Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent
“Gather up the fragments”
T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, written in 1922, captures an important feature of our modern world. The poem explores through a series of evocative images a world which has been largely destroyed through the madness of war, particularly the First World War, the catastrophic effects of which we are still beginning to try to comprehend and which has largely defined the whole of the twentieth century and carries over into our present anxieties. Near the end of the poem, he captures that world past and present in an arresting image: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The idea is that all that is left of the whole of a culture and a civilization are fragments, bits and pieces to which we cling in the memory of something which once was but is no longer. All is in fragments. All is in ruins.
We, too, are fragmented, unsure and uncertain about ourselves as selves having been willingly or unwillingly reduced to the bits and bytes of the digital economy, little more than clickbait for the benefit of our corporate masters. But over and against Eliot’s image of clinging to “fragments shored up against our ruins,” Jesus offers another image, the image of redemption, of the gathering up of “the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” A gathering up that has to do with the sense of wholeness and completeness; in short, salvation.
This Sunday is about endings and beginnings in and through which we might begin to find our true end, not in the ruins but in God. How to begin and how to end and how to begin again? These are some of the questions which this Sunday presents to us, The Sunday Next Before Advent. Its very designation hints at the question. We come to the end of the church year and so to the beginning of the next. We stand on the brink of the Advent Season but at the same time at the end of the Trinity Season.
The point is that these times of transition speak profoundly to our lives in pilgrimage. In a way we are constantly turning back and turning towards what truly defines us, constantly circling around our spiritual identity in Christ in whose person God turns towards us.
