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Sermon - Advent - 26th November 2006
St Alban's Epping Evensong
Readings: Psalm 75; Jeremiah 5:1-19; Romans 11:1-24
Advent is a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (30 November) and embracing four Sundays. The first Sunday may be as early as 27 November, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as 3 December, giving the season only twenty-one days.
With Advent the ecclesiastical year begins in the Western churches. During this time Christians are admonished to prepare ourselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord’s coming into the world as the incarnate God of love, thus to make our souls fitting homes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace and thereby to make ourselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.
To attain this object the Church has arranged the Liturgy for this season so that we can adore "the Lord the King that is to come", "the Lord already near", "Him Whose glory will be seen on the morrow". As Lessons for the season, the lectionary makes much use of chapters from Isaiah, who speaks in scathing terms of the ingratitude of the house of Israel, the chosen children who had forsaken and forgotten their Father; who tells of the Man of Sorrows stricken for the sins of His people; who describes accurately the passion and death of the coming Saviour and His final glory; who announces the gathering of the Gentiles to the Holy Hill. In the hymns of the season we find praise for the coming of Christ, the Creator of the universe, as Redeemer, combined with prayers to the coming judge of the world to protect us from the enemy. In other readings we are exhorted that, since the Redeemer is near, we should cast aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; should walk honestly, as in the day, and put on the Lord Jesus Christ; these readings show that the nations are called to praise the name of the Lord; we are to rejoice in the nearness of the Lord, so that the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, may keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus; we are also encouraged not to pass judgment, for the Lord, when He comes, will manifest the secrets hidden in hearts. The Gospels speak of the Lord coming in glory; of Him in, and through, whom the prophecies are being fulfilled; of the Eternal walking in the midst of the Jews; of the voice in the desert, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord". The worship takes us in spirit back to the time before the incarnation of the Son of God, as though it were really yet to take place.
The readings of Advent 1 are full of prophetic hope of the coming of Christ, not just at Christmas but also at the end of time. Advent 2 emphasises the Old Testament witness to the coming of Christ. The question arises whether the combination of these two themes does true justice to either. Advent 3 brings us ever closer to the coming of Christ with the theme “The Forerunner” that is, John the Baptist who proclaimed the Saviour. The story then reaches that cliff-hanging moment with Advent 4”s theme of the Annunciation, we wait with Mary for the birth of Jesus. We come to the end of Advent certain that the promise of a Saviour will be fulfilled.
We are encouraged to profit by the coming of the Lord event, and we are daily encouraged to long with the early Christians, "Send down the dew, heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One: let the earth be opened, and bud forth the Redeemer."
During the Eucharist, the Gloria in excelsis is not used. The Alleluia, however, is retained. The colour for the season is purple or violet. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) states that black was the colour to be used during Advent, but violet had already come into use for this season at the end of the thirteenth century. There was a law that pictures should be covered during Advent. Flowers were not to be used for decoration, neither the organ for leading the singing. I believe that we should celebrate somewhat more fully during Advent than during Lent. We do use some flowers and of course we use the organ. What would the preparation for Christmas be like without music such as Christmas carols? We should make as much out of to free advertising offered by the secular society. Being morbid and drear would be counter-productive.
It cannot be determined with any degree of certainty when the celebration of Advent was first introduced into the Church. There is no evidence before the end of the fourth century, when it was celebrated throughout the whole Church, by some on 25 December, by others on 6 January. Of such a preparation we read in the records of a synod held at Saragossa in Spain in 380, which prescribes that from the seventeenth of December to the feast of the Epiphany no one should be permitted to absent himself from church. There are some homilies, most likely of St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles in France (502-542), in which we find mention of a preparation before the birthday of Christ; still, to judge from the context, no general law on the matter seems then to have been in existence. A synod held (581) at M‚con, in Gaul, orders that from the eleventh of November to the Nativity the Mass be offered according to the Lenten rite on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of the week. The Gelasian Sacramentary, which is a liturgical book of somewhere between the fifth to the eighth centuries, notes five Sundays for the season; these five were reduced to four by Pope St. Gregory VII (1073-85). The collection of homilies of St. Gregory the Great (590-604) begins with a sermon for the second Sunday of Advent. In 650 Advent was celebrated in Spain with five Sundays. Several synods had made laws about fasting to be observed during this time, some beginning with the eleventh of November, others the fifteenth and others as early as the autumnal equinox. Other synods forbade the celebration of matrimony. In the Greek Church we find no documents for the observance of Advent earlier than the eighth century. St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826), who speaks of the feasts and fasts commonly celebrated by the Greeks, makes no mention of this season. In the eighth century we find it observed not as a liturgical celebration, but as a time of fast and abstinence, from 15 November to the Nativity, which was later reduced to seven days. But a council of the Ruthenians (1720) ordered the fast according to the old rule from the fifteenth of November. This is the rule with at least some of the Greeks. Similarly, the Ambrosian and the Mozarabic rites have no special liturgy for Advent, but only the fast.
Advent is the time that redirects us toward our source of sustenance, the hope that God will come and the promise that God is with us now and forever. We need the reminder desperately, for images of burning buildings, breathtaking greed and continuous terrorist alerts have taken their toll. Advent is a time of preparation, of patience, of remembering what grounds and sustains us.
In one sense, we are always living in Advent: As people of faith we are continually waiting and watching for signs of God. However, waiting is a risky venture. When we wait for anything, a friend, our turn at the ATM, we wait expectantly. We are in a state of suspension, temporarily neglected, unattended. Minutes or months or years tick by, and the outcome we’re hoping for may fail to materialize, at least not that we can see. And then we start to wonder. Am I in the wrong place? Did I get the time wrong? Where is everyone? Somehow I’ve taken the wrong road and in a place that I do not know. Somewhere, everyone else is gathered, admiring by candlelight the soft skin of the baby Jesus, basking in the glow of his holiness, seeing the sweetness of Mary’s face. How am I here in this desolate place, by myself?
We get lonely, then angry. Is God ever going to show up? How could God leave us? And when we’ve waited for so long and in the meantime suffered the loss of someone we love, the horror of others cruelly, the roar of war, we start to believe we are mistaken. God is not going to come.
Or worse, God is not even there. Fear sets in. We’ve been fooled, and we’ve been fooling ourselves. We’ve based the foundation and structure of our lives on a product of our imaginations and we are utterly alone in our pain and suffering.
More minutes, months or years tick by. At times we beat the dark air; at others we live buoyed by a kindness, perhaps, or an unexplained calmness, or a string of good luck. Then when we’re tired of being alone, of living in this dimly lit place, we look around to see who or what else is out there. Pieces of a story surface and we remember that there was a moment in history that God chose to come to us, in a form we could easily recognize, a baby with skin, eyes, hair, and a mouth, who grew into a man who sometimes got fed up with the people around him, many of whom he loved, a man who also suffered and felt utterly abandoned, all the while being loved by God.
It’s a story so familiar to us that we’ve stopped hearing it. The full weight of each word has been crowded out by gift lists and good intentions.
This baby is delivered and named: Immanuel. God with us. The name ties everything together: the birth that marked a moment in history and the Word that’s been with us since the beginning, the Word that dwells among us now. God with us. Here and now.
We’ve been sitting our dark room, blinking into the darkness, waiting, or so we thought. What were we waiting for? Fear and anger have kept us from remembering. Oh yes, we were expecting God. We’re not sure how we missed this, but suddenly we know God’s already passed by. The night air is electric, the faint sound of a familiar music plays, somewhere a door has been set open; the moment is pregnant with possibility. God is near.
Advent, if we really attend to it, is the feast of life. It reminds us that the journey to newness is long and dark and may in the end still look as if it has not arrived. Then we may know at last that we have come to that sense of emptiness that only God can fill.