Portsmouth Cathedral

First Sunday of Advent 2022

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

‘Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light….put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh.’ Romans 13.12b, 14a  

Those words, from the 13th Chapter St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, were the words that converted St Augustine, the Great North African Bishop, philosopher and theologian in the summer of the year 386.

In his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, Augustine tells us with remarkable honesty how he had always felt fragmented, torn by strong and conflicting appetites and desires. While he was fascinated by God and always felt driven towards him, he at the same time always found himself feeling far away from him.

Augustine was naturally introspective, but his habit of of endlessly looking into himself brought him no peace, only further mental anguish. He had gone to Milan in Italy and landed a plum job as Professor of Rhetoric. But after a couple of years this all went wrong and he found himself driven back into his intensity and depression. One summer day he had an absorbing and emotional conversation with a close friend. He had been leafing through a volume of St Paul’s letters and had thrown the book down in tears of despair when he heard a child’s voice from another garden singing out, ‘Tolle, lege, tolle lege…’ take it, read it, take it, read it. He picked up the book he’d just discarded and his eyes fell on the words, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ; and make no provision for the  flesh’. And that was it. Sudden light, certainty, peace.

Augustine realised that what he was seeking was being held out to him, not as a result of his tortured self-analysis, but as pure gift, that he was to take what was given and put it on, or rather put him on, to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, as clothing, as armour, as protection, as light.

Put on the armour of light. Put on the person of Christ.

Advent is a season of penitence, but it is very different in mood from Lent.  In Advent we are prisoners, but we know release will come; we are exiles, but we know we are going home; we are sinful, but we know we are forgiven. The cry of Advent is, ‘Keep awake’. Keep wanting, keep desiring, don’t settle for anything less than the Lord himself. For he comes as a thief in the night and at an hour you do not expect.

Freedom is near, but you could just miss it.  Augustine could have missed his own conversion if he had not allowed himself just for a moment to be distracted. That child’s voice ‘Tolle, lege, tolle, lege, tolle, lege’ – it was like a bell ringing over his life – ‘take it, read, take it, read it, take it, read it’. A totally random event which startled him out of his fruitless weeping into opening the book. And the rest….well there’s a lot more we could say about Augustine, but not now.

The point is that Advent calls us to look for redemption outside ourselves. Not to be obsessed by our feelings or our identity, not to agonise about our past or our wounds, not to run ourselves into the ground by trying to justify ourselves to ourselves. In this morning’s Sunday Times there is an opinion piece by Matthew Syed which notes the inward, subjective turn in today’s culture. It began with an emphasis on self-help, and then went on to the importance of self-worth and self-esteem, and of course we have ‘selfies’ and emphasise ‘sharing’ our stories, inwardly ‘curating our cosy truths’ as he puts it.

But now is the time not to get drowned in introspection, but to keep awake, to look up and look out, to peer through the darkness and see the light coming.  And then actively, positively to ‘put on the armour of light’, to ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’. This is the repentance of Advent.

And the repentance of Advent always comes with a note of promise. The one who comes is greater than we are, kinder and stronger and more real than anything we can imagine, greater than our own hearts, especially when they accuse us. Our first reading gives us a vision of the last days, of the mountain of the Lord shining out to all people, of universal peace and praise. That’s what we want, that’s where our hope lies; not just for ourselves, but for the whole creation, for the nations, for all living beings, for the earth itself.

So we are right to deepen our cries of longing. Christ comes, but there is a  mystery about his coming.  He came to Augustine through a text of scripture in a garden in Milan. Augustine, as the great theologian he would become, recognised that he was living in an in-between time, - after the first coming of Christ and before the second, and that we would never quite know what the second coming of Christ would mean.  

All that we do know is that we do not know the day or the hour, ‘No one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’. It is rather like the time of our own death. We know it will come, but we do not know when, and the sane thing to do, the realistic thing to do is to be prepared, but not obsessive; ready but not anxious.  He will come in his own way and his own time, to each of us, to his church and to all creation.

Our Gospel speaks of the casual revellers in the days before the flood, eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, totally unaware that anything else was going until the flood came and swept them away. They remind me of that rueful observation about death bed regrets. You know, no one on his or her death bed regrets not spending more time in the office.

No, the things you regret are the real things, the unexpressed feelings, the giving of forgiveness, the healing you sought or longed to give. So do the important things now before you can’t. This Advent don’t settle for anything less than reality, the armour of light.

The coming of the Son of Man divides humanity. One is taken, one is left. We are meant to feel the anxiety of that. Some people get nervous if scripture makes them feel uncomfortable, but how do we ever grow if we are immune from discomfort? Sometimes we are meant to weep at our foolishness and distractedness. To pick up the book we have thrown down and read it again and understand it for the first, second or umpteenth time. I love these verses by the poet W.H. Auden:

O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.

So Sursum Corda, ‘Lift up your hearts’, lift up those crooked hearts and welcome the light, not because we must but because we may and we dare to,  because even in our mortal weakness we are armoured in light, in truth, in Christ.  Today he enfolds and encloses us in his love, and tomorrow he will come to us in weakness and great humility and asks us to take him in. At Advent he is the thief in the night but at Christmas we will know him in the cry of the stable.