St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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This week, we've been getting the Christmas decorations down from the loft and I found that one of our three sets of lights had broken and there was no sign of a spare bulb. Removing the plug and consigning them to the bin bag I was reminded of one of my father's favourite stories - that of the old clergyman with a long neck in a very stiff, high collar who used to turn up at the electricity showroom where he worked in the 1950s to have an old set of Christmas lights tested before he plugged them in for another Christmas. When they lit up he would say, "Wonderful - another year" and off he would go, very pleased.
Advent Sunday too heralds another year: the beginning of the Church's year and indeed the beginning of the next cycle of readings in Year B of the Lectionary. It is a cycle of readings that follows all the great themes and events in the salvation history of our Christian faith. These are also followed in the liturgical colours, the variations in liturgy and in the appearance of the church, the music we sing, the provision of special courses and the giving to various charitable concerns.
I value our tradition and feel able to work and worship within it because I feel that life itself is unpredictable and changeable; and I therefore value the familiarity and the stability of the times and seasons of the traditional church year. I also feel that we never really get to the end of knowing, mentally or spiritually, what is the great mystery of God and the world; and the annual revisiting of the great themes of creation and fall, the Incarnation and Jesus' life and ministry, His suffering and death, and then the birth of the Church in the Holy Spirit all help us to encounter those things; and each time to understand or experience them a little more fully. It also means that, while we react to the crisis and the events in the world - as we are today by praying for Mumbai and collecting money for the Congo - these don't overwhelm the pattern of the journey, and we keep going. When people are very old and frail, the pattern is what remains, the recognition of the familiar words, the familiar sounds and sights, when other things are gone.
But as a new Church year begins, so we enter somewhat into the unknown just as we do in our own lives on January 1st. We can never predict entirely what will happen. Given this inevitable uncertainty it is rather important I think that the first thing that happens at Advent is the lighting of a candle - the symbol of the light of the world or of the coming of that light. In 1939 when George VI movingly and haltingly gave his Christmas Address, he quoted that remarkable poem: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown" and the reply "Put your hand into the hand of God; that will be for you better than light and safer than a known way". The candle we light here is a symbol: it symbolises the light of Christ and that light is not in our hand, it is within our hearts. We find our way by walking with Christ and by, as it were therefore, putting our hand into the hand of God. And one way of doing this is this coming together to remind ourselves of the journey of our faith, and to receive in word and sacrament the love and the person of Jesus Christ so that we may faithfully bring our journey and that journey together.
The familiar cycle, and the year ahead, predictable and unpredictable: our Gospel reading reminds us of one great Advent theme - the return of Christ. When I think of all the things I might hope to see and do in this coming year, is that among them? I have to admit, I don't think it is. Whatever our personal and collective plans as a Christian community there is the ongoing imperative that should always be with us: that Christ may return at any time bringing with him justice and mercy, the end of the imperfections of this world, the beginning of his Kingdom. We can and should make our plans but if we live everyday in anticipation that we might this day see the Lord, then that will create an even stronger framework for all that we experience in the year to come, because every day is a day lived in the light of the knowledge that the King might return and we should be about his business and that we, both as a community and alone, should watch and pray.
Amen
