Article
- Date:
- Sunday 15th December 2024
Year C, The Third Sunday of Advent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Isaiah 35
Luke 1.57-67
It is now over 40 years since I experienced a wilderness. i was in East Pokot in Kenya, well out of earshot of the nearest village, even the nearest goat; and this was a part of the land devoid of roads and railways and not on a scheduled air route. I had come in a light aircraft but it would not return until tomorrow. Even then it was a strange experience, ideal in principle but disorienting in practise. My addiction to stimulus was too strong.
Over the years the terms of trade for me have radically reversed. As a writer I find a lack of external stimulus fruitful and, as i get older, the stimulus becomes repetitive and even toxic. All of which goes to show how culture changes through time: the people listening to Isaih had no use for a wilderness and they lacked stimulus. Reverting, for a moment, to the East Pokot trip, conversation tended to be unremittingly circular; when people had said everything once there was nothing to do but say it again which puts into perspective the vacuous nostalgia about the days before radio and television: most people did not read improving books or partake of learned conversation. In any case, they were probably too tired after long days of manual labour.
But i think it is no exaggeration to say that we have created our own kind of wilderness, full of trivial things and sound and fury from which so many people just want to escape; but escape does not build resistance, it does not tone our emotional and spiritual muscle, it just makes us mentally flabby and obese, apt to consume content that is bad for us, a parallel to the physical consumption of processed food. Which is now, more than ever, why Advent is important.
There is, I think, no point in mourning the disappearance of the Advent lifestyle of fasting now that Christmas celebrations have moved from after 25th December to before it. It is too much to ask people to opt out of celebrating at work or with community groups. Neither is there much point in wishing for a strictly liturgical Advent with no Christmas Carols before Christmas Eve. But amidst the hurly-burly of parties, present buying, card writing and preparations for the great day there is still a point in taking time out to fulfil the other purpose of Advent: to put Christmas into its eschatological context: in other words, to see the Incarnation as the necessary starting point for the saving mission of Jesus. Too often we separate the enchanting birth narrative in Luke, with some dark material from Matthew, from what happened later so that Nativity Plays are too close to pantomime. Just as nobody would stop reading the biography of a great statesman at the point where he and his mother are discharged from the maternity unit, so the birth narrative of Jesus makes no sense without the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
This is not to say that we should dwell at this time on material which is proper to Lent and easter but we need to be clear why we are celebrating Christmas.
It is interesting to ask ourselves what Elizabeth knew. She certainly knew about Jesus but how much did she know about her own son after Zechariah's account of his encounter with the Angel in the Temple. She knew, for a start that he had been conceived, like many of his eminent Jewish predecessors, miraculously. Therefore, one thing was clear which came out in the naming discussion: tradition was to be overturned in the way that all the great prophets had overturned it. To name the child John was symbolic of this revolution. Things would never be the same again.
It probably seems strange now to think that we are celebrating a revolution. We are mostly not that kind of people. But just an hour in the company of the pagan gods with their selfish obsessions, wanton behaviour and arbitrary judgments shows us how revolutionary Jesus was. And still is.
No doubt there are countless numbers of ethical non-Christians but in this world of selfishness and pride, self-indulgence and violence, narcissism and grandstanding, we are charged with being the leaven, with planting seeds in the wilderness, with being counter-cultural. What we know and what we have, what we believe in and what we hope for, are too precious to be kept to ourselves. Christian hope is global property. To be a Christian is not to be an owner, it is to be messenger, a messenger in the line of Isaiah and of John.