ADVENT
The First Sunday in Advent. Hard to believe, isn't it? Christmas almost on top of us again, and all those gifts still to be bought, and cards posted, all those forgotten friends and relatives. Still, like it or dread it, the Advent season is with us again.
Advent, without putting too nice a definition on it, means coming. Though what, in fact, we're going to do this morning is to think more about going or seeking to be exact. You'll see what I mean in a moment.
We begin with a poem. It's “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot, and that should give you a clue to the overall theme of this first reflection on Advent. The poem describes the Magi, the Three Wise Men, the Kings of the Orient, whatever you like to call them, the Magi, setting out in pursuit of a star.
“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey, the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter, and the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbet, then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women, and the night fires going out, the lack of shelter, and the cities hostile, and the towns unfriendly, and the villages dirty and charging high prices.
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness, and three trees in the low sky, and an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel, six hands at an open door, dicing for pieces of silver and feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon finding the place. It was, you may say, satisfactory.”
That sets the scene.
The Magi set out in search of a king, and I like the port's description of that journey. There's a realism about it. The Magi and their search are earthed in this world.
The poem removes them from the clinical and rather ethereal image of our tinselled and fairy-lit Christmases. You know what I mean. Characters that, well, really, it's a bit hard to believe in.Eliot gives them somehow human faces, human feelings, and at the end of it all, as we'll see when we return to the poem, the object of their search leaves them shattered, unsettled, and discontent. The world doesn't simply become a lovely place because of their encounter with the Christ child. The poem isn't a happy ever after story, but more about that later.
Before we go any further, let's get something out of the way at the outset. Some people regard these nativity stories, and especially this part about the Magi, as rather fanciful legends, a slice of biblical folklore, a bit of romantic indulgence on the part of the gospel writers. Well, certainly it seems to me that it is the meaning of the symbolism of these stories that matters most, rather than haggling over their historical and factual accuracy, but there's no good reason why the Magi should be assigned only to the realm of poetic construction.
Magi, we know, were members of a tribe of the Medes, who became a priestly caste in Persia. Their religious understanding of life was based on astrology. They were, in this sense, wise men, observers of the stars.
So, there's nothing really all that unusual about the presence of the Magi in Jerusalem. They're there because they've come from the east, following the appearance of a strange star in the sky. It was a common enough feature in the events with the appearance of new stars in the heavens, and there's certainly nothing all that unusual about travellers using the stars to guide them.
Mind you, I don't want to make too much of this, for it seems to me that even if we could produce birth certificates for all the Magi, that doesn't mean they would have any real significance for us today. Here, history and interpretation, fact and symbol, are interwoven in the Christmas story. We have to, as it were, accept the whole package.
So, let's return now to the real issue, the meaning of the Magi for us in this biblical story. And incidentally, St. Matthew doesn't tell us how many there were, nor does he give us any clue about their names. For me, the Magi symbolise an essential element, not only in Advent, but in the whole of religious experience.
They symbolise a search, man on a journey, travelling people seeking a king. It's a theme, strangely enough, that's captured for me in a piece of music that I realise isn't overtly religious, but I think it is intensely spiritual in its own way. It's Simon and Garfunkel's song, “America.” In spite of the title, it's not a bit jingoistic, but it is rather a haunting expression of the strange, wistful, adventurous spirit of two young people on the road, hitchhikers and greyhound bus riders, out in search of life. A boy and girl seeking the meaning and identity of where they are and where they're going. So, as the song says, they walked off to look for America.
It may seem to you an awkward step, but strangely enough, that song takes me back to someone else in search of a country, the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, who walked off to look for the Promised Land, his America. And in a sense, the journey of the Magi really began back there, when this old man, with nothing but the conviction of a call and a vision, left his future and secure life in Ur of the Chaldeans and set out into the unknown, believing that somewhere at the end of it all would be God's promise of a new order. Tough luck if he was wrong, but there was only one way to find out, and that was to get up and go.
We read about it in Genesis Chapter 12 and in the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11.
“Now the Lord said to Abraham, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse, and by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.
So, Abraham went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he'd departed from Haran, and Abram took Sarah his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all the possessions which they had gathered, and the persons that they had gotten in Harran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was to go.
By faith he sojourned in the Land of Promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Clearly the Bible, and especially that New Testament passage, regard this search of Abraham's as a demonstration of faith, and of course that catches the spirit of Christianity exactly.
Christian discipleship is often understood as a pilgrimage, a journey in search of the kingly rule of God, and what the Gospels frequently refer to as the kingdom of heaven. And such a discipleship is based on faith. Why faith? Well, I suppose the nature of the journey demands faith, leaving behind old securities, old views, and setting out like Abraham, not knowing where he was to go.
Come, follow me, said Jesus to the astonished fishermen. That's all. No guarantees, no teasing promises, just a call containing a vision.
A journey like that needs faith, and that means decision, commitment, involvement. We don't just happen upon it. We don't just find ourselves caught up in the search unless we do something about it.
Take the first step, get up and go. To get back to the Magi again, it's conjecture I know, but presumably there must have been some point at which they decided to set out and follow this mysterious star. For all they knew, they could be totally mistaken, but there was only one way to find out, on the road. And so, they walked off to look for a king.
John Mackay, in his classic little book, “A Preface to Christian Theology,” written in the 1940s but still remarkably modern, makes this point very well through his description of two basic attitudes to life, which he illustrates through the symbols of the balcony and the road.
“By the balcony, I do not mean the gallery of a church or theatre. I mean that little platform in wood or stone that protrudes from the upper window of a Spanish home. There the family may gather of an evening to gaze spectator-wise upon the street beneath, or at the sunset, or the stars beyond. The balcony thus conceived is the classical standpoint, and so the symbol of the perfect spectator, for whom life and the universe are permanent objects of study and contemplation.
It is not necessary that the balcony, in the sense in which it is here used, be static. A man may live a permanently balconised existence, even though the physical part of him have the ubiquity of the globetrotter. For the balcony means an immobility of soul that may perfectly coexist with a mobile peripatetic body.
By the road, I mean the place where life is tensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, where choices are made, and decisions are carried out. It is the place of action, of pilgrimage, of crusade, where concern is never absent from the wayfarer's heart. On the road, a goal is sought, dangers are faced, life is poured out.
Let us beware, however, lest we interpret the road in a purely physical sense. Many have passed their lives on the road who never journeyed very far from their desk or their pulpit, from a hospital clinic or a carpenter's bench. Others serve upon the road who only stand and wait, for the road, like the balcony, is a state of the soul.”
That's a biting illustration, isn't it? Seeking means commitment. We can't engage in the search for the Christ until we come down from the balcony onto the road, until we're ready to leave the spectator role and get involved in all the excitement, disappointments, hurt, and turmoil of participants. And that means the decision of faith, to risk one's life, staking it upon a vision, a star, and following where it leads, and with no built-in insurance clauses against error and accident.
It's not for nothing that the earliest Christian disciples were simply referred to as the people of the way. The terrible thing is, it's so easy for us to seek God, even with the Word, sacraments, and fellowship of the Church, and our own personal devotion in the middle of it all, to seek God, and yet never leave the balcony. Nothing's really threatened, nothing changes.
Faith, you see, isn't involved. Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher, describes how easy it is for us to delude ourselves when it comes to this business of faith. “We wade out,” he says, “a little way from the shore, and then appear to onlookers to be swimming, risking the dangers of the depths. But all the time we're careful that our feet can still touch the bottom. It's all just a show.”
And an awful lot of religious activity is exactly like that, isn't it? We can never find God that way. The search for the Christ must take place down on the road, where everything's at risk, down where we're called upon to accept personal responsibility for things, and where choices have to be made in the middle of the social and political conflicts of our world. The quietism of the balcony, the place of withdrawal, is not the way to Him. God redeems us as individuals, not in splendid isolation, but as we engage ourselves with the struggle for those freedoms that make redemption visible and meaningful in the world.
Dr Sheila Cassidy, an English GP, worked for four years in Chile during the time of the overthrow of Allende’s government in 1973. They were among the most traumatic and brutal years in Chilean history. Sheila Cassidy found herself suddenly flung into another world, far removed from her middle-class suburban lifestyle, a world of terrible privation, where many children die in the first two years of life, and where in one hospital she soon discovered that the vast majority of her patients lived in wooden plank houses with earth floors, no running water, and a simple hole-in-the-ground lavatory.
In her autobiography, she writes, “It was while working in this hospital that I was first forced, like Thomas, to put my finger into the wound of Chile's poverty, and thus come like him to believe.” Later, when planning a trip home to see her father, a friend advised her to go by Miami and Bermuda. It's so beautiful, but don't go to Peru. The poverty is so depressing. But Sheila Cassidy had already discovered that the road of faith runs through the ugly parts of this world, as well as through the beautiful, and through the areas of hostility, as well as those of peace and quiet.
And for us here in Northern Ireland, that means it cuts across our community divisions and sectarianism, and through the agonies of racism, oppression, exploitation and everything that dehumanises and alienates people throughout the earth. This is a Jerusalem to Jericho road where we meet robbers as well as good Samaritans. Suddenly the fairy tale atmosphere of the Magi begins to assume the harsh features of reality, doesn't it? This journey is fraught with hazards, and so in all kinds of subtle ways we are tempted back to the balcony, to the place of apparent safety and security above it all, and we miss as a result the salvation of God, for we refuse the journey that passes through the world, affirming rather than denying it.
To return to the music of Simon and Garfunkel again, for whom I must admit there's a special place, I think, in my heart, they've another song which catches this lure of the balcony perfectly. It pictures someone alone in a winter's night, hidden and insulated up in a bedroom, protected against the cold and life down on the street, untouched by the world, safe, but desperately lonely, frustrated, and going nowhere…
“I am a rock, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”
Down on the road, however, the Magi weren't simply left to their own devices entirely. They were given a star to follow, something to look up to, a guide. Of course, it's easy to weave all sorts of allegorical and fanciful ideas around this appearance of a star, but then, as we've already said, there's really nothing all that strange or miraculous about it.
Countless travellers on land and sea have been guided by their lodestar for generations. We all need a star, a kindly light amid the encircling gloom, if you like, something that gives us direction. The search can't be carried out with any sense of conviction and hope without it.
When I was a child, I spent all my summer holidays, and any others I could manage, on the shores of the Ards Peninsula. My grandfather lived there, in the village of Cloughey, a fascinating old character, the sort of grandfather grandchildren idolise. He'd spent all his working days at sea, sometimes trafficking across the world on those magnificent old sailing ships; were he alive now, “The Onedin Line” would have been right up his street!
A lot of my time out of school was spent with him, pottering about in his boat, laying lobster creels, fishing, and now and again visiting the light ship permanently moored some miles out from our coastline. Occasionally, we'd spend most of the day with the crew, returning home in the evening when night had fallen. I remember one occasion in particular, when on the way home, darkness closed in around us, the wind rose, and the waves began to toss our little craft about like a cork.
I was beginning to get frightened, and while not daring to show it, my grandfather was somehow instinctively aware of it. He put one hand on my shoulder, and with the other hand he pointed ahead. “Look,” he said, “look, you can see all the lights of our bay yonder in the distance, and do you see that fourth light from the left, the one with the reddish glow? That's the light of our house, where we're headed. Now just you keep your eye fixed on that light.” It became my magi star, and I soon forgot all about the wind and the waves. I had, you see, a point of reference.
In our search for the Christ and the God who reveals Himself there, we've been given a point of reference. I suppose we've been given various lights, but I'm thinking about the Bible in particular, the Bible as our lodestar. How does the Psalmist describe it? Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Mind you, the Bible does seem to lead us into queer places at times, up all kinds of side tracks and cul-de-sacs. I'm sure it must be a constant source of puzzlement to non-Christians that there can be so many divergent denominations and sects, and all of them appealing to the same Bible to justify their differences. Of course, being human, we're bound to see things from different standpoints, and I can think of nothing worse than everyone reduced down to one common denominator.
You know how it goes in the song, we think alike, we look alike, we act alike. But at the same time, if the Bible really is a shared point of reference, then following it ought to bring us together on the journey rather than leading us apart. So it's got a lot to do with how we follow.
Our following then will depend very much on our ability to understand and interpret the Bible. I imagine there must have been lots of other people who saw the same star as the Magi all those centuries ago, but who failed to understand its significance. The Bible guides us insofar as we have the spirit to discern its true significance, and that means, among other things, allowing the Bible to be interpreted and understood within the shared ecumenical context of the whole church.
Lose sight of that, and we are soon off the road leading to Bethlehem, and onto a sectarian byway that invariably runs into the sand, or we're back up on the balcony. That doesn't mean the Bible doesn't speak to me directly as an individual. Of course it does, but as an individual whose pilgrimage is a shared understanding, experience, and growth towards maturity within the whole Christian community to which I belong.
Within the breadth and depth of this community, embedded in the world, the Bible lights the way to Christ, bears witness to Him. If I'm allowed to mix metaphors, in the words of Martin Luther, the Bible is the swaddling clothes in which the Christ child is wrapped. Here's a hymn that I think says it all fairly well, “Lord, Thy Word Abideth.”
So, they've set out, they've followed the star, and next thing we know the Magi are standing before Herod. Not surprising, perhaps, for it’s Jerusalem and the Royal Palace where they might have expected to find the object of their search. But Herod's palace is the last place where they're going to find this king. Herod, who was out to do him in, a possible rival to the throne. In the journey of the Magi, Herod represents a diversion. The Magi get sidetracked and end up in the wrong place.
James Plunkett, in his book on Irish places and history, “The Gems She Wore,” tells a harrowing story. There was a time during his life when he lived in an isolated cottage in Connemara. He had rented the cottage from a man who, as he puts it, had an air about him which set him apart.
One night, James Plunkett sat and listened to his story.
“He said that at one time long ago his father and mother and six brothers and sisters lived together in that small cottage and were happy. Then one by one the others went to America, and he was left alone with his father and mother.
Then his father died, then his mother. He was alone. At first, he used to lie awake and alone at nights and prayed to his father and mother to talk to him.
Nothing happened. He thought at first it was God who would not allow it, so he prayed to God to let one of them come to him just for one brief moment. He asked God to have pity on his great loneliness, but nothing happened.
Night after night he prayed, and night after night in the silence between his prayers he heard nothing, only the ticking of the clock and the creak of ash in the dying fire. Until one night it became so unendurable he rose again undressed. Something drew him to the graveyard.
He stood at the grave and entreated his mother and father to speak to him. Nothing happened, nothing stirred in the little graveyard, nothing at all. It was as he listened to the nothingness that made no response, no matter how hard he implored and begged and wept.
The thought for the first time came to him that there was nothing to beg from. He was talking to nothing. If God were there, he would have let his mother or father come.
If his father and mother were there, they would have come in spite of God, because they would have known how he was suffering, and they loved him before everything. He did not blame God. He was not there.
He did not blame his parents. They were not there either. In the graveyard that night he found out that beyond the little span of years granted to each man and woman, there was only silence and emptiness.
Instead of God and heaven, there was only absence and a void.
That was the story he told me at his fireside in Connemara. He had worked it out long ago, he said, for right or for wrong, and it set him apart.
Greater than the lonely acres of bog and lake which surrounded him was the loneliness squeezed into the little space of his heart.”
It's a tragic story, isn't it? Full of Irish melancholy. I must confess I can understand this kind of agnosticism, and I think sometimes we fail to appreciate its honesty, though I suspect there's a bit of it in all of us.
I know there certainly is in me, but the real tragedy for me is that somewhere along the way this lonely man got sidetracked. In his search for God, he was diverted and ended up in the wrong place. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” And it's so easy to get off the road and wander down the dead ends of religious inwardness, or self-centred piety, or illusory holiness, of moribund laws and doctrines, to get sidetracked in the quest of God. So easy.
However, the Magi were nothing if not dedicated to their search. So, they came at last to Bethlehem, to the place where the young child was, and entering the stable presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
But it's about here that I begin to feel uneasy. It's this ipso facto happy ending. The Magi, finding the King, returned to Persia and lived happily ever after.
The search ended, the journey over, certainty secured, and everything rosy. But that doesn't ring true, does it? Life, the search, the Christian pilgrimage, human experience, just aren't like that. Follow through the story in St. Matthew, and scarcely have the Magi left Bethlehem than the town and region round about it is soaked in a bloodbath, when Herod, in his rage and determination to dispose of any possible contender, slaughters every male child under two years of age.
“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”
No, it's not just a lovely story about going to Bethlehem and finding the Christ, and going away again, and everything is right. Nothing really changes, except that now there's a Christmas Tree in the corner of the room, and for a few days every year people are nice to one another. No, no, there's something revolutionary here, something we haven't really understood yet. How does the Gospel put it? “This child is for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and a sword, a sword will pierce your own soul also.”
That's why Eliot ends his poem, with which we began, as he does, and I have a feeling he's a lot nearer to the biblical meaning of this journey of the Magi, than perhaps a lot of our Christmas romance.
“All this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this, set down this, where we led all that way for birth or death. There was a birth, certainly, we had evidence, and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”
I'm reminded of two other travellers at the very end of the Gospel story. They had set out too to search for the Christ, and for a short time they thought they'd found him, but it all seemed now a terrible, sick joke, for they'd seen all their hopes and beliefs nailed with him on a criminal's cross on the garbage dump outside Jerusalem.
Now they were on their way back home along the road to Emmaus, utterly dejected, a violent and bloody end this to everything, “Where we led all that way for death. Faith, you have made fools of us!” But as the evening dusk gathered, they became aware of another presence with them. The stranger began to explain to them the events of the past few days and offered an amazing interpretation of them within the light of the Old Testament. As the darkness deepened, so too the light increased. They began to understand something of the meaning of this crucifixion, and something about the person of this stranger who walked with them, until at last in their village home he broke with them, and they knew him to be Jesus.
Suddenly faith revealed it secret. This death was birth. This end was the beginning. Their search for the Christ ended to begin with this, the experience that the Christ had found them. The meaning of the journey then is that as we seek Him, we discover ourselves to be found by Him. We've been walking in His company all the time. He's on the road with us.
To come through faith to see that is to find God.
Blaise Pascal, that French genius, sums up this paradox of the seeker with words that spring from the centre of his own spiritual pilgrimage.
“Thou wouldst not seek me hadst thou not already found me.”
And now a prayer.
“Our Father, we thank you that you have revealed yourself to us in Jesus Christ, your Son, so that we don't have to seek you as those who are without light, but rather as those for whom the light has shone into the darkness, and the darkness hasn't overcome it.
And we thank you that our search itself is an intimation of your presence with us.
Son of our souls, abide with us throughout our lives until the light becomes greater and the shadows depart.
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Amen.”
