ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

ADVENT SUNDAY, 2005
Litany & High Mass
All Saints, Margaret St.
Fr Alan Moses

We seem to live in an age of increasing anxiety: there is bird flu portrayed as a rerun of the Black Death; terrorism and gun crime. Will we have an adequate pension for our old age? What will happen when the oil and gas reserves run out? What if we do nothing about global warming and climate change? If we are Christians, we worry about divisions or statistics of decline.

Such anxieties generate a variety of reactions. Some bury their heads in the sand; hoping it will all go away; expecting the government to sort it out. In the meantime, many will party on, ignoring threats to health more immediate than avian flu. Encouraged by commentators and journalists, we can think that we live in the worst of all times. Panic leads some into irrational behaviour: who can we blame? So it is a help in facing real problems to know that while the details may be new, the sense of anxiety about the future is not.

Today’s scripture readings give us examples of other times of anxiety. Isaiah and the Psalm today both reflect times of disaster in the history of the Jewish people. The Isaiah passage was written when the Jews were in exile in Babylon; Jerusalem and its Temple were in ruins. Psalm 80 reflects on some disaster which had earlier befallen the Northern Kingdom. What hope was there for the future? Both are communal laments, pleas to God to bring redemption:

“Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”

Isaiah describe the distress of the people:

“We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

This state is attributed it their own wrongdoings. Then there is a statement of confidence in God, who us addressed as Father, and a final plea:

“Yet, O Lord, you are our Father,
we are the clay, and you are out potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity for ever.
Behold, consider, we are all your people.”

To speak to God as Father is to claim to be children of the Divine - in spite of the evidence. It is also to say that God is responsible for us in the end. It is this confidence in God that is the ultimate basis of their hope.

All this echoes the central themes of Advent - the need for redemption, our unworthiness before God, a longing for God to act, and the assurance that as Father, God is also Redeemer.

Today’s Epistle is written to the church in Corinth where there was confusion about the last things. This affected the way people behaved. Some who believed they had already experienced the second resurrection were spiritually arrogant and openly immoral. Others, perhaps newer Christians, felt unsure and anxious. Paul reminds them all that the resurrection is still future but that the interim period, the in-between-time, need not be spent in anxiety.

Christians can live in confidence that God is faithful and will sustain to the end those who have committed themselves to the life of faith and trust. His opening prayer is one of confidence and reassurance; recalling the decisive event in which all Christian experience is anchored - God’s gracious gift of Christ. He reassures his readers that they do not lack any spiritual gift, and that their commitment as Christians will be sustained God’s help:

“He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Our Gospel is the concluding part of that section of Mark which comes just before the Passion.. Jesus leaves the Temple for the last time before his death, and foretells its destruction: “Not one stone will be left here upon another.”

By the time Mark wrote, Jerusalem and Temple were in ruins. Jewish rebellion had finally exhausted Roman patience. What could this disaster mean for the purposes and promises of God? How were followers of Jesus to understand the end of the holy city and the temple? Added to the persecution at the hands of religious and political authorities, and the anguish of families torn apart by differing loyalties, was the confusion created by false messiahs and prophets. False messiahs were claiming to be Christ returned. False prophets were turning religion into an almanac: “The signs are right; this is the end.” The faithful are torn between giving way to despair or reaching for any flicker of hope.

To that Church and to all the faithful everywhere, - “And what I say to you, I say to all” - our text is both encouraging and demanding. Believers are not robbed of their expectation of a final day, a day of relief and vindication. That time will come, but it will be at God’s determination. All human calculations are confusing and futile. The day of the Lord is not to be tied to any political condition or religious institution. The success or failure of any nation or religious institution, even the chosen people, even the temple, do not dictate the time or place or form of God’s coming. God survives all human structures and institutions, sometimes having to shatter and recreate the communities that exist for God’s work in the world. True hope is trust in the faithfulness of God, constant amid the rise and fall of the worst and best of human achievement.

Trust in the faithfulness of God is demonstrated by faithfulness in our work and witness. This is what it means to be alert and watchful. To watch is not to scan the heavens, or read the horoscope, or comb through obscure texts, and begin every sentence with “When the Lord comes”. These are not hope but postponement and evasion. Looking upon scenes of human misery and saying, “When the Lord comes” has nothing to do with this text.

The short parable in the gospel makes it clear what life is for the disciples of Jesus. It is as though a master, absent on a journey, has left his servants in charge, each with work to be done, with a keeper at the door. The message then is to be neither falsely optimistic nor falsely discouraged. Christ will come and with signs that no one can miss. In the meantime, appropriate Christian behaviour is enduring, without trying to guess when; it is continuing the mission to the nations without giving up. “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” To keep awake is to be faithful in our work, as though we were already in the presence of the One for whose coming we long.

Let me finish by saying something about the Litany which we sang in procession before this Mass. You might think that this is just a way of making the service longer - although the observant will note that we have omitted some other elements in its place. We begin this season with it because it has that Advent combination of distress, plea for mercy and aid, and confidence in God we have seen in the readings.

Congregations which gathered for worship in 16th century England were a cranky and contentious lot, quick to take offence, to feel threatened, to respond violently to real or imagined slights; in large measure because they found it difficult to feel emotionally and physically safe in the world.

They had good reason to feel vulnerable, frightened, insecure, and uncertain of the future. Life in Tudor England was often nasty. brutish and short. Much of the population went ill-fed most of the year, making them more vulnerable to disease. The plague, if not as severe as in previous centuries, was still an all-too-frequent visitor. Even wealth or status were to some extent dependent on chance. The memory of civil war was fresh.

Marginal figures - vagabonds, thieves, the homeless - thrown off the land by agricultural “improvements”- were on the increase; the kind of people the Victorians would call the “undeserving poor” and we call “the underclass”. It was a time of public and official violence against the marginal: executions were public spectacles. The familiar landmarks of religion were changing too.

At such a time, when even the familiar landmarks of religion were changing, we might expect people to be concerned above all with security, both emotional and social, to hold on to what is, to have little left over for risk or change or acceptance of difference. When the church bell ‘rung to prayers’ it summoned a congregation of the proud and defensive, the quick tempered and the emotionally numbed, the frightened and the grief-stricken, the sick and the angry, the vengeful and the confused, and those eager to take advantage of every weakness. Most were illiterate.. Even the educated were trained in a style which was based on dispute, on winning arguments rather than consensus and negotiation.

The Litany was Cranmer’s first attempt at liturgy in English and the first component of what would be the Prayer Book. Some of Cranmer’s devotees today, see the use of the Prayer Book as a means of preserving an endangered status quo. This is not quite what the Archbishop had in mind. He was engineering religious change; a change in language and in governance. He recognised that people were frightened by political, social and religious change. He sought through the words and actions of common prayer to strengthen their faith, to reassure them about the nature of God, and, at the same time, to direct their efforts into the building of church and nation as a holy people. Their individual fears and longings were taken into the Common Prayer of the people. That Common Prayer was a plea for mercy and forgiveness; for the overcoming of estrangement and fear. It was a plea based on the recital in scripture and celebration in sacrament of what God had done and still does. It was an act of commitment not simply to personal needs but to the well-being of the whole community.

Cranmer in the Litany sought to put people once more in touch with the God of biblical narrative. The people gathered into community then and now, become like the Israelites gathered to hear God’s Word from the judges and the prophets and like the early Church gathered to experience their risen Lord, present to them through Word and Eucharist. And in that experience of the risen Christ anxiety would be overcome by the assurance of God’s “favour and goodness towards us, and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope , of thy everlasting kingdom”. That grace was to be an assurance but a spur to action: to “do all such good works as thou has prepared for us to walk in”