ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Second Sunday of Advent 6 December 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass

Readings: Baruch 5; Philippians 1.3-11; Luke 3.1-6

The four weeks of Advent are not so much a preparation for Christmas, as the preparation for our lives as Christians. This is how Christians live their lives, the Advent way: watchful, hopeful, self-aware, moving towards clarity, the truth, forgiveness, the Kingdom, call it what you will. Luke today calls it the salvation of God. And the salvation of God, the word of God, comes neither from Rome, nor Jerusalem, nor any seat of power, but is found in the wilderness, which is where we are. Which prompts me to draw your wandering attention to the first lesson from the Book of Baruch. You probably hadn't even heard of the Book of Baruch. Advent is about our ignorance, our darkness, and how the light is going to shine upon it. Anyway, all we need to know about the Book of Baruch right now is that it is about a battered land and a people in exile, looking forward in hope to a new beginning. That's us, you see. In Advent we live in hope. Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God. That's going to be us. Our names are written in heaven.

Advent is a lovely and a hopeful season, and I believe it to be lovely because the Advent hymns, carols, prayers and readings face, head on, the truth, what our first hymn today called "the Advent voice": the truth about the human condition and the truth about God. In Advent we admit how little we know and how much we would welcome the salvation and the closeness of God. So at Christmas, this desire is fulfilled, and we shall find that the truth about God has a human face, we see the meeting of the human and the divine in love. God can come and share that particular human agony we have about time passing and lives coming to an end. It is an agony, this sense of loss and death, because life is so beautiful, but in Advent we face up to it. That's our first step. We have to strip out the fantasies. Living without illusion is the first step to salvation. So the traditional themes of the four sermons in Advent are Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. If we think that's gloomy and turn away, we are on the way to missing the point of religion. These last things used to be markers in human lives, they defined how we behaved. There are so many distractions these days that we can get away without thinking about important things at all. But Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell will not go away. Death - the end of existence in time for all of us. Judgement - the Day of the Lord, Christ the measure, the standard of all things. Heaven - the full knowledge of God's love, participation in a new and deathless story. Hell - the rejection of God as father and the refusal to share God's forgiveness. These are not outdated concepts of an apocalypse at the end of time. They are the last things because they define human lives. Advent is the time for finding signs of these four last things in our lives here and now. It can be different each year, and should be. Life is not straightforward.

Let me explain a bit about the Advent way of life. I am not going to recite poetry, but T.S.Eliot begins his poem East Coker with the words: In my beginning is my end. This is how we usually see ourselves, growing, with a potential to become what we are, and that's it. I am what I am. How depressing is that, for you? As a philosophy of life, 'I am what I am' is puny, it is paltry, it is unworthy of us. By the end of his poem, Eliot has turned the phrase round: Old men ought to be explorers.. We must be still and still moving into another intensity.. In my end is my beginning. Here is a different dance altogether, a dance to the music of the spheres. In every end there is a beginning, in every death a resurrection, in ordinary things and in ordinary lives there is significance and value. The significance of a life is to be found in its end, the end for which we were made, a life with God.

Advent isn't just a season, the four Sundays before Christmas. Advent is more like a place we go, the wilderness where we can learn more about God and prepare to meet Him. And because we are only beginning and have to begin again each year, because we don't know, because we are still explorers, and because the darkness still frightens us, the light that Advent can give us is best expressed through ritual, and through music, psalms, carols, hymns, the worship we offer together. At our Advent Carol Service we heard something called The Advent Prose. It's at the back of the English Hymnal. It is an introit or anthem using words from the prophet Isaiah. The chorus is: 'Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.' That's what we come here to see in Advent; the heavens and the earth meeting. God making himself understood, his forgiveness real. I am what God will make of me. In my end is my beginning, my true identity. Today St Luke quotes Isaiah when he writes: All flesh shall see the salvation of God.