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An Advent Meditation – 2025
“My words shall not pass away”

Luke’s apocalyptic warnings which we hear on Advent II are strong and disturbing words. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring” (Luke 21. 25-33). There is nothing really new about that: “same old, same old,” we might even say, other than being far more eloquent than, perhaps, either the news or the weather report!

Yet, it must surely give us pause, “men’s hearts failing them for fear,” anxious and worried on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present.

But exactly how, to use Cranmer’s words in his marvellous Collect for Advent II, do such disturbing warnings about judgment provide us with “patience and comfort of thy holy Word”, let alone give us “hope”? And yet that is precisely Jesus’ claim here. “My words shall not pass away.”

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Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father: way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children: pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Psalm 51.17

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 138)

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Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and so to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent marks a new beginning. But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? Is the cycle of the Church Year 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? “To make an end is to make a beginning,” T.S. Eliot observes for “the end is where we start from.” It is about the principle of our 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 for our souls, as it were, a gathering up of the fruits of the past year’s grace 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 and all because “Jesus turned.” The turnings of the year and our turnings turn upon God’s turning to us.

In the barren emptiness of nature’s year, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73), 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,” 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 suggests 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.

Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had quite enough talk, too much talk, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evening, 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. For apart from God’s talk, our talk is vain and destructive. “The tongue,” as St. James notes, “is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous member…With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.” Such are our contradictions. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” As he says, “My brethren, this ought not to be so.” But sadly it is, for “no human being can tame the tongue.”

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“The night is far spent”

There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilizations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion: distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.

In one way or another, they are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.

In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship and mortality. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limitations of our knowing.

He undertakes the first of the great spiritual journeys of our humanity in terms of literature, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found. He journeys to find Utnapishtim to ask him“concerning life and death.” Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the much older story of the flood contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He has been granted everlasting life and has survived the flood, the flood which was intended to wipe out the human nuisance and yet threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” beside the wall of the city of Uruk. But where is Utnapishtim? At the end of the world and beyond the end of the world, we might say, all alone except for his wife, unnamed and unknown. We may ask what kind of immortality this is.

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Lenten Prose

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father: way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children: pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

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The Collect for today, Rogation Monday (Rogation Days being the three days before Ascension Day), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962);

ASSIST us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers, and dispose the way of thy servants towards the attainment of everlasting salvation; that, among all the changes and chances of this mortal life, they may ever be defended by thy most gracious and ready help; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 2:1-8
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:1-10

Collect for the Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men:

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift: Bless, we beseech thee, the labours of thy people, and cause the earth to bring forth her fruits abundantly In their season, that we may with grateful hearts give thanks to thee for the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Genesis 1:26-31a
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-33

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At the Lenten Quiet Day held last Saturday, Fr. David Curry delivered three meditations on the theme Lent and Original Sin. The text of the three talks may be downloaded in a single pdf document by clicking here.

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