“The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious”
Ready yet? Or are you still running madly about in circles in the mindless busyness that so often and so easily overtakes us? Perhaps we need this Sunday in Advent just like we need Advent more than we realise in order for Christmas to have any real meaning. “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is the Advent mantra. It comes to further expression today in the notes of expectancy and joy, of wonder and peace signalled in the readings. “The Lord is at hand,” Paul says in Philippians with a sense of rejoicing, a “rejoic[ing] in the Lord alway”, he says.
And in the gospel reading from St. John, too, we seem to be going in circles, indeed to have come full circle. The passage this morning ends where the gospel reading for The Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist says, pointing us to Jesus. There, on The Sunday Next Before Advent, it serves as a kind of transition between the ending of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent. Here on The Fourth Sunday in Advent it signals the meaning of the one whose coming we await, the one who is at hand always.
We are going in circles just not mindlessly but mindfully, I hope. At least that is the purpose of the Church’s proclamation in Advent. Perhaps it is only now in an increasingly post-Christian and post-secular world that we can begin to enter more fully and more mindfully into the mystery of God with us now and always without the social veneer and cultural patina so often mistaken for the real thing. Perhaps we can begin to see how the Christian Faith simply intensifies the great religious mystery of our being with God that belongs to philosophical religion more generally and which allows for a principled discourse with other religions and even our post-secular culture, particularly in its multicultural confusions.
Our advent wreath is about a circle of light. It challenges the rather linear nature of our thinking and our doing, as if time were all and everything, itself a kind of mindlessness in the endless parade of the contingent and the random. It reminds us instead of how our lives are embraced in the eternity of God and that time has no meaning apart from its being gathered into the fullness of God’s truth and light, into the eternal present of God.
Repentance is itself a kind of circling, a redire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches us, a circling back to him from whom we have turned away. That circling is of the greatest significance because it signals the idea of hope and change, of transformation and renewal without which we are completely and fatalistically caught in our own mindlessness. Metanoia is the word for repentance and it highlights a change in outlook, a turning around in our minds, a circling back to truth; it is about a kind of mindfulness. Not the mindfulness that has become a fad in the global corporate culture, say of Google, which is really only a gimmick to be more mindful of the only thing that matters there, which is profit. Being mindful of profit is not the Christian metanoia nor the Jewish teshuvah nor the Islamic tawba – all terms which signal a kind of moral growth and transformation through an ever-deepening engagement with the truth of God.
Today’s gospel highlights a further aspect of that profounder mindfulness, that deeper metanoia. It is captured in the remarkable exchange between John the Baptist in the wilderness and “the Priests and Levites [sent] from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who art thou?’” The question takes us back to The First Sunday in Advent to the scene of Christ’s triumphal and yet disturbing entry into Jerusalem where “all the whole city was moved, saying, Who is this?” Here the questions about John the Baptist are turned into a testimony about Jesus, the one, he says, “who stands among you, whom ye know not” and yet it is he, he says, “who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” Powerful words which convict us, too, about the one who is in our presence whom we often ignore and do not know, lost in our own busyness. The coming of Christ awakens us to the eternal presence of God with us.
“The Lord is at hand” and always is the great insight strengthened and intensified in the Advent message and especially on this day and this week, the week of the darkest time of nature’s year, the week of the longest night and shortest day. The poet, T.S. Eliot, seems to have caught Lancelot Andrewes’ meaning about repentance as a kind of circling. Such are the motions of love, the dance of love “at the still point of the turning world” (‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets). Our liturgy is about that dance.
“Love is most nearly itself,” he says, “when here and now cease to matter …/ We must be still and still moving/Into another intensity/ For a further union, a deeper communion/ Through the dark cold and the empty desolation” (‘East Coker’, Four Quartets). “In my end,” he says, “is my beginning.” This Sunday calls us to a mindfulness about God being with us in the quiet darkness of Advent, God calling us to joy and peace. For “Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present” (‘Burnt Norton’).
In our mindless busyness we forget to be still and to be mindful. But Paul tells us “in nothing be anxious.” The older King James translation, used in the Prayer Book for centuries, is even more to the point, “be careful for nothing”, it says. We are, I am afraid, only too full of cares about far too many things. We need the quiet mindfulness of The Fourth Sunday in Advent, the quiet mindfulness that gathers us into the eternal presence of God, the quiet mindfulness that points us to “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” We are returned time and time again to God. Such is the metanoia, the mindfulness of Advent. We return to him who is our beginning and end. For “What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from.” The point of such a circling “will be to arrive where we started/ And to know the place for the first time” (‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets), being still and yet “still moving into another intensity … a deeper communion”.
Our mindfulness is a deeper knowing, a thinking that is a reflective remembering about our being gathered into the eternal presence of God through the one who comes to us seeking our good and bestowing his love.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered (‘Burnt Norton’).
For “the end and the beginning were always there/ Before the beginning and after the end./ And all is always now” (‘Burnt Norton’).
This day and this week seek to bring us into the fuller mystery of God’s eternal presence. Such is the heightened expectancy and the joy and the peace of Advent if, and only if, we are mindful of the motions of God’s love coming to us. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Such mindfulness is the counter to all our anxieties. In him we find the peace “which passeth all understanding” because it is the peace of God, the moment remembered where “all is always now”.
“The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 4, 2015