Sunday 9th December 2007ADVENT II
Fr David Cherry
Isaiah 11 : 1 – 10 ; Romans 15 : 4 – 13 ; Matthew 3 : 1 - 12
Yesterday after mass and lunch, I found myself not once, but twice in Selfridges wondering how did I get here? What drove me here? How did I agree to be here? What is it I really want? Why am I here? Where would I rather be? (Actually that wasn’t so difficult to answer since I have 6 episodes of the Jewel and the Crown waiting!)
You see : we have to wait, we have to allow it to happen to us and in us.
As I hurtle towards 50, the archdeacon thought it would be good for
me to go on a Ministerial Programme to assess such questions with other
clergy and be taught new strategies for the next twenty years of
ministry. How did I get here? What is it I want?
Such questions are existential questions about life and its meaning for
us; they are about who we really are. Sometimes they come upon us
as crises in our lives and we need help. But Advent is a time for
such questions – to let them emerge. When there is a sense
of wanting something more, God is at work. It is a time for
thinking about ultimate horizons, how we want to be and how we want to
live.
Isaiah gives us a vision of how it could be. He tells of a new
shoot growing from a cut-down stump. With God, so often it is the
things which are discarded and rejected, if we stay with them, they
will bring forth something fruitful. Jesus was that stump cut
down by his own people, but raised to new life. Isaiah
gives us a vision, a horizon of what God wants for his world and for
you and me – a people where there is no more hurt or destruction.
And the feast of the Conception of Our Lady yesterday re-assures us,
that God’s grace, God’s loving Spirit inhabits all of us as
it filled Mary; and is drawing us by our wants and desires towards what
is good and better for us, towards that sense of fulfillment which is
our vocation and God’s desire for us.
But how to listen; how to wait where we are as we are; how to not leap
at a quick fix or solution? How to allow oneself to be surprised
and filled with hope….
John the Baptist (TANGENT : I’m sure I would have given him a
wide birth – he’s so different from Jesus: full of
apocalyptic imagination, aware that something calamitous is about to
happen; some terrible judgement …. and then onto the stage comes
Jesus inhabiting the life of his Father and inviting me to be there
with him; taking the chaff of my life, not burning it, but making of it
something new.)
But the Baptist tells his hearers – don’t think you can
resolve who you are by claiming your lineage, your religion, your
‘specialness’: “Think not to say within
yourselves, We have Abraham for our father: for I say unto you, that
God is able of these stones to raise up children unto
Abraham.” Get over yourselves.
How to stay with the questions, in the present, the not-knowing?
This is not a strategy. It is about real discernment, listening to oneself, staying with the questions.
On last week’s sheet I gave the quote from Rowan Williams:
“The Christian in Advent needs to listen to that, listen to such
a degree that this season becomes both a season of joyful expectancy
and a season of ‘poverty’ – of the knowledge that we
cannot talk and touch ourselves into life”.
You see : we can't achieve it ourselves - we have to wait, we have to allow it to happen to us and in us.
Fr Daniel O’Leary (the quote today) shows how a spirituality
which isn’t Christian is also coming to the same wisdom : the
need for waiting and listening to oneself. The truth of
what is on offer is for all. St Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles
is making a similar point in his letter to the Romans. It is yes,
first to the Jews, but it has no bounds.
And St Paul speaks of a God of steadfastness and encouragement who
reaches out to us as he does here in Holy Communion, to commune with
us, to give himself into our lives and strengthen us as we journey in
this season of hope and expectation.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing,” he writes, “so that by the power of the Holy
Spirit you may abound in hope.”