"All we can do is wait" - a sermon for Advent Sunday

Isaiah 2: 1-5; Matthew 24: 36-44.

We have, as a Church, entered Advent, the season of joyful hope, the time when we are called, in the words of that wonderful prayer of the season, to be found by the Lord watching and waiting.

Unsurprisingly for Advent Sunday our readings focus on this theme of waiting. No where more so than in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. In this Jesus implores his followers to keep awake because you do not know when the Lord is coming.

On Advent Sunday we stand with the first hearers of Jesus’ teaching waiting expectantly for the coming of the Messiah. Our waiting will be short lived – just over four weeks – although that will feel agonisingly long for some of the younger in heart among us. However, for Jesus’ disciples, for the people of Israel, the wait for the coming of the Messiah, the saviour, had been a long long struggle, centuries old.

Commentators remind us that this theme would have been at the forefront of the first hearers of this Gospel. For the people of Israel the waiting had got all too much for them. After the long-held promise of the Messiah had not seemingly come to pass, they were beginning to take matters into their own hands. Threatening and eventually taking up arms against their Roman oppressors, to do the work they expected their Messiah, and so God, to do. But this human impatience only led to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem as Jesus foretold.

This problem of impatience, of not wanting to wait, is not an historical phenomenon, but one which we all experience day by day. We like to hurry things along, to get on with things, and if needed to sort things out ourselves if things haven’t got started soon enough for us. Impatience, a reluctance to wait, is, you could say, hard-wired into all of us. What, after all, were the actions of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, but the ultimate human act of impatience? We might want to get on with things, to hurry things along, but God does not want us to do this. God wants us to watch and wait. 

So, as we fast-forward two thousand years we find that this human impatience, this reluctance to wait, is still there. If your email inbox is anything mine it has been full of insistent Black Friday deals for the past two week telling us to buy things now before all the good deals are gone. “Buy things now, not tomorrow, now, and even better buy them yesterday, for delivery now!” Even if it was found that 98% of “Black Friday deals” weren’t worth buying.

Or perhaps you remember the story of voter in Sheffield at a recent general election who was furious because the polling stations had closed before they could vote; however as they told their story it turned out that they had gone to polling station several times earlier in the day, but had left, because the queues were too long and they couldn’t be bothered to wait.

But God wants us to watch and wait, and the thing is, if we do, then amazing, unexpected, and glorious things can happen. 

For a long time we, as a family, have loved the South-Tyne Valley running from Alston to Haltwhistle. It was a decent day trip when I was a curate in Whitley Bay and on our doorstep when I was Vicar a little further east in the Tyne Valley. When this job became available an attraction of it was that we would still be close to a place we have come to think of as home.

Once when walking there on a day off, we walked along the riverside. As we walked I saw, in the corner of my eye, a flash of grey-blue and heard a splash and we realised that the Salmon were swimming and leaping their way up stream. This is one of those natural wonders we had never seen before, so we decided to watch and wait and see if another Salmon would leap out of the river. There is no way we could make the fish jump, and no way of knowing how long it would take to see this would happen again, if at all.

All we could do was wait.

And as we waited, not really knowing what would happen, rather than get bored, we started to notice more and more the vibrancy, and beauty of everything around us: in the colour of the late-autumn trees; the sound of the river flowing; the changing patterns of the clouds in the sky – things we would not have seen, not have noticed had we not chosen to watch and wait.

The problem for all of us is that when we are asked to wait we assume it is for something and we get impatient for it. But we fail to realise that there are glories all around us, hidden in plain sight, if only we had the time and patience to watch and wait. When we are forced to wait we accept that we can’t do anything to change the situation. We could not make the Salmon leap. All we could do was wait. 

But in that waiting, in releasing ourselves into God’s time and God’s plan, we become more able to see the glimpses and promises of God’s grace all around us. And as we learn to wait we discover these glimpses of grace come not only from our attentiveness to the world around us, but to our attentiveness to God’s presence with us in the midst of our hurried and busy lives.

Ann Lewin finds this insight, as I did, by a riverbank.

Prayer is like watching for the

Kingfisher. All you can do is

Be there where he is like to appear, and

Wait.

Often nothing much happens;

There is space, silence and

Expectancy.

No visible signs, only the

Knowledge that he’s been there

And may come again.

Seeing or not seeing cease to matter,

You have been prepared

But when you’ve almost stopped

Expecting it, a flash of brightness

Gives encouragement.

All we can do is wait.

So, we are all invited to take the chance of Advent, this season of joyful hope, to take time to stop and to wait. You might come this evening to our Advent Carole Service and watch and wait in words and music in the beauty of this ancient place. You might buy and sit with an Advent Candle each day and allow yourself to watch and wait as the candle burns down each day closer to the end. You might stop and read scripture each day or realise that we are never ever too busy to pray.  Or you might simply wander somewhere and see the changing glories of the countryside all around us.

If we find the patience to wait and watch and hope, as we found standing by that river-bank, you will encounter more flashes of wonder, more simple signs of God’s grace, than you could ever have imagined.

So, did we see the Salmon leap? 

Well all I can say is that it was worth the wait.

"Trust in the Lord" - a sermon for the second Sunday before Advent

Malachi 4: 1-2a; Luke 21: 5-19

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

….or so I thought as I was put on hold by the bank for the third time!

Whether in our day-to-day interactions, or on the global stage, or in our perceptions of the world around us, the strong and prophetic language of the prophet Malachi has a deep resonance for us. Scientific journals and the popular press are increasingly full of studies that seem to suggest that people’s fear, and so people’s frustration and anger, is increasing because of a perception that things are falling apart all around us.

This is not always as trivial as not being able to speak clearly and easily to someone at the bank – although we are all getting used to the Kafka-like processes that often involves. However, there is clear evidence of “catastrophe anxiety” or “doomsday fear” or even “apocalyptic dread” in our modern lives.

You only have to look at the news this last week to find examples and predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation. For some the inconclusive outcomes of the American midterm elections are evidence of a nation stuck in political ideological gridlock which, for some, is leading inexorably towards public disturbance and civil war.  The urgency around the COP27 summit in Egypt is heightened by predictions of the environmental and climate break down. Every movement in the war in Ukraine is read and interpreted in light in the instability over the leadership and control of Russia’s nuclear arms.

As the prophet Malachi says:

See, the day is coming that shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

In one sense it is important that we are alive to and open to these threats and fears. The world certainly feels a more uncertain place than it did even a decade ago. But we also need to be able to take a broader view of these threats and fears. Certainly, they are magnified through the effects of a culture of polarised twenty-four hour news and social media. I know from my own experience during the pandemic lock-downs that I had to ration my exposure to the news – preferring the hourly updates on Radio 3 to the constant flow of information on other channels – to preserve some perspective and balance.

Equally outside of the lens of modern media and our contemporary experience we could argue that these threats – or those like them –were ever thus. Looking this last week at some of the books in the Cathedral collection with a colleague was reminder that the seventeenth-century intellectual world of Thomas Smith was suffused with the fears of the end of days and collapse of all things wrought by the ravages of the English Civil War. Equally, nearly a thousand years ago, the millennial fears of the end of days informed peoples interpretations of the Norman conquest of this country, and of the harrowing and taming of the north that that led to, of which this Cathedral’s story is part.

So, when we come to the texts that we read today, with their apocalyptic frame and scale, I always need to lift myself from my current anxieties and concerns and remind myself that it was ever thus. There is something, I think, deep in all of us which makes us tack to the response favoured by Chief Vitalstatistix of the Asterix books, and fear that inevitably the sky will fall on our heads.

The source of this fear is often an understandable and evolutionary fight-or-flight response to the world around us. But it is also magnified by our implicit understanding of our own humanity. We fear catastrophe because we know, deep down, that none of us are perfect. We like to imagine that if push came to shove we’d be magnanimous and generous, but fear that we would not. 

Perhaps that profound and inciteful Scottish thinker, imbued I’m sure with a deep and unbending Presbyterian upbringing, was right when Private Frazer said again and again: “we’re all doomed!”

Well that’s a cheerful place to get us to.

But there is hope – there is always hope.

We find that hope implicit in both our readings today. A hope made explicit to us in the book of Psalms and Psalm 42 in particular. In that wonderful Psalm, which are saying each day in our service of Morning Prayer. There we hear these words of assurance:

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,

and why are you so disquieted within me?

O put your trust in God;

for I will yet give him thanks,

who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Or as we hear again in the book of Proverbs:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

    and do not rely on your own insight.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

    and he will make straight your paths.

In both our readings today, we hear this message. That whatever might befall us, whatever the future has to hold, whatever fears we might carry with us – however justifiable or realistic – we need to hold onto one thing and one truth – “Trust in the Lord”.

Now the cynic and sceptic might rightfully say that this teaching is merely a panacea – the opiate of the peoples – to persuade us to look away from the injustice of the world and the failure of others as we put our hope in an unlikely and unknown future.

But those who say that have not known what it means to trust in the Lord. 

To trust in the Lord, to acknowledge him, is by implication to acknowledge our own failures and limitations. To trust in the Lord is to see our own imperfections as clearly and vividly as we see those imperfections in others – now what a difference that conversion would make in our political discourse! 

To trust in the Lord is to trust in the gifts that God has given us, including the wonder of creation and our gifts of ingenuity and innovation and self-control as we seek to live with our changing environment and climate with deeper care and understanding. 

To trust in the Lord is to trust that in a world of palpable evil and malice the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot and will not overcome it.

We live in a changing and challenging world. To place that in a broader frame and perspective is helpful but should not diminish the very real challenges we live with.  But what that broader frame reminds us of is that as we face the changes and chances of this fleeting world we do so knowing one unchanging truth: trust in the Lord, because in that trust is our hope.

Or as the Prophet Malachi puts it rather better than I can:

For you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings