Revd Mark Bonney
I relish this season of Advent
because the stirring readings and hymns, and yearnings expressed within them
resonate with that peculiar mixture of hope and frustration that is a part of
life.
That anguished hope was
expressed in the very first lines of the first reading “Oh that you would tear
open the heavens and come down” – this is part of a passage in Isaiah that
expresses a mixture of hope and frustration – hope, because the rebuilding of
the temple in Jerusalem was now a real possibility – frustration because there
was so little progress in that direction, and worse, there was no sign that God
would crown the new possibilities with a spectacular intervention.
The Bible is full of expressions
of desperate longing, of anguish borne of great hope and expectation – as the
Psalmist achingly cries “As the deer pants for the waterbrooks so longs my
soul for you O God” – or as St Paul cries “For all creation is groaning in
travail together until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves groan
inwardly as we wait.”
Advent is a season that lives
with the frustration of hoping and waiting for a new world that is beyond the
capacity of the human race to achieve.
The world around us is a
mysterious mixture – the seemingly intractable situation between Israel and
Palestine; the fears and realities of global terrorism and violence; the bleak
realities of inequality, violence and hunger; half the people on the earth live
on less than $2 a day – a billion people go to bed hungry every night – one
woman dies every minute in childbirth – there are estimated to be 40 million
AIDS case in the world rising to 100 million in 2005.
People react to this in
different ways. One way is to say well let’s accept that this is the way
things are and get whatever enjoyment we can out of things while we can. “Eat
drink and be merry”. But religious faith can’t rest with that – if God is
a God of Justice then faith cries out that this not how the world is meant to be
– it cannot just stay like this –we cry with the psalmist “Oh that you
would tear open the heavens and come down.”
The people of Israel had a dream
of something that was not-yet – how it would come about they didn’t know –
when it would be they didn’t know -
but there would be a time when swords were turned into ploughshares and
spears into pruning hooks; when nation would not lift up sword against nation.
Someone of a cynical disposition would say that this dream seems as far away as
ever the dream was a foolish one. But it was a “not-yet” dream for which
they could live, and it gave dignity and purpose, and sometimes influenced
reality.
Jesus too, it seems, lived with
this hope of transformation. Today’s gospel is one of those strange texts to
do with the end of time. For the gospel writers and arguably for Jesus too, that
end was not thought to be far away. The return of the Son of Man in great power
and glory was eagerly awaited.
It’s hard for us to take these
predictions of the end of time seriously – all the guesses have been wrong –
but the heart of these texts is not about when – the heart of these texts is
about a vision of a changed world where God’s will is done on earth as it is
heaven – a vision of what we pray for every time we say the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s a looking forward to something better
-a day when the poor will have bread, the tears will cease, and God will
be all in all.
As Christians we’re not to be
content with the way things are – ‘Come Lord Jesus’ is the yearning cry of
so many of our Advent hymns. We belong for something that is not-yet – that is
coming to be. We’re a pilgrim people, on the way to a Kingdom that is always
ahead of us, beckoning.
Famously Martin Luther King, at
the end of the March on Washington in 1963 spelled out his dream of unity
between black and white;
I have a dream that my four children will one
day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the colour of their skin
but by the content of their character. I have a dream today – that one day
down in Alabama little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with
little white boys and girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today that
freedom will reign.
It hasn’t come yet – there’s a “not-yet” quality to it. But the dream makes people restless with injustice and the world is better for it. Desmond Tutu dreams of South Africa as a rainbow nation. The reality is more ambiguous – but the dream challenges and inspires.
Today, at the beginning of
Advent we remind ourselves that faith is always about being unsettled with how
things are and longing for how they are to be. We look fowards -
we dream - this Eucharist
gives us a foretaste of sitting down together at one table in the Kingdom –
but meanwhile we’re in the ‘not-yetness’ of God’s creation – the
“not-yetness” of justice for all, the “not-yetness” of peace in the
Middle East, the “not-yetness” of a cure for cancer or of an end to poverty,
racism and hunger. Some of us will be in the middle of our own ‘not-yetness’
as we move through and struggle with these difficult life-experiences where
answers are not readily available – not yet, anyway.
But we dare to dream, we dare to hope and we dare to go on believing – and we do so because God is God; and he is the one and only living God, Father Son