Advent

Advent has always struck me as an odd season of the year.  The word “Advent” comes from the Latin, adventus, which means arrival or approach.   Our minds and our hearts are turned towards the Advent of Christ at Christmas, yet the great Advent themes expressed in our lectionary are the coming of Christ at the end of the world, and the accompanying themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell.

In conversation today with our appliance repairman the discussion turned to the stress people feel around this time of year.  What was on his mind was the first of the Advent themes, death, and the implication of judgement, heaven and hell.  Having had conversations with him a couple of times before I wasn’t entirely surprised.   One of the things that we were discussing was the moment of dying.  One minute the person is there; the next moment the person has left and only the shell remains.

We talked about what happens when we die.  My repairman friend is badly crippled and he  is looking forward to being absent from his body and alive in heaven with Christ Jesus, and he looks forward to having a new physical body with legs that are fit for running and jumping.

It turned out that there was a serious point behind all this.  My friend’s older brother died last week.  One minute he was there, and the next moment he was gone and only his worn out body remained.

All of that comes crashing home during the Christmas season as a counterpoint to Christmas joy.  Christ comes to be born in the world just as we experience it.  It helps a great deal to understand that it’s not about shopping, gifts, Christmas Muzak in the stores, and eating enough to make us nauseous, although we will in all likelihood do all these things.

Consider the nature of this Advent of Christ, called Christmas, or more accurately The Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He who comes to be born a human child, God uniting himself with our flesh for ever.  That act of humility is incredible.  In a lovely poem Christina Rossetti wrote:

Lord God of Mary,

      Whom His lips caress

While He rocks to rest

On her milky breast

      In helplessness.¹

In the midst of the inevitability of death we celebrate the birth of Christ Jesus in Bethlehem, an historical act that is eternally present.   Rejoice.  The King is Coming.

¹ Christina Rossetti, “A Christmas Carol”, Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 383

The Overwhelming Sea

I have seen the sun lie low upon the sea,

All the swelling waters, hammered molten gold.

I have seen God’s fiery light on surging waters bold

Crashing on the rocks that hem the sundering sea.

I have ridden the waves of the roiling sea

When the night was stormy dark, the waters bitter cold.

Up I rose to heaven as the mighty waters rolled

And plunged to the depths of the overwhelming sea.

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterspouts,

All you breakers and waves have rolled over me.

My sails are stripped away, I am laid bare for You to see.

The angels danced over me with loud cries and shouts.

    At last in sweet surrender I am at perfect peace.

    As I rest quietly in You, all my strivings cease.

There is a danger swimming in the overwhelming sea.  The danger is the desire to struggle on gasping for air as the waves and billows crash against you.  Surrender is a gift that can, and often is, refused, and so, Judas went and hung himself kicking at the end of the rope until the very end.

Surrender once accepted is a tremendous relief.  The truth is that the first complete surrender is the worst to endure, so many fears, a dread of abject helplessness; but once received, what peace, what joy, and as one finally catches one’s breath, what jubilation.  Who could ever have thought that sweet surrender could be so grand!

All subsequent surrenders harken back to the first surrender, and surrender becomes a delight and not a dread. Of course there are moments of stupid, even sluggish, resistance.  But the memory and the joy of surrender calls you back to the beginning and you find that surrender itself is a foundation stone that lies upon the Bedrock who is Christ Jesus.

Mortality's No Joke!

I have had death and dying on my mind for some time now, not constantly, just fitfully re-emerging at odd  moments and tugging at my consciousness.  With it comes a tingle of fear, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Why?  There are a combination of factors, my age, the fact that at the moment I’m serving an older congregation, and certainly my reading; C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams among others.

From C. S. Lewis the figure of Mark Studdock contemplating death in his cell at Belbury comes to mind.  “The killing was the important thing.  On any view, this body—this limp, shaking, desperately vivid thing, so intimately his own was going to be returned into a dead body,”[i] or again, It came to him as a totally new idea that this very hand, with its five nails and the yellow tobacco stain on the inside fingers, would one day be the hand of a corpse, and later the hand of a skeleton.”[ii]

It may also be the result of watching too many C. S. I. shows with their callous dismemberment of human bodies.  Did  the internment of ashes in Ireland this summer also play a role?  One thing, is evident, I have always have had a highly participatory imagination.

Tonight I have been reading and understanding as never before Charles Williams’s novel, Descent into Hell.  I have known for some time that Williams is not good bed-time reading, at least not for me.  It is not for nothing that we are told not to fear him who can kill the body.  Death is only a passage into life.

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[i] C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 241

[ii] Ibid.

Wandering in the Desert

There is a true story of a man who wanders into the desert in Arizona and dies of thirst.  When he is found he is still clutching an unopened gallon jug of water that he has been hoarding to drink at the right moment, but in his disorientation the right moment never comes.

Our society is in many ways a spiritual desert.  Many people wander its trackless wastes only a short walk from well of the Water of Life.  The poet T. S. Eliot said: “The desert is not remote in southern tropics, /The desert is not only around the corner, /The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you, /The desert is in the heart of your brother.”[i]

We were born wanderers.  G. K. Chesterton says, “according to Christianity, we were indeed survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world”[ii] (Orthodoxy, Ch. 5).  Like the Wanderer of old we roam the turbulent seas seeking a lost band of brothers, and a home to call our own. [iii]   No place quite fits. I felt like a lost child of king that was somehow stranded in a peasant’s hovel amid the dank and gloaming hollows of druid wood.   Again Chesterton says of this discovery, “I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in the spring” (Ibid).    

To the wanderer in a spiritual desert a drink of cool clear water is a delight, and we are drawn by delight.  That cool clear draft of water is promised by Jesus who says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.  ³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”[iv]

“What does it mean, to be drawn by delight? ‘Take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.’ . . .  Show me a lover and he will understand what I am saying. Show me someone who wants something, someone hungry, someone wandering in this wilderness, thirsting and longing for the fountains of his eternal home, show me such a one and he will know what I mean. But if I am talking to someone without any feeling, he will not know what I am talking about.”[v]

In looking for those who are wandering, the Church seeks those that thirst, and offers them the living water of the Spirit of God.  There is a deep well of clear cool water in the liturgy and life of the Church.  There will come a time when, “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age.  And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.  Thus says the LORD of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my sight, declares the LORD of hosts?”[vi]

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[i] T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

[ii] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (London: Image Books, 1959), p. 80

[iii] Burton Raffel, “The Wanderer,” Poems and Prose from the Old English, (New Haven: Yale, 1998), p. 7-14

[iv] John 7:37-38  ESV

[v] St. Augustine, from A Homily on the Gospel of St. John, Tract. 26: CCL 36, p. 261-263

[vi] Zechariah 8:4-6   ESV

The Walled Garden

One of the gifts on our Anglican tradition is an appreciation of the beauty of God’s creation.  We pray for Joy in God's Creation:

O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works; that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We believe that God’s creation is good and that He intended that we enjoy the wonderful things that He has made.  On the Seventh Day of Creation, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  At the center was the Garden of Eden traditionally understood as a walled garden.  The word “Paradise” actually refers to a “walled garden.”  It is a place of the generous grace and goodness of God, a place where he seeks to walk with us in the cool of the evening.  History and experience testify that we have lost the way to that earthly garden, but art and the pursuit of beauty tell us that we long for it still.  Written in the aspirations of our hearts is an eternal longing for Paradise; a longing that acknowledges both the sense of paradise lost and the hope of paradise regained. 

Every lovely garden is an echo of the walled garden which is Paradise, and with yearning and faith we reach out to that walled garden, which is not only in the past, but also future.  The very purpose of the Incarnation teaches us that God became flesh in Christ Jesus, to dwell with us, to suffer; we must not forget that Gethsemane is a garden.  In his incarnation he came to die, to be buried, to rise again from the dead, and in that rising to take us with him to the true garden, Paradise, eternal in the heavens.

We live lives of longing and that longing in in itself is a declaration that there is a reality beyond this present realm.  Our hope is a Resurrection hope.. We actually believe that we will walk in the flesh in that walled garden, and we pray with faith and joy;

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Saviour Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (BCP, p. 226)

Mortality and Time

The first thing to say about mortality and time is that I'm going to live forever. No kidding! I'm going to live forever! That obviously skews my understanding of mortality and time.

The second thing to know is that my time's are in God's hands. James is very realistic when he says, “You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that” (James 4:14-14). Only God knows when I'm going to get the final curtain call and so far He isn't telling. That's probably a blessing; at least it's not something I should be worrying about.

Third, our life span is “threescore years and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore;” (Psalm 90:10) that is 70 or 80 years, at least at the time when the Psalmist was writing. Now I'm already in my seniority and time's a wasting! One of the things that many of us in our seniority notice is the illusion that the older you get, the faster time seems to move. “Oh no! It's almost Advent again,” but that only a matter of perspective. If you view time from Eternity it flashes by faster that the flash of a firecracker. One of the great miracles was that the King of Forever humbled Himself to enter into the millisecond of time.

Having said all that, time is precious and needs to be spent wisely and in acknowledgement that there is “a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted: a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing (that one will get you in trouble with an airline if you fail to recognize it); a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate, a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecc. 3:1-8).

There is a time for everything from working to relaxation, but I suspect that there isn't much time for just mindlessly staring at a wall. How do you spend your time? Time is always spent, deliberately or carelessly, it doesn't just drift away like sand in an hourglass; even not deciding how we spend time is a decision. When you think about time always remember that “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man's mind” (Ecc. 4:11).

Remembering 9/11

The media is filled these days with special reports on the working out of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  We all were taken by surprise, but for some it was more of a surprise than for others.

 

Those of us who are familiar with the Middle East and the political and religious problems of that area, while shocked by the attack, also understood that it was an extension of what we already knew about the nature of terrorism.  In the mid-1980s we crossed from Jordan into Israel on the Allenby Bridge with the sound of bullets ricocheting of the rocks.  It took us six hours to get through the security check because a few days before a tourist’s hand was blown off by a bomb that had been planted in his luggage.  Ever since then we have realized that there is a reason for the security now in place.   It is too bad that it took 9/11 to make us all aware.

How do we understand the harsh events of current terrorism with our Christian faith?  Dame Julian of Norwich sets the evil deeds and harms of her time, and ours, in the context of a surprising confession of faith, saying “All is well, all is well, all manner of things shall be well.

“There are evil deeds done in our sight, and we experience such great harms, 
            that it seems impossible to us that ever things should come to a good end.

  We look upon this then with sorrow and mourning 
            and the result is that we cannot resign and rest 
            in the blissful beholding of God as we should do. 
  And the cause for this is that the use of our reason is now so blind,
            so low, and so stupid, that we cannot know that high marvelous Wisdom,
            the Might and the Goodness of the blissful Trinity.

She goes on to day that there is a Deed which the blessed Trinity will do in the Last day which will balance the books.  There is a time of judgment yet to come and she says, “Take heed now in faith and trust, and at the last end thou shalt truly see God’s power manifested in fullness of joy.  This is what He means when He says: THOU SHALT SEE FOR THYSELF that all manner of things shall be well.

The other part of the answer is perhaps an uncomfortable one.  Where was God on 9/11.  The answer is that He was where he is in every human tragedy, on the Cross, bearing the sins and pains of us all, and crying out “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).