Sermon preached at St Margaret Newlands
Malachi 3.1-4
Canticle: Luke 1.68-79
Philippians 1.3-11
Luke 3.1-4
“See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, he is coming says the Lord.”
I wonder sometimes whether we need to see Advent differently. We are accustomed to think of Advent as the time in which we prepare, in which we live in the hope and expectancy that God is coming to us, the time in which we wait actively upon the coming of the Lord. And of course that is true. But Advent is also the time in which God longs to be with us. In Philippians, Paul writes of overflowing love: “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight.“ Malachi talks about “the covenant in which you delight.” This is a reminder that Advent is about delight – mutual delight. Paul writing to the Christians in Phillippi, writes “How I long for you, for all of you, with the compassion of Jesus Christ.” “How I long for you…” These are Paul’s words, but in them we hear a message which tells us something about God and where God is in Advent. “How I long for you, long to be with you,” writes Paul, but this is not only Paul’s message, but God’s. How God longs for us – so much that God sent Christ, God’s Son into the world for us. God comes to us, not because God must, but because God will, because God loves us, and in that loving wants to be with us, to support our faith, to make us whole. Advent is a time not just of waiting, but of longing, a time in which we may open ourselves to feel the power of God’s longing for us, open ourselves to feel the power of our longing for God and respond—as Paul wishes for the Philippians—by overflowing with love, knowledge and insight.
It is powerful, this desire. Powerful and disruptive. Both today’s passage from Malachi and the reading from the Gospel remind us of the potential power of the coming of God. When the Lord comes into the world, the whole world will change: “Every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth.” Everything will change, all that was before will be altered, and so too with the people: for in the encounter with God people will see what they have done, will repent of their sins, will turn to salvation. For the Lord is like a refiner’s fire or like fuller’s soap, as a refiner and purifier of silver—and the encounter with the passionate love of God will confront us with who we really are, will strip away all that is impure, unnecessary, extraneous, will reduce us to our essentials.
These are not easy images. On the contrary, they can be frightening and unrelenting, even while they are invigorating and inspiring. These images tell us – warn us – that the love of God is not going to leave us untouched, that it will call us to become our true selves, to realise what really matters. To give up what we should not be in order to become what we are called to be. To be pared down, sculpted, until we are become the essential person that God calls us to be. This is the deep, true encounter with God’s love. It can be very painful, but it can also be of great joy: joy and fear are here intertwined, as so often in the prophets. God’s love for the world, God’s desire for us, is in the deepest sense of the word “passion”. It is passion in the sense of love, which takes form in the incarnation, but it is also passion in the sense of suffering, for we know that it will end with Christ’s death on the cross, and his resurrection which gives the world new meaning.
That means that it is often in the deep experiences of love, of passion, of death that we encounter God and learn about the truths of our lives and our selves. Michael Mayne writes:
There are in every life, except perhaps in the most diminished by disability or circumstance, days when we cannot avoid the transcendent and the mysterious. The most obvious have to do with birth and falling in love, illness and death. These times may be at once deeply spiritual and deeply carnal experiences, putting in us touch with levels of experience that we sense but may find it difficult to describe.[1]
Falling in love, or the process of expecting and then having a child, which is one aspect of what we are remembering in Advent, can call you into “transcending yourself [to] become more, not less than you are.”[2] And so too do the dark moments, times of pain and loss, of crisis, in which we are confronted with the depths of existence, of the questions about who we are and what life is, of what meaning life can have. These are experiences which take us beyond ourselves and confront us with the essential.
They are also experiences which can leave us wondering where God is in the world. On retreat this summer, I spent some time (as Ignatius directs) thinking about the Trinity’s decision that Christ should be incarnate. The intention, I am sure, was that I should contemplate God’s desire to be in the world. But I found myself asking: what difference has the incarnation made? The world is still such a damaged place; people are so cruel to each other; the problems seem so intractable; in the face of this fallenness, what does it mean to say that Christ was incarnate and redeemed it? Some words of Elizabeth Goudge offer a perspective on such questions:
It may be difficult, in the face of human suffering, to believe in God, … but if you destroy God you do not solve your problem but merely leave yourself alone with it … A ghastly loneliness.[3]
Perhaps these testing experiences of refining fire teach us of our need for God. They show us that God desires us – and desires that we become our most essential selves – but they also show us that and how we need God.
It is this kind of challenging, astringent encounter with God for which we preparing throughout Advent. It is the kind of encounter with God’s desire for us which we may not actively seek, for it is an encounter which focuses, refines, pares down, in order not to diminish but to enhance and reveal. That is the encounter with the God who is coming into our world. Advent challenges us to listen, to encounter the refining fire of God amongst all the business that fills our lives, to open ourselves to the encounter with the essentials, with what is “really real”.
It is no accident, I think, that in the Bible such encounters often seem to take place in the desert. For deserts are surely places in which life is reduced to its essentials, where it becomes very clear what is necessary, what is unnecessary, what leads to life and what leads to death. And in that sense, deserts are not geographical places. Those of us who do not have the pain or the privilege of living in the desert may find our deserts in different times and in different places. In moments of joy or crisis, but also in taking time to be apart and slow down and open ourselves to God; in the moments which we find to be alone and let the thoughts and the intimations of God come to us, however unlikely a place or a context it might seem. “My desert is three stops on the Paris metro,” someone once said, three stops on the metro, surrounded by people, but alone with God.
In the times and the places when we are open to the mystery that lies at the heart of things, in the moment in which we know that someone, something is calling to us, “when everything beckons us to perceive,” as the poet Rilke puts it.[4] We God’s desire for us calls us to enter into the places in which we open ourselves to the overwhelming love of God, to God’s passion for us. Love, says Paul, is what gives everything its true meaning. God’s love, God’s desire, God’s passion for the world gives it – and with it us – true meaning. Let us open ourselves to God’s desire for us – as we are, as God delights in us.
“See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, he is coming says the Lord.”
Amen
[1] Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder, p. 51.
[2] Ibid., p. 52.
[3] Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells, pp. 372-373.
[4] Cited by Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder, p. 31.
Wings of the Morning 