Advent Sunday - 9:30am, 29 Nov 2020

Isaiah 64.1-9

1 Cor 1.3-9

Mark 13.24-37

Light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s a phrase which has united such disparate people as Nicola Sturgeon, the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Economy Minister of Spain.  The Chief Executive of Pfizer found himself reaching for the same soundbite.  They’re all, of course, describing the momentous news of the coming Covid vaccines.  We have endured months of waiting for a breakthrough, but without knowing when or even whether our waiting would be rewarded.  In fact it has been salutary, in the wake of the good news, to hear how uncertain many scientists were about whether a viable vaccine would even be possible at all, let alone on this timescale.  So now, we have some relief:  we are renewed in our waiting, from the darkness of a wait for something of unknown timing and an uncertain end, to the light of a wait for something more defined and secure.

This first Sunday of the Church’s year can bring something of the same sense of relief.  As followers of Christ, we wait always for the coming of God’s Kingdom.  But in Advent, this always-waiting can give way to linear, temporal waiting, as we count down the days to his birth.  As we number these days, we can bask in the security of knowing how this will end – preparing in the knowledge that, in a few short weeks’ time, we will celebrate again the miracle of God becoming human - a measureless gift to cling to amidst the world’s uncertainty. 

A strong Covid narrative, from the spring onwards, has been one of concern that we should not lose any of the lessons we have learned from this time.  That even in easier days, we should hang on to our reordered priorities, to our new ways of working, to treading lightly, consuming responsibly, and looking out for our neighbours.  And as the end of the tunnel draws nearer, there is some scepticism that this will be possible – scepticism based, it has to be said, on a realistic analysis of the human psyche.  When Covid struck, we were shocked into a realisation of our own fragility and interdependence. Especially in the early days, this shock brought out the worst in some people. But it has also given rise to those beautiful things which we would want to keep: the altruism, the sense of shared responsibility, the love.  The trouble is that we so easily revert to type.  That despite all the brave talk of the new normal, we actually just can’t wait to have more fun, to luxuriate in the familiar, to be our old selves again.  And unless you’re a puritan, you wouldn’t  really begrudge us some of that.  But with it might well come a shift back towards the comfort and complacency out of which we’ve latterly been shaken.

And that’s why we have a pressing need to wait well this Advent.  Because although it’s easy to see this new season only as a finite journey to a known destination, it is also a compelling reminder of the reality which lies beyond our horizon, drawing us to the light to come, not by familiar ways, but by opening up silences and spaces and questions through which we can become more aware of our vulnerability and of God’s grace.

This is the grace of which Paul reminds his complacent readers in his first letter to the Corinthians.  They have grown comfortable and well-insulated, focussed on the present, and unaware that the spiritual gifts they have been given are not simply to be gloried in, but to be harnessed – equipping them, he says, ‘as you wait’ – this waiting being, not the defined, linear sort, but the waiting for Jesus to come at the end of time:  that uncertain waiting which they and we are called to do.  As Paul recognizes, we can only do this well if we realise that God’s grace in Christ gives us strength.  Strength which enables us to acknowledge our weakness, to relinquish our sense of control, to learn not to pursue the fruitless quest of grasping at elusive earthly certainties, but instead  to rely on its source, Christ himself, and to trust him in and through all things, even to the end of time.

The necessity of this trust calls us to be vigilant in our Advent waiting – to be alert to the signs of Christ’s presence among us, not just as the light at the end of the tunnel, but as the light in its midst:  the light which shines in the darkness and which the darkness does not overcome. This kind of vigilance is hard. In the prayer of lament which we hear in Isaiah, there is a profound sense of shame at the behaviour of the people, and a sense of the absence of God:  ‘…you have hidden your face from us,’ says the prophet.  But still, in the midst of this apparent void, there is the knowledge of that strength on which the people in their weakness can nonetheless rely:  ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;  we are the clay, and you are our potter;  we are all the work of your hand.’  God’s revelations of himself, his surprising and awe-inspiring deeds, might command respect, but in the long gaps between the revelations, the people are apt to turn away:  ‘…because you hid yourself,’ says the writer, ‘we transgressed.’  And yet as he joyfully proclaims, it is also in the gaps that God is revealed – disclosed to those who have got their eye in to perceive the God ‘who works for those who wait for him.’

And as he works for those who wait for him, so they work for him.  God meets those who are faithful to him – who ‘remember you in your ways,’ as the prophet has it – and who are faithful and just in their relationships with other people – ‘who gladly do right.’   If we in our weakness derive our strength from God, then we are both empowered and compelled to look beyond ourselves, to lead lives of altruism, of shared responsibility, of love. In the so-called Little Apocalypse of Mark, Jesus talks of the signs of the times, as all nature portends the coming of the Son of Man.  And again, this focus on the future – that day or hour about which no one knows – drives how we must be now:  not passive, but expectant;  filled with both the confidence and the vigilance of those who are called into service.  ‘We must not drift through history with our backs to the future,’ said the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, writing in the 1960s.  Jesus exhorts his followers then and now to face the future, not with knowledge or certainty, but with confidence and trust in him.  And in that confidence and trust, to live the present with hope.

Whatever 2021 brings, may we on this first day and all the days of our new year be blessed by this grace, and shine its light to the world.

Amen.