Day: December 15, 2023

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 December

Waiting in the wilderness

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness. We are, perhaps, not so good about waiting, wanting instead the immediacy and intensity of ‘celebratory’ events. That is to forget the meaning of waiting. What is our waiting? It is at once human desire and the divine gift that redeems our desires. Our human desires for this and that thing are radically incomplete and unable to be fulfilled. Our waiting is really prayer; the desire for wholeness and completeness which by definition cannot be fulfilled in ourselves.

What is the wilderness? It is not the external world or a world without us. The wilderness is us. This is the strong message of Isaiah, the most ‘evangelical’ of all the prophets, as some have noted. Looking back and reflecting on the great themes of Creation and the Fall, Isaiah movingly highlights the wilderness within us. “Let me sing a love song for my beloved, … a love song concerning his vineyard,” Isaiah 5 begins. “My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is the wildness in us that makes the wilderness both within us and in our world. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” The question, like so many of the biblical questions, simply calls us to account and bids us reflect upon ourselves in our yearnings and desires. Ultimately what we seek is the absolute goodness of God which is more than what we can completely imagine and yet belongs to all our seeking and desiring.

But Isaiah, as we heard in the Advent Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols, shows us another view of ourselves and our world that stands in complete contrast to the sad and disturbing divisions and polarities of our divided and violent world. Isaiah offers us a picture of Paradise Restored, of the harmony between God and our humanity, the harmony of creation itself as grounded in the Creator. Instead of Nietzche’s will to power which supplants Darwin’s struggle for survival, the wolf and the lamb are envisioned as lying down together, an image of the interplay and interdependence of the natural world that transcends the binaries of distinction but without negating them. That image of Paradise Restored is the symbolic meaning of Bethlehem.

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Sermons

“The Lord Is At Hand”: Advent Programme

“The Lord is at hand”

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the Advent refrain for the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We wait upon the motions of God’s word coming to us but that waiting is about our active attention to God’s constant and eternal presence. His coming is really about our coming into a deeper understanding and meaning of our lives with the God who is always at hand, always near, and always with us. As we heard last Sunday in the thundering words of Luke’s apocalyptic gospel, “look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” And on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we will hear Paul’s words that “the Lord is at hand” even as that day will bring us to Christmas Eve and to the celebration of Christ’s holy nativity.

The kingdom of heaven, the Lord, your redemption. What does it mean to speak about these things that are “at hand,” that are “nigh”, or near us? Our Advent meditation tonight will focus on something of their meaning by way of Mark Frank, a seventeenth century Anglican preacher and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1613-1664), in ways which, I hope, will deepen our understanding of the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. It is really all about his eternal being and presence into which we come.

He notes that the Lord is said to be at hand or near us in several ways. First and foremost, “he is at hand, or near us, by his Divine essence,” by virtue of being God. For God, as the traditions of mystical theology and philosophy suggest, is “like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As Mark Frank says, “He is everywhere; we therefore nowhere, but that he is near us,” drawing upon Paul’s observation that God is “not far from every one of us” since we have no being, no life apart from him. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17. 27,28).

This highlights the primacy of God with respect to all our thinking and being and recalls us to the mystery which embraces our very being. The mystical traditions of thought are all about a constant redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of reality, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches. That mystery underlies all of the different forms of the kingdom of heaven, the Lord, and your redemption being at hand or nigh to us.

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