At home recording of a sermon on the theme of Advent.
Rev R D Drysdale (Circa 1979)
Advent
Well, I don't know what it's like in your part of the world, but here in Northern Ireland it's spring, a marvellous, resilient, sappy time of year. For I live in Belfast. Along these streets and avenues, the cherry blossom trees are in full bloom and the gardens are coming alive again after the harder, colder days of winter.
Mind you, I don't feel quite as romantic and poetic about it all when the weekly chore of cutting the grass around my own house has to be done. Spring, alas, also has its drawbacks.
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells a story that seems to me to capture this springtime miracle perfectly.
During a period of his life when he was exiled to a remote part of northern Russia, he together with others was set to felling trees and then chopping them up into logs. For a whole year some of the logs had lain out, exposed to the bitter, cold winter months. But come the Spring, when the men returned to saw the logs into smaller sizes, one elm log they discovered hadn't given up.
In fact, there was a fresh green shoot sprouting from it, a sign of survival, of hope and of promise, a whole new tree even in the making. The men placed the log on the sawing horse, but somehow even those tough and hardened prisoners couldn't bring themselves to cut into it. “How could we?” asked Solzhenitsyn. “That log cherished life as dearly as we did. Indeed, its urge to live was even greater than ours.”
Faith in God, it seems to me, is always a bit like that. It has to struggle for survival.
Faith in the sense of a providential care over our lives, a sense of knowing ourselves to be grasped and held by something which is not of ourselves, and which we also recognise to be for our good. Such faith in a world like ours isn't easy. It must struggle towards growth, like that tender shoot on the elm log.
It has to grow through many winters of doubt and the unanswered and unanswerable questions constantly being thrown up by our human experience, an experience which has to wrestle with the mysteries of life in this world, with man's inhumanity to man, with terminal diseases, with the yawning gap between rich and poor, with tragedies like Bhopal and the starving multitudes of North Africa, and with the unproven and unprovable existence of God in the middle of it all. But faith in God is the courage which says again and again, nevertheless, “I believe.” And without faith, struggling to grow within our souls, what have we? What are we? Physical husks, eating, sleeping, making love, working, competing, getting older, and dying at last, dust to dust.
Faith in a goodness, a divine love, at the heart of things is often, as Jesus described it, like a tiny seed struggling to grow, and yet capable of becoming a flower that splits the rock. For faith is the tender shoot born of the conviction that we are something more than just flesh and blood, that we're not just children of humanity, but children of God.
At the heart of Advent then, as I've said, we come up against this great paradox, this apparent contradiction, the Creator revealing himself in an obscure birth, in a remote corner of this earth, at a place called Bethlehem.
The message is staggering. Little wonder our words fall apart when we try to describe it, or our minds just give out when we try to understand it. Yet it can grasp us, this thing that we can't grasp.
And so, for just a little while now, I want us to allow that to happen, to simply allow ourselves to be confronted and addressed by this supreme paradox, that in Jesus Christ we encounter both the God who remains hidden from us, and yet drawn near to us. So, let's hunt this paradox for a little while and see where it leads us.
In Jesus Christ we meet with both the mystery of God and his accessibility.
If we had lived around Galilee all those years ago and had, let's say, followed Jesus down the street or along the lake shore, we'd have noticed nothing exceptional about him. Lots of people didn't. And if we'd ask someone, who's that man over there? Do you imagine anyone would have said, that's not a man, that's God.
And even if they had, would we have believed them? “Old Ezra is going astray in the head…” we'd be more likely to tell the next-door neighbour, “…he's beginning to hallucinate. Imagine that carpenter from Nazareth is God, I ask you!” And just to confirm our opinion about poor old Ezra's premature senility, if we managed to listen to Jesus himself, we'd hear him talking about God, and more in his prayers, we'd hear him talking to God, calling him, “Father.”
In Jesus' own awareness then, God was quite distinct and separate from himself. So that even when we look at Jesus close up, as it were, the mystery of God isn't removed. The enigmatic nature of God's presence in the world and His coming among us through the event of the Christ continues to puzzle us.
The mystery of God remains. Indeed, if anything, Advent simply serves to heighten it. And it's something I'm sure we should never lose sight of, so that our talk about God should never become too flippant, too casual, too matter of fact.
Christian faith, with its symbols and rituals, reminds us of this, that sometimes we need to be still and just acknowledge that we've nothing to say, no light to cast on the mystery, no way of resolving the paradox. In this sense, it's always Advent. God is always coming.
We can't speak unreservedly of an open arrival. The trouble is that we live in an age that much of the time can't abide mystery. The spirit of our generation is one that wants everything exposed, laid open to view, the public view. The cameras are everywhere. It's a profane age. Too often it takes the sacred and the mysterious and profanes it. Self-assertion is the spirit of our time. We've all but lost what it is to be reticent. So, the very name Christ is on many people's lips a profanity rather than an expression of mystery. We vulgarise the very things we ought to reverence. We try to reduce religion down to our secularised values, down to what we can handle, turning the mystery of God into a superstar. And slowly, imperceptibly, we remove the voice of angels from the Christian message, or at least we remove from our lifestyle the capacity to hear it.
Yet the truth is that without this dimension of the beyond and the inexplicable, we can't even begin to hear the Advent message for what it is, the message that preserves the mystery of God. “Take the shoes off your feet,” the Divine Presence ordered Moses, “for you are standing on holy ground.” Advent is a salutary reminder in an age of hobnailed boots that there are times when we ought to tread slowly, softly.
There is however, as I've suggested, the other side of Advent, the other part of the paradox, that in Jesus Christ we not only encounter the mystery of God, but also the accessibility of God. Had we continued to follow Jesus down the street or along the lakeshore, to revert to our earlier flight of imagination, we'd have been aware of something else, as well as His ordinary humanness. We'd have been struck by His authority.
We'd have felt, as others apparently did, that here was someone who spoke not as man speaks. We'd have been forced to wonder at the things He did, the lame made to walk, the blind to see, lepers cleansed, and people crippled in spirit by sin and guilt set free, gloriously free. And when it was all over and He'd been crucified, and yet His presence remained still with those who were his disciples, so that they confessed Him as their risen Lord, and more than that, went out in the power of His presence with them and turned the world upside down, in the light of all this, we'd either have to dismiss it all as some kind of hocus-pocus, or lift our eyes away from all these strange events running back from an empty tomb in Jerusalem to a stable manger in Bethlehem, to lift up our eyes and see God.
See God behind the authority of this Nazarene carpenter. God so at work in this man Jesus, and Jesus so identified with God, that His will and that of His father's were one to the point that we could say, as the New Testament does, God was in Christ. And then we'd begin to understand how Jesus, with what would appear as arrogance in anyone else, could say of himself, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
God making himself accessible to us in Jesus. God drawn near to us. God with a human face.
And that really matters, doesn't it? To know in our own experience that God is down with us in the nitty-gritty of things here, in the small and inconsequential things of our lives, as well as in the big issues of world affairs and human history. It matters desperately to know that God's accessible when we're locked up in a sick room gasping for breath, or when our heart takes wings and we've just got to know who to thank, or when our child prays this Christmas and asks for the BMX bicycle. It matters.
In fact, religion is empty unless it brings into my little world the God of the universe, who's also smaller than the galaxies. When Emerson, the writer, was asked the secret of his life, he replied simply, “I had a friend.” It's really not enough to believe in God, maker of Heaven and Earth, unless we can also penetrate this mystery of creation and find a friend, one to whom we can pray and say, “Our Father…”
To live then in the light of this Advent paradox, to be grasped by it, to be religious in this the true sense of being religious, to live in the tension between this mystery and this accessibility of God will profoundly affect how we live, how we understand this world and our way through it. It means that we live humbly, sharing the same perplexities and inarticulate answers and this silence that everyone else finds before the mysteries of being human and not Supermen, and therefore before the infinite mystery we call God. And yet it will also mean that we live confidently, finding God nearer to us at times than we could dare imagine, and so in his accessibility proving himself to be there, the greatest certainty in all the world.
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