call the Magnificat in a version from the Iona Community’s daily prayers:

Sing out my soul, sing of the holiness of God;

Who has delighted in a woman,

Lifted up the poor, satisfied the hungry,

Given voice to the silent, grounded the oppressor,

Blessed the full-bellied with emptiness,

And with the gift of tears those who have never wept;

Who has desired the darkness of the womb

And inhabited our flesh.

Sing of the longing of God. Sing out, my soul.

I invite you to unmute yourself, even if you do not wish to speak as a symbol of our connectedness in waiting together. And if you do wish to share your prayer this night, then welcome.

Silence

God of the watching ones,

The waiting ones,

The prayerful and positive ones,

The angels in heaven,

The child in the womb.

GIVE US YOUR BENEDICTION

YOUR GOOD WORD FOR OUR SOULS

THAT WE MAY REST AND RISE

IN THE KINDNESS OF YOUR COMPANY

AMEN

Hello – my name is Ann, I live near Cambridge. I am the Church Secretary and one of three Lay Leaders at Whittlesford URC (where the synod office is) and I am also a member of the core group of the URC spirituality committee.

In this session, I want to offer some thoughts from Elizabeth’s perspective, and later, in groups – for us to try to answer two questions; What are we waiting for? and what does Advent mean to us now?

Let us remind ourselves of the biblical text:

Luke 1: 34 – 57 describes the scene as the events unfold:–

But Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.”

Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

During those days Mary set out and travelled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

And Mary said: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my saviour. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

When the time arrived for Elizabeth to have her child, she gave birth to a son.”

Pause

Let us just spend a moment or two, thinking about both Elizabeth and her cousin Mary – and of course, Zechariah, because he was waiting, too!

I’m now going to morph into Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin.

Meditation of Elizabeth

It seems like I was always waiting– always wondering when it would be my turn to bear my husband a child. My sisters and my friends were cleverer than me, prettier than me, more confident than me. I was always waiting to be chosen. My marriage has not been without love, but there hasn’t been much joy, if I’m honest. I feel as if my life has never really got started, and there is so much I regret. I have spent far too long thinking ‘’if only’’.

I don’t blame Zechariah. He is a good man, a holy man, a godly man, a priest descended from Aaron. I know he was embarrassed by it, though – and he was embarrassed by me. You know how men are; they have difficulty in talking about their shame. They bury themselves in their work. They cannot look you in the eye and least of all – discuss it! He did what other men do – he looked the other way! Everyone assumed that it was my fault that we had no children …..even me. And so we just went our separate ways. Together but not united.

And the emptiness between us just grew and grew.

When my friends became pregnant, I was pleased for them at first. Soon, it would be my turn, I told myself. But the years came and went and even though their children had children – I did not. I felt cursed and became covetous and then angry. There was life in me but someone had pressed the ‘pause’ button. There were possibilities and always hope in me, but eventually as I got older, even that disappeared and I had to face the fact that I would never bare a child. When I thought about the future – my future, it felt very bleak.

I retreated into myself. I was still a good wife in the sense that I did all that was expected of me, but it was all pretence. I was filled with disappointment and envy – and it was eating me up. Mine was the shadow of a life. I practised deceit and pretended to smile with contentment but even that didn’t prevent people’s pity. The whispering was so hard to bear. I knew they were wondering whose sin and whose failing had caused this barrenness.

Each day; each week; each year after each long year, faded into the next – until the day it didn’t! And even then, me an old woman bearing a child, there is a kind of mockery in it. This is not how it was meant to be. Don’t get me wrong, I am pleased, so pleased, so overjoyed that there is a child coming – but why now? And who is this child?

It happened on the day that Zechariah was serving in the sanctuary. His section was on duty, and as is the custom, someone was chosen to make the offering of incense, and the lot fell to him. Zechariah entered the sanctuary and was making the offering when – and I know this sounds crazy – an angel appeared to him. He was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him – but you know the rest.

We were both filled with doubt as well as fear. After all, that’s what age and disappointment does to you – it makes you cynical, and so he asked the angel how he would know that all that he was told, would actually happen. And the angel named Gabriel said to him that because he did not believe, he would be struck dumb until the day happened.

Well, as soon as Zechariah came home, he couldn’t tell me what happened but within days I felt the change within me. My body was different – full of energy – full of life. I hid myself away and never went out of the house. Then I was sure, and when there was no mistaking it, I was as proud as any mother could be. I told it plain; I showed the world and shouted out that this was what the Lord had done for me – and it took the disgrace away that I have endured among my own people.

[Reuben/Dan – can you share the image of Elizabeth & Mary on the screen, please]

And now, here she comes; Mary, my cousin. She also carries a child and she also has a strange story to tell. I watch her coming and know that somehow, I also am being used for the purpose of God, and that my child, like Elijah, directs the heart to God. Amen.

Spend just a few moments looking at the joyful image and thinking about what you have heard. [2mns pause.]

Group session

Before we go into groups, I want to give you a few statements that I found on the internet which may promote discussion when trying to answer the two questions:

1. What are we waiting for?
2. What does Advent mean to us now?

Statements

For us, the Advent season is a four-week period before Christmas that celebrates the anticipation and coming of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. The origin of “advent” is from the Latin word adventus which simply translates “coming” or “arrival”.

Google states that the Advent Season is all about reflecting on how we can prepare our hearts and homes for Christ’s birth in the world as it is today.

It is a time for faith communities and families to remember, through prayer, reflections, special music, and good deeds, what the true meaning of Jesus’ birth is.

Hmmm……. Another website that I came across, states that the Advent season invites us to step away from what can be a frenzied time of parties and shopping to consider how we commemorate the birth of Jesus, one of the holiest times in Christian faith. It is also a time to reflect on the triumphant return of Jesus at the second coming. 

Not only is the Christian meaning for preparation and celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ and his birth at Christmas, but also to celebrate the new life when someone accepts Jesus Christ as their Saviour, and lastly, the anticipation of Jesus returning again. 

Now, let us try to answer in groups, those two important questions in the light of where we are today, in the 21^st Century:

Can you put the questions in the group chat, Dan/Reuben?

Since there are two questions appearing in the group chat, I’m going to be generous and allow 15 mns in the groups.

Welcome back! I hope the time you spent in your groups was fruitful? Does anyone want to tell me – and those who weren’t in your group, what conclusions you came to?

Well, let us end this session with prayer

Let us pray:

Father, we pray for those women who have waited and waited to bring forth another life into the world, but for some reason, it doesn’t happen – like my great niece, Maisie May.

Bring them comfort, hope and support in their grief and desolation.

Let us spend 2mns in silence and then we will end this session with a final prayer, which we will say together, so you will need to un-mute (unless Dan un-mutes you all automatically)

God of light, as you show us hope, shine forth and show us how to bring hope to others, especially those who may find themselves homeless at Christmas.

God of mercy, as you help us, help us to comfort your people and share in their joy.

God of hope, as you bring us hope each year, make us an Advent people, preparing the way for life in all its fullness.

Amen.

This evening, Kathryn Price will be looking at what prompted Mary to visit her cousin, Elizabeth – and what she may have learned from her.

Thank you and I hope to see some of you this later on.

I was raised by prayerful mother, she taught me how to pray understanding the power of God, knowing that we survive through prayer.

Being a mother is not an easy journey to take. Every mother has a different story. In the Bible, we have two mothers of faith Elizabeth and Mary, they experienced miracle pregnancies and praised God for favouring them. Elizabeth is a good example of those who are longing to get something, denied getting something and don’t understand why! Elizabeth was Zacharia’s wife, Zacharia was a priest in the Temple. Both were God fearing and righteous in the sight of God, described as very old and childless.

*Elizabeth prayed for a child and gave up hope but understood how to remain faithful while waiting on God. Even though they had advanced in years, they had the desire to stay righteous even after they waited for a long time. When Mary found favour with God, she immediately set off to see her cousin Elizabeth, who blessed Mary and encouraged her to celebrate her faith as well as her role as mother of Jesus.

I personally have 2 sons who are graduates but have OCD unable to work, I prayed and promised God that I will serve the Lord in anyway I can if He heals my sons. There hasn’t been any changes and I am waiting on God to answer my prayer.

Many times, we wait on God in our day-to-day life experiences we go through. Sometimes we get confused praying, believing, trusting in the Lord and don’t understand why! our problems are too much that we wait patiently on God to change our circumstances. It may take years slowly weakening our faith where some people, may grow tired of waiting praying the same prayer again and again without change.

There was a mother mourning, screaming and cursing because she had the pain of her babies dying soon after giving birth. She lost nine babies in counting. Number 10 and 11 survived and she praised God for her miracle babies. My sister had a baby when she was you and she was sent back to school, later her the baby died. She got married off and celebrated the 25 years silver wedding anniversary, celebrated 50 years Golden wedding anniversary without children of her own but raised many children in their home who call them their parents.

We have Biblical mothers, these mother’s had different stories teaching us that God sees our pain, rejection and struggles.

Let us look at the promises

Sarah was promised a son and to become a mother of many nations, Kings of nations will be among her descendants. She didn’t believe the promise immediately but God’s promise was fulfilled at the age of 90 years.

Hagar was commanded to return with strong promises received personally from God.

Prayer waiting on God to perform a miracle

Leah was Jacob’s unloved wife, Jacob loved Rachel her sister even though she didn’t have children at first. Leah turned to prayer. The only way Leah would have known about God’s promises, would have been through her husband Jacob telling her about the promises God promised to his father Isaac. The Bible says that the Lord saw that Leah as unloved and he enabled her to become pregnant and again, and again. The Lord took notice of the suffering unloved wife.

God blessed Leah – Through Leah there came the Lion of Judah, the Messiah’s ancestral lineage.

Promise to the Lord our God

Hannah’s prayer on her knees, weeping asking God to remember her and give her a son, making a promise with God that if God was to give her a son, then she will give him to the Lord all the days of his life. She took her son to the Temple and left him there.

Promises to our people

Naomi – After losing her husband and sons, she felt pain and emptiness, her daughters-in-law tried to stay with her comforting her. Ruth 1:16 She refused to be comforted and pushed them away because of her pain but Ruth did not abandon her. She said to Naomi, wherever you go I will go, wherever you live I will live, your people will be my people and your God, my God, where you will die, I will die and there be buried. May the Lord do thus to me, and more, if even death separates me from you!”
Ruth reassured Naomi to fill better from her pain of losing her sons and husband. I know that Ruth was buried in the area H2 of Hebron the Tomb of Jesse and Ruth.

Looking our Faith

Jochebed’s Faith encouraged her to trust in God to save her son. Her Faith still have an impact on our lives today as an example of those who wait and trust in the Lord for a miracle.

(1) What do you do while you are waiting for God to do something to come through?

(2) Do you pray and wait for God’s answer patiently but become weak because of the long waiting?

Before we begin this session, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Fleur Houston and I am speaking to you this evening from Macclesfield where I inhabit a silk weaver’s garret with my husband, Walter. Retirement from pastoral ministry means that in some respects my time is flexible, though punctuated by regular invitations to take services for churches. I enjoy writing articles and books and I am particularly glad to let you know that my present book on the life and work of the theologian John Wood Oman is nearing completion. With only two more chapters to write, the end is in sight.

For this session, we will pick up some of the things David Cornick was talking about this morning as we reflect together on the theme “waiting and knowing when the wait is over.” Then after a minute or so of silent reflection, we move into discussion together about some of the issues raised. That will once more be followed by silence shading into a period of musical reflection and concluding with a short prayer.

David reminded us how we live our lives as our ancestors did, by rhythms of time and how for most of us today those rhythms are Christ-shaped.

We were reminded too how ambiguities arose over the 4th and 5th centuries, as the Christian experience of time was fixed, and how some of these have been preserved in our observation of Advent. We wait for the second coming and for the first. We wait once more for the coming of the Christ-child at Bethlehem, to welcome him into our hearts. But we wait also for an end to the greed and folly of humanity and we long for the day when Christ will come again and his rule will be all in all. So it is that in the Advent weeks of waiting, in the best of all possible worlds, we hold the totality of the Christ-event together – from the beginning of our salvation to the redemption of the world.

Now it’s time to tease that out a little further. What does this apparent ambiguity mean for our experience of Advent waiting? How do we hold these two strands of our tradition together? And how do we know when the wait is over?

Now I’d like to be frank with you – the first thing to say is that these issues are far from straightforward and I’ve got no easy answers. I can say, though, that visions of the first and second coming are not readily reconciled and when we don’t maintain the resulting tension, our waiting gets out of balance. We lose sight of God’s purposes for the world.

We either over emphasise the nativity and fall into pious sentimentality, rehearsed and predictable, or we place too much emphasis on the wickedness of the world with a poorly focussed vision of the second coming. And I would like to suggest to you that when either of these happens, our waiting becomes meaningless.

One of the best illustrations that I know of meaningless waiting is a play by the distinguished 20th century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett entitled Waiting for Godot. You may know it. Beckett wrote in French and English and was a winner of the Nobel prize for literature; he dealt with tragi-comic experiences of life that often raise profound philosophical questions. Waiting for Godot was written originally in France in the years after the second World War, and has been hailed as his most outstanding work. It brings out very well the absurdity of putting life on hold while we wait. It goes something like this. In a country road, near a leafless tree, two men are waiting. They don’t know what they are there for and vaguely assume they must be waiting for someone. Although there is no evidence of this, they wait, patiently and passively. They give the man a name, Godot. But Godot never comes. “And if he comes?” one asks the other – “we’ll be saved” is the response – but what that means is never spelt out. The words are evanescent, they fade away into nothingness. At the end of each day, a boy comes to tell them that Godot will not come today but will come tomorrow. We never meet Godot and his whole purpose appears to be that who is waited for.

The two men pass the time talking, playing games and arguing. Boredom sets in with the interminable waiting. They get very forgetful and need to be reminded who they are waiting for. All they can do is idle away the time with meaningless repetitive actions. Time for them is cyclical. There is no end in sight.

Now we see from that summary that the waiting of Vladimir and Estragon, as the two men are called, is qualitatively different from the waiting we are exploring here. Waiting for us in a time of Advent has to be more than simply a test of our ability to endure; it has to have purpose, a meaning and an end.

But what purpose, meaning and end can we find in our waiting for the first and second comings? We give expression to the second coming in the most significant liturgies in our calendar. As we celebrate the eucharist, we affirm that Christ will come again. We state it in the great creeds of the Church. It is a feature of the earliest Christian writings. However, the question as to when that would be realised has always been of secondary importance in mainstream church tradition. Paul’s hope was grounded in the saving work of Christ– nowhere does he claim to know the time when Christ would come again to judge the living and the dead. This made no difference to Paul’s faith or his hope. The delay was no problem for Paul –when Christians at Thessalonica pressed him to tell them when the end would come he insisted that that he had no information– the Day of the Lord would come unexpectedly “like a thief in the night” and that was all they needed to know. The world would be judged, the world would be saved, but the exact timing of this was of lesser importance. In fact it doesn’t seem to matter.

So for Paul, the meaning of the waiting mattered, and mattered very much but the precise day and time when it would come to an end was of lesser significance.

Now let’s turn to the other skein of the Advent tradition. For interwoven with our waiting for the second coming is our anticipation of the first coming – the birth of the Christ-child, the saviour who is Christ the Lord. And in the Gospel of Luke the meaning of our waiting and its end are fleshed out. We are told twice that time is fulfilled; first, we have a natural human phase of life, a baby come full term, a baby born and according to our human experience of time, this is the end of waiting. But the fulfilment of time is also seen as the accomplishment of prophetic revelation, it is a sign of God’s steadfast love. And that is everlasting. Time and eternity are one. Night is juxtaposed with light as the glory of God shines forth in the here and now with unearthly life, free from any of our human programmes or religious seasons, independent of all our human understandings of time, transcending our most devout Advent waiting. The birth of Jesus is an everlasting sign of God’s purposes for his people. And so we come to understand that the judgement proclaimed in the second coming is not to be feared but hoped for in faith and love.

Generations of our ancestors in the faith affirmed from childhood onwards this resounding truth (and pardon the non-inclusive language): “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” We are to enjoy not just with our intellect but also with our heart, drawing on deep wells of kindness, generosity and unselfishness.

We come to see that the meaning of our waiting is in the joyful awareness expressed so simply in the carol written by Christina Rosetti: “Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine, love was born at Christmas, star and angels gave the sign. Worship we the godhead, love incarnate, love divine, worship we our Jesus, but wherewith for sacred sign? Love shall be our token, love be yours and love be mine, love to God and all men, love for plea and gift and sign.” Such love will never come to an end.

Let’s keep silent for a moment or two.

Silence

Discussion.

Silence shading off into musical reflection

“Wait for the Lord” (Taize)

Closing prayer: Nunc Dimittis (Song of Simeon) from BCW

Save us, O Lord, while waking,
And guard us while sleeping
That awake we may walk with Christ
And asleep may rest in peace.

Now Lord you let your servant go in peace
Your word has been fulfilled.

My own eyes have seen the salvation
Which you have prepared in the sight of every people;

A light to reveal you to the nations
And the glory of your people Israel.

Glory to the Father and to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever.
Amen

Save us, O Lord, while waking,
And guard us while sleeping,
That awake we may watch with Christ
And asleep may rest in peace.