I always rejoice to hear those words opening the new Christian year. But I can scarcely remember a year when they sounded quite so good. To begin Advent, with its feeling of joyous waiting, its art of anticipation, its delicious breath-holding–I can scarcely remember a year when that has seemed quite so welcome.
In Advent we stretch our sense of time itself, we open our eyes to past and future and we deepen our present tense. That sounds wonderful to me right now–when our present world has seemed, well, so simply tedious.
Right now we have so much to worry about–from our crumbling infrastructure to our fractured economy, which someone characterized as a colossal Pozzi scheme that finally came to light, to our punctured climate to our floundering schools–there comes a point where serious as it all is it begins to look tedious. Even the national election, which in many ways for me was a moment of unanticipated joy–even there I heard a voice within me say well, glad that is over.
This world is too much with us, and Advent opens the channels to other worlds. And that begins by stretching our sense of Time.
What is Time like? Most people agree with the Hymn: Time is an ever-rolling stream (“O God Our Help in Ages Past”). It goes on forever; it is one thing after another. Time works the way an old-fashioned wind-up clock works: a series of equal tick-tocks, one after the other, identical, from now on to forever. I measure my life in coffee spoons, as Mr. Prufrock put it.
That view of Time is simple, it is intuitive and commonsensical. It is also a little dull, a little boring.
But our faith has an entirely different notion of Time. Time is a creature, an invention. It is one of the things God made. It has a shape, it has contours. In God’s hands, it can be folded, stretched, compressed, bent. It has a beginning, and it is going to have an end–that Last Day. Then there won’t be any more Time. Postmodern science began to say things like this about Time a few decades ago; Christianity has always said them. Time is not a straight line that reaches from here to forever. It is perhaps curved, maybe it’s a circle, it may have loops and gaps and all sorts of peculiarities.
Does that sound strange? Well of course it sounds strange, many things in our Faith sound strange. Your mind is complex and uncanny, it is one of the things that make you a walking miracle–but your mind is also boxed in by the world we know and love. So when we start thinking about, and reading about, and praying about, matters that reach outside that box, things are naturally going to sound strange. It would be strange in fact if they did not seem strange–I believe it because it is absurd, said Tertullian, and I think this is what he meant. Not I insist on being stubbornly weird. I insist that, when we hear about space, time, eternity, infinity, creation, judgment, the Kingdom of God, those matters are supposed to sound uncanny.
Well, we are opening four weeks where there will be no shortage of uncanny, I can assure you of that. And, you know, uncanny sounds good to me right now. Out of this world sounds refreshing.
Time in God’s hands is not that slow, steady, sequence it seems to our mind’s eye. God can fold time, for example.
That is what we do in fact with Time during Advent. We fold it. Imagine a strip of three panels, in sequence. Fold them together and you have three simultaneous things. Now if this strip is Time, you have Past, Present, and Future at the same Time.
Pay attention to the lessons and it will be very clear. Origen says the Cross is sought in the Old, given in the New, and assimilated in the Church: during Advent we work through those phrases.
During Advent we recover the Past. I have to use a special word. We have a word in English, “remembrance,” that is used to translate it. But that word is too weak. The word is anamnesis, and it really does not mean “remember,” it means “make the Past present.” In other words, make that fold in Time. Pay attention to those Old Testament readings through this season and feel what it is like to wait for the Messiah. To long for the First Advent.
And by the way NOT to know exactly what, or who, is going to arrive. Listen to the promises as you hear them in the OT lesson and you will understand what I mean. We know the Person they all refer to but that is only because we have hindsight. Stand for a moment this Advent with the people of God waiting for the Messiah: wisdom, key of David, root of Jesse, God-with-us: it all sounds so rich and so good, but what exactly could it mean? Stand back and share their blessed confusion. They were hardly clueless-they had if anything too many clues. But what it all amounted to, no one could have known. It must have been joyously confusing.
And deeper still. Isaiah today expresses it so well: longing. A craving for something. Put it this way: he begs the Lord Yahweh to come like a raging fire, make the mountains shake, make the brushwood blaze–come and judge.
Now think about it: these are not usually things anyone would want. Earthquakes and forest fires are the sorts of things we normally ask God to keep us from, not to cause. Meaning: we are sated with this world. We crave holiness. As John Keble, one of the Oxford greats who inspired our parish at its foundations, the time has come to pray not for Peace but for something better still: Holiness.
Would you like holiness? We challenged one another in adult education recently with that question and the answer was, yes, yes without any doubt. I want lots of things but the greatest of these is holiness–not because it sounds pious but because it very simply gathers up into one absolutely every longing craving aspiration hope and desire we have ever had and ever could have. We recover the past during Advent, so that we can wait again for real holiness to arrive.
And during Advent we remember the Future. You heard me correctly. Sounds absurd, because it is supposed to. Serious philosophers worked on that one recently: we can remember the Past, why can’t we remember the Future? Faith says we can.
We start by imagining it.
Today’s Gospel lesson offers us all the tools we need to imagine the future: the stars falling from the sky, moon and sun extinguished, Angels gathering God’s chosen people from the four sources of the winds, from one edge of the world to the other, and the Son of Man arriving on a cloud, with Angels, in power and glory.
Now notice what is happening. Your imagination is being trained. This is not a crystal ball for the future; it is remembering the future. Preparing to be part of it. It won’t look like this, but it will be like this. Imagine the sky as a scroll rolling up from end to end, imagine the sun going dim, imagine the Angels–not winged things but radiant Persons. It will not look like this, but it will be like this.
And during Advent we open the Present. What a relief. Most of the time our souls are so myopic. Right now we see a pretty church with a few dozen nice people. But what’s really here? Dynamic energy beyond belief, a spectrum of colors not only past what the eye can see but what the mind can imagine, the deep consciousness of that few dozen people which manages to recapitulate the history of our species–and that’s merely what science tells us is here. Faith adds the presence of Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven, and soon the Real Presence of the Body of Christ.
Those are the things that are really here-that is reality. Advent invites us to tune into that reality, to stop denying it, stop avoiding it.
We open our Christian year by asking for what? The Armor of Light. What kind of armor is that? Not just a pretty symbol though it is that, this is a gorgeous prayer to open the Christian year. Here’s how to appreciate it: chain mail protected against the broadsword, plate armor protected against the lance. Against what does Light protect? What does Light defend us from? Lies. When the light shines, lies have no place to hide. Ever suffer because of a lie? Of course. Well, remember that moment, remember how hurt and frustrated you felt. And now realize that the light will never allow that to happen again.
Ugliness. We humans have made it a one-species project to uglify this world where God made us the doorkeepers. Well, Light is one of the beautiful things.
And finally, Error. The more complicated the operation the more light we need. I believe that is partly what it means that God’s first word as Let there be Light: from that moment, what God created could be seen.
Recover the past, remember the future, open the present: this is the challenge of the new season. And our deep tradition gives us the equipment we need to meet that challenge. The somber color purple to steady us while the world outside grows giddy and desperate. The weekly lessons–or daily if you want the fullness of Anglicanism–that offer us past, present, and future folded every day.
The Advent resolve. That is our responsibility–it came home to me last year when some radio program or television channel or newspaper or store–I don’t remember which– tried to cash in on the “Twelve Days of Christmas” which they thought was a count-down from December 13th. Perfectly clueless–and a reminder that Advent is not only our privilege but our responsibility. It’s up to us to keep St. Martin’s Lent–nobody else is going to.
The there is the Wreath: a horizontal clock, gathering the light as the daylight dwindles. And a reminder, week by week, that we are donning the Armor of Light. I feel a little vulnerable right now. But I trust that in four weeks, I will have the armor of Light as surely as that wreath as four corners of flame.
This world is indeed too much with us. But I see one spot of light on that wreath this morning. And that spot of light reminds me of the light that this world could never comprehend. That protects us in this mortal life. And which at the Second Advent will flood heaven and earth. Till that day when the one who “visited us in the present, returns in the future in power and great glory, and we rise to the life immortal.”
