Advent Faith and the realities of life

 Advent 3         Year A        Eucharist – 11.xii.2022

(Isaiah 35.1-10; James 5.7-10; Matthew 11.2-11)

I’m in the middle of taking a series of school assemblies. My starter question in the schools I’ve been visiting has been, “What do you need to help you get ready for Christmas?” Helpfully last Thursday morning, nearly all the children in Benfieldside School were wearing Christmas jumpers - so that was a start! And at home they are putting up the decorations, getting out the lights. They might be thinking about present lists - not just what they can get, but what they can give. A few have been writing Christmas cards. It’s helpful to get them to talk about these things because it works as a checklist for me, and I realise quite how far behind I am in my preparations. When I got to the question, “Who’s put their tree up?” nearly every hand in the assembly hall went up.

In that I’m failing… though St. Cuthbert’s has (at least) two trees dressed and lit when I last looked, and St. John’s is proudly displaying the tree in its garden to all who pass by on the A68.

So, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Or is it? In a sermon workshop the other day, someone said, “Advent is a time for people who hate Christmas.” So we have to be careful about what we say. Should we be holding back saying, “Don’t try to get there too quickly?” After the last nearly three years of pandemic restrictions, people really do want to get on and celebrate. But at the same time as we do our best to get into the Christmas mood, there are realities to face. The first Christmas didn’t start off that happily for Mary and Joseph. There would be presents for them - later - from the Wise Men. But first there was a birth away from home, away from their families and without proper shelter. I was taking part in a sermon workshop the other day, led by Sam Wells, the Vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields in London. He pointed out that the couple themselves were living in the aftermath of nearly having broken up over Mary’s unplanned pregnancy. What’s it going to be like for many families in this time of bitter cold and escalating prices when so many are having to choose between heating and eating? What’s it like when you can’t really afford either, but you’re wanting to buy all the presents on your children’s Santa list - the presents that you yourself want to buy?

I don’t really want to keep on with this theme. Advent is not to be about grimness - and certainly Christmas isn’t. As someone I know pointed out, this 3^rd Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday, so it’s about joy! It gets the name Gaudete from the verse of Scripture with which today’s service traditionally begins: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.” Someone else pointed out, “the problem with Christians is that so often they don’t look that redeemed.” Christians who look miserable… St. James in today’s New Testament reading has to warn the readers of the letter he wrote to them, “Beloved, do not grumble against one another…” Cheer up!

But we can’t escape the realities. If only we could follow the suggestion that we “give half the presents but double the love.”

Seeing God’s love put into effect is something we need for every day… The prophet Isaiah writes for a people who lose their nationhood, defeated in war and so many of them carried into exile in Babylon. Their plight cannot be denied, but the prophet affirms that there is hope and there will be restoration. The wilderness is a reality, but “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” There are those who know that their hands are weak and their knees feeble, but they will be strengthened. And God will ransom his people, and bring them back to what is truly theirs. The whole of that 35^th chapter of Isaiah is something we can meditate on when we are feeling down or depressed.

Being a Christian is about living in faith and hope through the bad days as well as the good days. Sam Wells points out that there’s a very real question which every Christian has to face: “If Jesus has changed everything, why does everything look so much the same?” For us now it might be, “why can’t I pay my heating bill?” Or if we’re more fortunate look at the plight of other people and ask, “why are things in such a state that they can’t pay their heating bill?” Or, “why did the person I love get sick… why did he or she die and leave me feeling like this?” Just believing in Jesus won’t fix things. But I would want to say that believing in Jesus might give us a concern for justice, and that might be a start in making things better.

John the Baptist, in today’s Gospel reading, finds himself face to face with realities, questioning and doubt. John has proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, called on people to repent, warned of the judgment of God’s Kingdom. But now he finds himself locked up in prison, the victim of King Herod’s anger. And from his cell he sends his message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Has John got it right in putting his faith in Jesus, or has the project failed?

To which Jesus responds: 

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me. 

We don’t know if John will ever receive that message. But the message for us is to look for the signs of God’s Kingdom. How can they be brought about? Our role is to live God’s future in the here and now.

God’s future is the promise the prophet Isaiah holds out to his people even as they face defeat by the Babylonians and the loss of their nationhood. Despite all appearances there is an abundance in God’s provision to which we need to remain open. The message of the poet Thomas Traherne might be distilled to the more prosaic, “Don’t dwell on asking why my life is so miserable - but glorify God that you have a life at all.”

What can sustain you when you feel up against it? When you’re cold, think of the needs of others.

What keeps the people of Ukraine going when its Russian neighbour seeks to destroy its infrastructure, when the entire city of Odessa is totally lacking in power - and so many other parts of that country?

What’s it like for the people of Somalia, whose people starve because of climate change, crop failure and war - and how can we act to make things better for them?

We need to take our experience into a sense of solidarity with other people. In the grimness of life today, it’s not enough that we can make ourselves warm and content - if that’s all we want, we will remain cold to the experience of other people.

The German Jesuit priest, Alfred Delp, wrote from his imprisonment by the Nazis:

I see Advent this year with greater intensity and anticipation than ever before. Walking up and down in my cell, three paces this way and three paces that way, with my hands in irons and ahead of me an uncertain fate, I have a new and different understanding of God’s promise of redemption and release. 

There would be no release for Alfred Delp, but there was a real sense of freedom within his confinement because of the faith he knew.

The Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was imprisoned at the same time - and I often go back to his words: 

For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more meaning and be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to [human beings], that God should come down to the very place which [people] usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn -- these are things which prisoners can understand better than anyone else.  For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense. 

There are no text book answers to the problem of suffering in the world. But we can look for ways in which faith has been lived out in the darkest of times, freedom found in the harshness of captivity.

Let me end with a final quotation from Thomas Merton as he wrote of an experience which transformed him in his sense of God’s care for all people: 

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut (the junction of two streets), in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.… I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.