by CCW | 19 December 2010 13:58
Are we ready, really ready, for Christmas? Do we really know what it means to be ready? Ready, exactly, for what? Perhaps that is why we are often so anxious.
Therein lies the problem and the necessity of the Advent season. The problem is that in so many ways, Advent is anticipatory of Christmas. There is the sense of impending fulfillment such that the celebrations already seem to have begun. Yet Advent is the season of expectancy, a season of hope in the realization of what has come to pass, “this thing that has happened,” the holy birth of Christ.
Advent looks to Christmas and so it seems that Christmas has already come. We find it hard to remain in that mode of holy waiting, of holy expectancy. We rush on to what we think is the celebration. We forget the message sounded so profoundly and so importantly in the scripture readings for this day.
“The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ.” What powerful words, words, too, which have shaped our liturgy, words which inform the blessing at every service of the Holy Eucharist. “The Peace of God which passeth understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The Peace of God! This seems so diametrically opposed to the mad rush and busyness of this season, a holy season that threatens to become anything but holy, anything but peaceful and calm. “I wish,” I overheard someone once say with great emotion, “that they would just do away with Christmas.” I am not sure who “they” were, but there was no denying the frustration and the stress in this person’s voice. It so easily becomes too much. We forget what we are preparing for; we easily forget what the celebration is really all about.
But the problem is really with ourselves. Why? Because in so many ways, we make the mistake of thinking that Christmas is all our doing; consequently, we are all in a rush to get it done, whatever “it” is.
Herein lies the necessity of the Advent season. It is found precisely in its anticipatory nature reminding us and teaching us about the meaning of what we await. That is the great wonder and truth of these lessons and the truth of our liturgy. We are being reminded of the greater story in which we take our part. We are part of the drama. Indeed, the dogma – the strong teaching of this season – is the drama. Advent is the drama of our waiting upon God, our waiting upon the one who comes in the dawning awareness of the awful wonder of his coming. “Behold the Lamb of God,” John tells us, “which taketh away the sin of the world.”
Advent is about the grace of the one who comes. His coming is the counter to all of our mindless and endless busyness which buries us in ourselves and in the tyranny of our own anxieties. That is why we need these lessons in the heightened intensity of the darkest time of nature’s year.
Nowhere is that sense of expectancy more heightened in its intensity than on the Fourth Sunday in Advent. It appears most strongly, it seem to me, in the wonderful gospel lesson, known as “the record” or “the witness of John”. Everything comes down to the intensity of the exchange between John and the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem” who ask him, “Who art thou?” They ask their questions with a deep sense of wonderment, signifying, I think, a true desire to know about God’s dealings with his people; questions which open us out to the deep mystery of God, questions which draw us into the preparations which God himself makes for his own coming among us.
Our liturgy reminds us that we are all part of this holy drama which is nothing less than the dogma of our redemption. We cannot celebrate Christmas unless we have some sense of our need for a Saviour; some feel, we might say, for the extent of our darkness, the darkness of our ignorance and fears, the darkness of our arrogance and presumption, the darkness of our mediocrity and complacency, the darkness of our worries and our anxieties. In the week of the darkest and shortest day of the year, at the time of the longest night of the year, we look to the light of Christ breaking into our midst and gathering us into the embrace of his grace.
This is what we must will. How? By our patient and prayerful attentiveness to God’s Word proclaimed in our midst and in his Sacraments celebrated. The lessons of the Advent season awaken us to the overwhelming mystery and wonder of God’s “coming unto” us, his coming into the very darkness and misery of our world and day, not to be another casualty, but to bring us hope and joy, peace and understanding. Such things can only be found in us through the motions of God’s Advent alive in us. Our real readiness is about our openness to his grace and our willingness to enter into the drama of our redemption that is the dogma of our salvation. It is about our being with the one who wills to come to be with us. “The Lord is at hand,” St. Paul tells us, the one who “takes away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist teaches us.
But if we do not appreciate the one who comes, then we remain trapped in our anxieties. We lose sight of God. Indeed, God is removed from the horizon of our minds and, certainly, from the forefront of our lives. This is our willfulness, the greater darkness that remains within and without. We are not alive to the grandeur of God, let alone to the even greater grandeur of God’s being with us. We need to be awakened to the grandeur of God in the majesty of his truth and beauty before we can possibly make sense of the greater wonder of God’s being with us in the very soul and body of our humanity, incarnate in the child Christ.
Yet this is cause for great rejoicing, a rejoicing found in the midst of the waiting, provided we are open to learning more and more about the one who comes, provided we are willing to wait upon the motions of his grace. You see, “the Lord is at hand,” near and now and always. Therefore, “in nothing be anxious.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent IV, 2010
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