'Waiting Up'
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 27th November 2011 by Revd. Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Isaiah 64: 1-9 and Mark 13: 24-37
Advent is the season of the night. What do I mean?
Well, I could mean that Advent is mainly in December, the month of the shortest day, the least light, the longest nights. Some newcomers to Scotland may wonder if by Christmas we will be in perpetual darkness, like the North Pole. Not quite.
Or do I mean that Advent is the season of candlelit carol services in church, which take place after dark?
Partly – but I really mean something more fundamental: Advent is the season of waiting up, through the night of God’s apparent absence.
Of course, Advent itself is not named in the Bible: it’s a later Christian development. The Bible has no interest in the actual day of the year that Jesus was born. And it was only in the 5th Century that a penitential period before the new festival of Christmas was developed. It started out as 6 Sundays before Christmas, but gradually was reduced to 4.
Advent is associated with two anticipations: first, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem – and in the university we have a number of carol services this Advent which will anticipate that very wonderful birth. But almost more significantly it looks forward to the second coming, the return of Christ, to the end-times. It is about a double coming of God to the world. And so today’s readings, for Advent Sunday, focus not on Bethlehem but beyond.
Isaiah 64:1: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.
And indeed the whole passage expresses the longing for God to act, to intervene on earth, to reveal himself, to leave his hiding-place.
And in the Gospel passage, we have words of Jesus proclaiming the return of a figure from heaven: Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory.
These readings display a desire for God or his appointed one to come, to return, to intervene, to be present in this world, to act, to judge, to rule. And yet in expressing this longing, they show that at this present time, God is not absolutely here, God is not fully present, God does not act and judge and rule, God does not intervene. Perhaps we can even go so far as to say that God is gone, away, absent. Or at least, that is how it seems. As we sang from Psalm 50: God is silent, while men say, ‘He has gone; let us forget him!’
These are not texts of comfort, of light, of the assurance of peace. They are words of discomfort, of unease, of darkness. It is not day, but night.
For when Jesus goes on to explore the coming of the Son of Man in a parable, it is a story of the night. A householder goes away but expects his doorkeeper to be ready for him when he returns, but that will be at night: in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn– the four watches of the night.
Now you may be thinking: that’s all rather gloomy. Is our chaplain trying to give us Seasonal Affective Disorder? Is he trying to make me Sad? After all, this is St Andrews, with its clear north light; this is the university with its sense that life is burgeoning, character blossoming, the future dawning. This is not a place of night but day. And of course, there’s truth in that.
And yet, even as we rejoice in Raisin Monday’s foam-fight, sadder, more bitter crowds gather in another square, in Cairo; camps made of sticks and scraps of cloth assemble in Mogadishu for a daily ration of rice porridge; a bleak darkness falls over the Eurozone with the promise of a generation of austerity; and the Arab Spring may be turning into a cruel winter. It could be argued that St Andrews is lit by artificial light.
And so, in this night, what are we to do? Wait.
Isaiah 64:4: From ages past no one has heard, no ear perceived,no eye has seen any God besides you,who works for those who wait for him.
And in Mark 13:35 Therefore, keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come.
A Dutch Christian writer, Corrie ten Boom, wrote this: When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away your ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
One of the hardest experiences of life is to be a parent with a child, perhaps a teenager, who goes out for the evening, and promises to be home by a certain time, but doesn’t appear. Their mobile is switched off. Increasingly worried parents wait up, through the watches of the night, for their precious child to return. And as the first light appears through the curtains, they start to lose faith. Is our beloved one ever coming back?
We are those parents this Advent. It is our night-time, and we are waiting up – for what? Well, we sang it in that wonderful Advent carol with which we began the service:
O come, thou dayspring, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death’s dark shadows put to flight.
We are waiting for God to come, for Christ to return, for justice to flow, for peace to break out, for the hungry to be fed, for oppressors to flee, for love to be fulfilled, for an end to death and crying and mourning and pain. We are waiting in our own lives for answers to prayer, for God’s blessing in our troubles in study, work, with family and friends, in our relationships of love, in doubting all we thought was true.
And we are called not to lose faith: to wait up, to stay awake, to be ready when the answer comes, when the troubles resolve, when God is no longer hidden but revealed, no longer there but here. Not that it’s easy: a proverb says that the darkest hour is that before the dawn. We remember that in the life and death of St Andrew, our patron saint and from whom this town and university are named. It is believed that around the year 60, when Nero was Roman Emperor, there was a period of persecution of the first Christians, and Andrew, sharing his faith in the risen Christ, was executed in Patras in Achaea in modern-day Greece on an X-shaped cross, portrayed on the icon on the cover of today’s Order of Service. Andrew lived in the light of the resurrection, but in the midst of a dark night in the Empire. Yet his faith was not in vain, and his martyrdom witnesses to our hope that we can trust in God, that justice, peace and love will come, and re-make our world.
We may not be called to make the sacrifice that Andrew made; indeed, I hope we are not called to do so. But I am in no doubt that many in St Andrews, and perhaps some here today are going through a dark night of the soul, and the dawn may seem further away than ever. It may be tempting not to wait up, but to give up hoping, to let the darkness overwhelm us. Yet for all that Advent is the season of the night, it is a night into which light shines, perhaps a flickering candle-flame of a St Leonard’s Chapel service, or the patient grace of friend. There is enough light, even in this night-time, to trust that God is coming: and we can take confidence in the wise words wrought from real life in Psalm 30:5:
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning .
Amen