ADVENT 2020
I have always looked on Advent as a sort of mini-Lent, and it shares with Lent that sense of waiting and anticipation. It is not as long as Lent, of course; but, just as Lent prepares us for Holy Week and Easter, so Advent prepares us for the coming of Christ in his birth in Bethlehem, his incarnation, as the theologians put it. But it also looks forward to Christ’s final advent at the end of time. What we do in church in Advent in our readings, our sermons and our prayers points us towards Christ’s birth. We are also challenged to confront the theme of divine judgement, as our reading from Mark’s Gospel does this Sunday. ‘Lo he comes with clouds descending’, writes Charles Wesley in a great Advent hymn. I goes on to conclude - ‘Every eye shall now behold him robed in dreadful majesty.’ That is an element of Advent we are reluctant to acknowledge perhaps today, but it is still there. In our uncertain times, it is a useful reminder of our dependence upon God in every thing. When I was a choir-boy in the 50s, I remember the Reverend Druett preaching on the Four Last Things - Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell - every single Advent. These are the traditional themes for Advent meditation. This made much harder for all of us under commercial pressure. As I write this, my email box is full of encouragements to get ahead of my Christmas shopping by taking advantage of Black Friday offers from (almost) all and sundry! I find it really difficult to concentrate on Advent and sustain the appropriate sense of alert watchfulness when the surrounding atmosphere is trying to tell me Christmas has already started. It hasn’t. But the underlying prayer of Advent remains ‘Maranatha’ - ‘Our Lord, come.’ Let us pray it every hour of every day in Advent, and let us prepare ourselves for Our Lord’s birth on 25th December. Church decorations in Advent are simple and spare. Purple is the liturgical colour. We are lucky in the northern hemisphere as Advent deals at the darkest time of the year. The natural symbols of darkness and light are powerfully at work throughout Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. We light candles on our Advent wreath, a custom that came into our country in the nineteenth century. Christingle, which we shall be unable to hold this year because of the Covid19 regulations, comes originally from Moravia. We shall hold our Christingle later next year, when the regulations are relaxed. So much will be different once that happens, won’t it? The third Sunday of Advent was observed in mediaeval times as a splash of colour, rather like Mothering or Refreshment Sunday in Lent. We light a pink candle, hence the name ‘Rose Sunday’ and the chant for that Sunday started with the Latin word for ‘Rejoice’, ‘Gaudete’. It is known as Gaudete Sunday. Finally, in the last days of Advent the Church has the sequence of Great ‘O’ Antiphons, which we recall in the hymn ‘O come, o come, Emmanuel.’ When will we be able to sing again? I wish you all a thoughtful and prayerful Advent, full of expectation and anticipation of Our Lord’s first coming in Bethlehem and his Second Coming at the end of time. We shall be back in church on 6th December. I cannot wait! John
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We have come to the end of the Church’s Year. Next Sunday is Advent Sunday, when the colour of our hangings in our churches will be sombre, purple or violet, to catch the mood of the season, one of thoughtfulness and reflection. It is right, then, that the Year should go out with a bang, and it does! This Sunday is the Festival of Christ the King. The hangings in our churches are joyful and celebratory, gold or ivory, or even gold and ivory, worthy of a King. They are there to lift the heart, and, God knows, we need our hearts lifting this year!
Today’s Gospel is the last great parable in Matthew’s Gospel (chapter 25, verses 31-46). It teaches us about the end of time, when the Son of Man, that is, Our Lord himself, ‘comes in all his glory, and all his angels with him.’ He is going to separate the sheep from the goats, the good from the bad, the just from the wicked, the saints from the less saintly. In my last church we had a version of this scene on our chancel arch. It dated from the Middle Ages and was rather faded. However, it was there and did its job - to remind us of the end of time and the Last Judgement, as it had done since the thirteenth century. We were meant to be frightened into being good! I don’t think this parable is there to do that. Yes, there is a warning, but there is also an encouragement. The sheep, among whom of course we count ourselves, have been doing their Christian duty all along. They are a little surprised when Our Lord commends them for feeding him, giving him cool, refreshing water to drink, clothing him, visiting him in prison or when he was sick. But he was there all along. St Francis had a similar experience in his own life. He loved God and followed him as best he could, but one thing bothered him - he dreaded lepers, who were common in Umbria, and in fact there was a leper colony outside Assisi. One day the very thing he dreaded happened. He saw coming towards him a leper and there was no way of avoiding him. Against his will Francis felt himself compelled to embrace the leper. When Francis had gone a few steps, he turned round and the leper had vanished. It had been Jesus in the form of the leper. Francis’s fear of lepers had gone, and he went and worked for some time in the colony. ‘When I was sick, you visited me… When did we see you sick and visited you?.. When you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.’ This parable is also a challenge to us, but it is one we willingly take up. Even though we cannot see Our Lord, we know he is present in the hungry and thirsty, the sick, those in prison, strangers and refugees, and we act accordingly. Sometimes, God allows us to see the figure of Christ in those we are helping, and that gives us new energy and courage to go on. Our Jesus is the Lord of all time and space, the Ruler of the Universe, ‘Pantocrator’. He is the just judge who loves the whole of creation and brings peace, justice and truth. That is what we are celebrating this Sunday.
Today’s Gospel is Matthew 25.14-30. It comes from the end of Matthew’s description of Jesus’ ministry and just before his arrest and suffering. There is an air of apocalyptic about it. There is a sense of judgement and the end of time. It is beautifully told and is unsettling for some.
Bishop Ruth, our new bishop of Horsham, recently talked about the figure of the man who is about to go away as an image of God. It is a God who is generous to an extreme, a God who is very rich. He gives one servant two and a half years’ wages (five talents), another a year’s wages (two talents) and the last six months’ wages. They are large sums. God is generous to us all in different ways. The talents we receive from God are not monetary of course, but they are real nonetheless. We are called upon to develop our talents to the best of our ability. God does not ask for anything more from us. Notice that the man, on his return, commends the first two servants with the same words - ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Imagine the joy and wonder at hearing those words uttered by God at the end of the age. Both servants receive the same commendation. Both of them - those words are for all of us. The problem for the third servant is his total lack of trust in the fairness and justice of his master. He is totally unwilling to use what talents he has and develop them. His talents remain buried. There is no development, no growth. He does nothing, just waits for the return of his master with fear and dread. That is the picture of a person who is spiritually dead, unable to understand the generosity of God and unwilling to try to grasp it. His fate is horrible, and it gives Jesus an opportunity to use one of his favourite phrases - ‘where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’, a fate literally worse than death and a stern warning to his disciples. We notice the warning at the end of the parable - ‘Whoever does not have, even what he does have will be taken from him.’ It is indeed no laughing matter. What about us in November 2020? We are all in a very strange situation, where we find ourselves constrained by the lockdown and unable to live our lives as we feel God wants us to. I think this parable warns us to use what opportunities we have - with the God-given talents we certainly do have - to continue our mission of working for God’s Kingdom by whatever means we can. It is easy to take what God has given us and just bury it until the present situation passes. We cannot do that. We do not have, of course, our usual freedoms, but God has showered us with talents which we should try to use, even in the lockdown. The rewards have been promised to us. ‘Enter into the joy of your master!’ Yes, there is judgement here, but there is also great joy and a love more generous than we can ever imagine. We have only to try and to trust in the generosity and the justice of God. For those who cannot come to Sutton at 1040, The Remembrance Day Cenotaph service will be shown on BBC1 from 1015. Or Click here to see the Royal British Legion's suggestions of how to honour Remembrance Day |
AuthorCanon John Green Archives
May 2021
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