by CCW | 22 November 2021 06:00
Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent fast approaches and with Advent, we begin anew.
But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin anew? Are we simply trapped in a never-ending cycle, like squirrels on a fly-wheel? Is the cycle of the Church Year but another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives?
We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives. But it means, too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed, the idea of God making known to us things that compel our attention.
In the greyness of the year, comes Christ the King (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness” (Jer. 23.6), our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great (330-379 AD) shows us something of what this means:
As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in
summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk. (Letters)
Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had enough talk, too much talk in fact, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evenings, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings?
Surely, it is God’s talk, God’s Word and no other, God’s Word making his talk in us. In the midst of a scene of apocalyptic judgment, that Word tells us clearly and directly, “this will be a time for you to bear testimony” as Luke puts it (Lk 21.13), a time for you to witness, a time for God’s Word to speak in your life and for God’s Word to live more fully and more perfectly in you. And what is the time, except this time, now and always, even unto the end of time? The real measure of our lives is the truth which we are given to proclaim.
We have come to an ending and what do we find? What kind of testimony have we borne this past year? Has God’s Word been manifest in our lives or hidden from view, buried under the intolerable burden of our sins? Certainly there have been great challenges.
Perhaps you have found some fruits of grace in your life, some progress made against the snarl and whine of your constant and besetting sins. And if so, may God be praised, but this is no time to rest on your laurels, no time to relax, only time to begin again, with God’s Word ruling your soul yet more and more that “your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment” (Phil. 1.9). In short, begin anew.
Perhaps, your words have been stout against God’s Word in lives of immorality, lives of idleness, lives of foolishness or in lives of immoderate busyness, lives of selfish self-involvement, lives of manic madness, or of angry discontent. And what shall you do? Begin anew with the Word of the Lord spoken to the woman taken in adultery speaking to you, “Go and sin no more” (Jn. 8.11). The year runs out most surely in notes of repentance. Repentance belongs to the community of sinners. Are we not all such sinners in heart, if not in word and deed? Repentance is a beginning anew for all of us.
Perhaps, you have found the year a dreary round and your souls simply places of desolation, darkness and despair and how shall you begin? Listen and hear “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness”, for even the desert of despair can become “the highway of the Lord” (Is. 40. 3). There is a harvest in the wilderness; listen and begin anew.
Perhaps, you have found that you are dying, that your end is near, though “no man knoweth the hour”, and you wonder in the loneliness of your fears, what shall I do? Begin anew? Yes, indeed. Begin in him whose beginning contains all our endings. Let the fear of your dying become your fear of the Lord, that is to say, love in awe at his majesty and truth revealed to you. To love “the Son of Righteousness” means finding “healing in his wings”(Mal. 4.2), being gathered under the “shadow of thy wings”(Ps. 17.8). And so, this too, shall be “a time for you to bear testimony”. Indeed, no better time, “now and in the hour of our death”. “In patience”, in waiting upon the Lord, “possess ye your souls” (Lk. 21.19). Again, begin anew.
We come to an ending only to find that we have come to the beginning, to him who is the foundation of our lives. We find all our endings and all our beginnings in the Father’s Son and Word. We come simply to Christ. And surely, that is the truth of our Christian life. By his Word we have gained the threshold of heaven upon which we sing and dance. What more can we ever say than that? What can our talk be except his Word in us, the testimony of his love for us, this time and every time, now and always. The fruit of our lives must be our talk of him. Let us, this Advent and now, be stirred up to begin anew.
Fr. David Curry
2021
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