Sermon: Advent Sunday 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 27th November 2011
Service:: Eucharist

The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, leads up to and away from the Babylonian Exile, with the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC, then the return of those exiles and the re-building of the Temple between 520 and 515 BC. Primordial mythology, ancient history, court intrigue, dynastic struggle, national identity – all move on and away from that first great expulsion, the Exodus from Egypt, slavery, then the Promised Land, then the second great experience of deportation and exile to Babylon, the Temple’s destruction, the waters of Babylon, beside which, in the Exile, the Bible was written, and the restoration that leads on and upwards to the first Advent and the coming of Christ.

Thus, the Christian new year begins with the re-iterated experience of exile, of deportation: ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered thee, O Zion. As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein.’ Every month every cathedral choir recalls the story of the Babylonian Exile, as every year the whole Church throughout the world moves from last Sunday’s Feast of Christ the King, the glorious reign of God, glimpsed now, anticipated in human experience, and longed for hereafter, to the more mundane, and far more painful, experience of alienation from God, our experience of sin, the experience of hoping again for the lost Promised Land amidst all the horror of life as it is. Thus, our period of penitence and preparation for Christmas that we call Advent.

Religion, as in the three books of Isaiah, deals with the Big Picture. In first Isaiah, chapters 1 to 39, there is the message of the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy and the corruption of priests and prophets – nothing changes! Bankers’ bonuses, you might say. Then, second Isaiah, chapters 40 to 55. Here we have the beginning of the deep undercurrent of hope, God as the Redeemer of his people. Chapter 43, ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine’. And then, third Isaiah, chapters 56 to 66, from which we have our Old Testament reading this morning, with its emphasis on the importance of keeping the laws and the triumph of God, for here the writer is looking back on the Exile and reflecting on its meaning. ‘We had the experience’, says T S Eliot, ‘but missed the meaning’. Religion, therefore, is always in the major key, but life for us so often in the minor. We’re got down by little things and lose sight of the big picture.

Last week, a glimpse of glory, for just before the Feast of Christ the King we had the visit of Her Majesty The Queen, and those of us who were there had that strange experience of being slightly out of time, out of the ordinary, for our 85 year old Sovereign brought attentiveness, kindness and grace into our lives for an hour to be long remembered, before we were back to worrying about what to do about the asbestos or whether our once temporary set of Low Mass, said celebration, blue vestments should eventually be replaced by the more universally-worn purple of the Western Rite, which is what we’ve done for Advent. But, can we accept a gift of purple vestments if we haven’t got a purple altar frontal? These are the daily worries, and details matter, of course they do, but we let them obscure the big picture.

Perhaps Brian Cox, in his majestic television programmes about the origins and nature of the universe, and the experiments at CERN under Geneva to discover what makes matter matter, reminds us of the big picture, the symphony rather than the minuet, often played out by religion. Isaiah in its three parts, before, during and after Exile, gives us some of the best-known images and sentences in all Scripture because this prophetic oracular work deals with a fundamental human experience, exile, and the tectonic plates of the Middle East continue to be, as they shift and reposition themselves, the stage upon which so much of Salvation history is acted out. Even the names resonate with ancient Scripture: Egypt and Israel. What is happening in Syria this very weekend? The struggle for freedom under despotism is precisely what our ancestors in the faith, the ancient people of the covenant, the ancestors of Jesus himself, knew in their very bones in their daily experience.

Religion deals with the big picture, hence the place of a great building, the spaciousness of this Cathedral, into which last week we were able to bring something of our Cathedral Choir outreach, our schools education work, our relationship with the sciences and the arts, the work of the Bishop of Guildford’s Foundation, the Surrey Community Foundation, the penal affairs work of the Mothers’ Union, the Surrey Appropriate Adult Volunteer Service, the work of our own Street Angels and the YMCA - stitches in a tapestry of great interest to our Head of State, who is a devout Christian woman, and who, like us this morning, will be exposed to the majestic themes of Advent.

There is hope in Advent because Christ’s coming at Christmas is but the herald of a greater coming, when this world will dissolve in fire and history will be, as the Bible says, ‘rolled up like a cloak’, and God will inaugurate a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. ‘Be not exceedingly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity for ever. Behold, consider, we are all thy people’. Or as the Authorised Version puts it, ‘Now O Lord, Thou art our Father. We are the clay and Thou our potter, and we are all the work of Thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for ever. Behold, see, we beseech Thee, we are all Thy people’. We’ve had the experience of exile and Advent reveals the meaning. From Babylon then, to the numerous deportations and displacements of 21^st century experience now, Lord do not let us miss the meaning. T S Eliot in The Dry Salvages:

It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution ….

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness.

Advent teaches us that God is the big picture. There is more than superficial feelings of happiness in God’s great providence for us, for God has in His providence our meaning as well as His reality.