Absence and Presence - a sermon for Advent Sunday

Advent is the great season of absence. All the great poetry and hymnody of Advent speaks and yearns of this absence.

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”

“Come thou long expected Jesus”

“Lo he comes, with clouds descending”

All our attention is pointed towards a coming presence which, by its very nature, speaks of the absence that we experience at the heart of Advent. 

For many of us that absence has become something of a battle of wills against the oncoming presence of the Christmas season. As the march to Christmas begins earlier and earlier the desire of many to hold back that tide, to hold the place of absence that Advent speaks of, becomes stronger. Some of us, well I can only speak for myself, can place a perverse pride in holding off eating a mince pie, sipping a mulled wine, or putting up anything that smacks of a decoration, for as long as possible. In this modern Advent ritual, the absence of Advent and the presence of Christmas play a tug-of-war with only one true winner.

This playful pattern of absence and presence however only scratches the surface of the great spiritual and even existential truth that the absence at the heart of this season points us towards. Our readings today both speak of absence. From Isaiah we heard a prayer of longing echoed in the great Advent prose which opened this service. Here Isaiah yearns that God, despite the sinfulness of God’s people, will break into a reality seemingly devoid of God’s presence:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

   so that the mountains would quake at your presence—

[…]

to make your name known to your adversaries,

   so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

In our Gospel reading Jesus, though present in the telling, describes the terrifying place of absence that will mark the time before his coming again. Where:

the sun will be darkened,

   and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from heaven,

   and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

These visions of the absence of Advent take us far beyond the abstemious habits that some of will seek to model in the coming days and weeks. This is a terrifying reality where God appears to be visibly and palpably absent. Another great Advent hymn, one which has though fallen from our hymn books, captures something of the existential fear of this truth.

“O quickly come, dread Judge of all;

for, awful though thine advent be,”

In Advent we are challenged to look deeply into the truth of our faith. That hard truth of our faith that however hard we might look for God’s presence we most often find ourselves in the place of a double absence spoken of in our readings today.  The first absence focuses on our present reality, where we seek the presence of God in a world where God appears to be absent, and where many remain indifferent to this reality. The second is an eschatological absence. One which looks to the end of this this present age, between the stories of the first coming and the promise of the second. A place where the Church stands longing for God’s presence in Jesus – known by the apostles and promised in the new Jerusalem – but recognisable only to us in the stories of the past, hope of the future, and the vivid absence of our present.

In these two experiences of absence there is a danger that absence and presence are placed in opposition to one another. If though we look to those stories of Jesus’ presence in the Gospels we find again and again that the great stories of God’s presence through Jesus lead to, or are defined by, an absence. Jesus’ baptism, that moment when he is revealed as God’s anointed, is followed by his withdrawal and absence into the wilderness. The truth of the resurrection is fulfilled not only by the presence of the risen Jesus, but the absence of the Cross and the empty tomb. The tangible experience of God’s Spirit in the gift and feast of Pentecost is promised by Jesus, but only once he absents himself and is taken into heaven at the Ascension.

Advent teaches us to seek and know this great paradox of our faith. That God, in Jesus, reveals God’s presence, very often through his absence. Knowing this these absences we experience now take a new form. They are no longer vacuums, but places where, if we have the courage to look, we can discover God’s presence. The Welsh priest poet RS Thomas, that great bard of paradox, speaks of the truth of presence in absence in his poem Via Negativa:

        God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to

Arrive or find.

As the poem goes on he seeks to take this challenging, but often abstract truth, and ground it in realities of our lives. Perhaps echoing Jesus’ vision of the absence of star-less sky, he speaks of God as “the darkness between the stars”. Then as footprints which God has left which we follow. Then with a physical and visceral truth he says:

        We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm.

However, we do it, Advent calls us not to simply seek out these places of absence, but to attend to them, and in that attention discover God’s presence through them.

I had an extraordinary experience of this recently. A few weeks ago, I was able to take a few days away from the Cathedral for a time of personal retreat. For a few days I focused my reading, reflection, and prayer on the themes of Advent and particularly the theme of absence. On my final morning of retreat, I decided I would try to ground this reading by taking myself to a physical place of absence. So, I drove and then walked along Hadrian’s Wall to the gap in the Wall where, until recently, the great Sycamore Tree stood. 

As many of you will know, this was a place very familiar to me and my ministry and so there was both a familiarity and shock as I walked up the path, seeing the outline of a landscape which was both reassuringly familiar and deeply strange. In the middle of that familiar dip in the horizon stood a great gap, a great absence. Where the tree had stood there was now just a bare stump. And there with me other walkers and pilgrims stood in silence and looking deeply into that place of absence. But as we looked into that absence, and came closer to where the tree had stood, a small sign, placed there by the National Trust, came into view. It reads:

“This tree stump is still alive

If we leave it alone it might sprout new growth”

I very much doubt this simple sign was intended to articulate so well the deep paradox and truth of absence and presence that lies at the heart of this great season. But for me, in that moment, it spoke more deeply of this truth than all the hymns and poems and sermons I could find. Having gone to that place looking for the reality of absence I found unexpectedly and beautifully, a promise of presence echoing Isaiah’s great words of Advent hope and promise:

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,

   and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,

   the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

   the spirit of counsel and might,

   the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

The promise of Advent, not only for this season but also for our life of faith, is that in God’s seeming absence is always a presence breaking in. Our task and invitation through this season is to seek and attend to those places and spaces and times of absence that punctuate the realities of our everyday lives; to spend time with them; and speak into those places of seeming absence that great Advent prayer:

“Amen, Come Lord Jesus.”