Advent
1 2008 – ‘Absolute Beginners’
“And what I say
to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
Here we are, at the beginning of a new church year, again. Do you ever
get that weird feeling of déjà vu, when you just know that you’ve been here and
done this before? I’m sure it was only a year ago that we last had Advent
Sunday, with the purple drapes and the wreath and the
‘it’s-not-quite-but-almost-Christmas’ feeling in the air. Every year we have a
new beginning, over and over and over again.
That might seem obvious – every year we have a new beginning – but I
believe it’s a crucial concept for us to understand, especially as we enter
Advent, this idea that there is no single, once and for all, beginning, but
rather a whole ongoing series of beginnings, which means that no matter who we
are or what we are or how old or experienced or educated or gifted we are, we
are all, always, beginners.
“Keep awake.”
So we begin again. Every year I stand here and plead with you and
encourage us to let this Advent be Advent, to resist the temptations all around
us to begin the Christmas celebrations early and to focus on the season we’re
in, and every year I more or less fail.
I was at someone’s house the other night – someone whose religious savvy
I respect very much – and they said to me, ‘out there we say all the right
things theologically and liturgically about Advent, but in here, at home, we
love Christmas!’
Fair enough, most of us love Christmas I know. Some of us aren’t
especially fond of some aspects of the Christmas hype, but it’s hard to argue
against Christmas per se. So we’ll sing some carols and put up the tree and the
nativity scene – both very soon – and we’ll have the Christmas Pageant and do
all those things that so clearly reflect the overwhelming movement towards
Christmas we see on the streets and so insistently distract us from really
doing Advent, we’ll do all that, and I’ll continue to put my finger in the hole
to try to stop it all falling down. But this year I have some not-so-secret
weapons.
This year I have
two things which will hopefully help us to keep awake, to stay focused.
Firstly, there are the readings. I sometimes wonder why we get some of the
readings we do during the year and I guess if you’re already focused on
Christmas you’d have to wonder why we get readings like the ones we have today,
but in fact the Advent readings are all marvellously, perfectly, focused on
Advent and its continual underlying theme of waiting. We see that today in our
reading from Isaiah and that wonderful psalm – ‘Restore us again O God!’ – and
in Paul’s opening words to the Corinthians and most starkly in the ‘Little
Apocalypse’ of Mark 13.
This is the year of Mark, so we’re going to be hearing a lot from there
for the next twelve months, and if you can find some time during the next
couple of weeks I want to encourage you to read the whole Gospel in
preparation. It shouldn’t take too long, Mark is both the earliest and the
shortest of the Gospels, but even more than the others it’s informed by the
context at the time of its writing somewhere between 66 and 70 AD. It was a
turbulent time for
Mark echoes that context often, and especially in readings like today’s;
“in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon
will not give its light.” There’s a clear sense of waiting in Mark, the kind of
waiting that Advent’s all about – not waiting for Christmas – Mark doesn’t even
bother with the manger stories – but waiting for the return of Christ which
will mark the completion of the restoration which began with the empty tomb,
the point where Mark’s Gospel ends. Mark as a book is incomplete because for
Mark the whole Christ story is incomplete until that day when Jesus comes
again.
So that’s the first of our readings for Advent, and as we read the
desperation of Isaiah and the apocalyptic references of Mark hopefully we’ll be
pulled away a bit from the tinsel and tassels of Christmas, but just in case
that’s not enough I’ve got a vision to distract you as well.
Hopefully many of us will remember when we started this process over a
year ago. At that time I preached a number of sermons about vision and we asked
you to answer some questions in the newsletter and suggest some people to join
a Distillery Group to take your responses and shake them down into a single
Vision Statement, which they’ve done and we’ve publicized it and asked for
responses and no one responded so we’re taking silence as roaring approval and
here you have it:
“St Luke’s is a supportive faith community whose Christ-centred vision
lights the way for young and old everywhere, by living out the Gospel.”
Some people have asked me why we needed to do this. There are two
answers really; the first is because, as we hear in Proverbs, ‘Without vision
the people die’ – vision is essential for life. Secondly, it’s all about
thinking ahead. I’m not going to be here forever and after I’m gone I would like
to think that when the nominators meet with a potential vicar rather than
asking, ‘where would you want to take us?’ they can say, ‘we know where we want
to go, now how can you help us get there?’
Vision is
essential for life.
I’ve chosen Advent as the time to bring our vision to the fore because
Advent is about new beginnings and this vision – which is going to be in your
newsletters and in your face through the next four weeks and beyond – this
vision is about a new beginning as well.
The thing about identifying your vision is that once you’ve done so – as
we have – from that point on everything you do, every dollar you spend, every
programme you start, every ministry we commit to, everything has to be measured
against whether or not it leads us to where we say we want to be.
“St Luke’s is a supportive faith community whose Christ-centred vision
lights the way for young and old everywhere, by living out the Gospel.”
This is now our vision, our goal, towards which we must strive and work
and by which all we do is judged, and we’re going to be reminded of it right
through Advent.
“Keep awake.”
I keep coming back to those last two words of our Gospel reading, which
equally are the last two words Mark has Jesus saying to the disciples before
the Passion, and which our lectionary takes – these final words – and makes the
first words of the new church year; Keep awake.
These are interesting and significant words. In this one Gospel reading
alone we find three different Greek terms translated in three different ways
all saying similar but importantly different things; loleps, beware, agrypreo,
keep alert, gregoreo, keep awake. All of these are in the present imperative –
I hope all you teachers are impressed – that is, they imply an immediate and
continual action, not an attitude or a state of mind, but an action. Keep
awake, stay alert. I’m reminded of that television ad with the family in the
car and Dad starting to fall asleep at the wheel and the little girl in the
back saying, ‘daddy!’ Keep awake, don’t fall asleep, don’t stop driving!
But what if
you’ve been driving for a long time? What if it’s been two thousand years, and
there’s no sign of the end of the road yet?
Keep awake, stay alert, even when it feels like you’ve been driving
forever and getting nowhere, stay focused, even when it’s only the beginning of
the journey and the road stretches way into the distance, don’t lose sight of
where you need to go.
Keep awake.
Keep awake as we begin another Advent and face the year ahead. Keep
awake as we begin to live towards making our vision a reality. Keep awake even
when it seems like an impossible task, because we know God has always
specialised in calling inadequate people to do impossible tasks.
Keep awake.
We will try, we will fail, we will try again and fail again and try over
and over and over again, and every time we fail we begin again, just as every
Advent we begin the rhythm of the church year again and again, because
ultimately, as every Advent reminds us, we are all, now and always, beginners.
May God be with us in our beginnings. Amen.