Homily for the First Sunday of Advent
Parish Church of St James, Louth
29th December 2020
May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Advent begins. And we are called to do two things, or a twofold thing with elements that can be in tension: to wait…and to long, to expect…to ‘stir up our hearts’. These elements can be in tension because it is be hard to wait for something you long for! And if the other side, the expectancy, is too overwhelming, it can also be hard to have the joyful faith which allows you to receive it well. Who hasn’t cried at their own party, or argued over the turkey?
We have a little boy, as you know, and almost every night he CANNOT wait for morning and MORE PLAY. He hangs off the end of his bunk bed and asks me ‘WHY is the night so LONG!’. He certainly does not find it hard to ‘Keep awake’ at night—but the strain it puts on him means that quite often the next morning he finds it equally hard not to stay asleep.
What are we waiting for in Advent? Christmas, of course. A birth. A birth that is the bud in which is furled the thousand-petalled rose that is salvation. And we are waiting, too, to learn how to wait: to cultivate that expectancy, filled with trembling wonder, that T.S. Eliot says in his poem On the Cultivation of Christmas Trees we must tend and grow throughout our lives…
so that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(by eightieth meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall also be a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
In this we see that there can be another tension. Because, yes, we are also waiting for our end, and the end of everything. In this sense Christians are always waiting. Waiting to see how it all makes sense, waiting in the hope that it will all make sense. We are waiting to for our best hopes to be realised and the worst weaknesses of our hearts laid bare. This is quite something to wait for!
It will not have escaped any of us, hearing that figure of the softening fig tree and its message that ‘summer is near’ that there are other things we are waiting for at the moment. In this pandemic year, things have seemed more apocalyptic at times than my generation at least will have ever known them. And there has been wait after anxious wait – would the virus reach our borders, would it spread, would we be locked down, when would we come out, would there ever be a treatment? A vaccine? Some hope? Now we seem to have a way out of this dark time. But that does not end everyone’s darkness. What can?
And yet this Advent we retrain ourselves once again to wait for the thing worth waiting for: God’s love surrounding us, seeing us, unveiling us, returning us to God. And, thank God, we never wait for this unsustained: for, like a perpetual Advent Calendar of never-exhausted delights, every time we open the door to him, God’s grace , help, mercy and love awaits our hearts, unstinting.