Sermon for the first week of Advent.

Friday December 2^nd, 2011

Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School

Maggi Dawn, Dean of Chapel

I guess you’ll have noticed by now that it’s Advent.

If you hang out in a church that does the liturgical tradition, you’ll already have lit an advent candle last Sunday, been wished the Church equivalent of “happy new year”, and had the first round of advent readings.  Or maybe you’ve been alerted to the fact that it’s Advent by the alternative liturgical tradition of the chocolate Advent calendar…

Psalm 27, which we read together a few minutes ago, encapsulates the two classic themes of Advent. The coming of Christ into the world is depicted by the metaphor of light in the darkness, and the anticipation of what is yet to come is teased out as we are called to wait, attentively.  As Augustine famously pointed out, our awareness of time passing often has little to do with the hands on the clock, or the pages of the calendar – for our lives may be measured chronologically, but they are experienced in a series of kairos moments.

It’s these two themes that make Psalm 27 so apt for the beginning of Advent. For here the author contemplates light and darkness, and he also waits in what seems like interminable anxiety, holding on to the hope that God will always be with him. But I love Psalm 27 because it not only combines those themes, but it also challenges the simplistic  way that we sometimes use them.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
Light is right there in the first verse. And we can easily think of a whole slew of other familiar advent references to the light –  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has the light shined; let there be light, and there was light; light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it…

Darkness-and-light imagery, though, isn’t without its problems. Always associating dark with evil, and light with goodness, can have – has had – terrible consequences for our society.

But the scriptures don’t actually present this metaphor with quite the simple binary opposition we sometimes assume. Sometimes God is presented as light. But not always.

Psalm 27 begins “The Lord is my light,” but just a few verses later the Psalmist says,  “you keep me safe in your tent”. I daresay that some of you, in the course of playing hide-and-seek or some other kids game, will have crawled under a tarpaulin, or underneath the rafters of a house. It’s safe, it’s a great hiding place, and…

…it’s DARK!

God hides the Psalmist from danger by hiding him in the dark!

But get this – God isn’t only in the darkness – there are even places in scripture where God is presented to us actually as the darkness. Take the annunciation. We usually put the spotlight on the angel and Mary when we read that story. But right in the middle of Gabriel’s speech is this intriguing phrase – “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will OVERSHADOW you…”. Reading from a Christian viewpoint, this is one of the most mystical and God-breathed moments in all of human history. And it occurs, not in the light at all, but under the darkness of God.

Now I realize this is not a reading that would suit a puritanical mindset, where transparency and daylight are prized so highly, and secrecy treated with fear and suspicion. Yet right there we see that God works in dark and secret places, just as much as in broad daylight. God is my Light and my salvation. But he also hides me in his darkness.

It’s not only the scriptures that mix up this imagery; poets do it too.  In romantic poetry the sun was often used as a metaphor for God. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge did something quite different from his peers. Coleridge frequently uses moonlight to represent the presence of God. He had personal reasons for doing this: as a boy he was sent to school in London, and missed his home and the countryside very badly, The only place he could capture some sense of being close to the natural world was at night when school was over, and he could go up to the roof and gaze at the night sky. For Coleridge, then, moonlight became associated with the sense of God’s presence. But he also thought that light reflected by the moon was a better metaphor than sunlight for perceiving God’s presence. For all our knowledge of God is only ever indirect: as Moses discovered, you can no more look directly into the face of God than you can look directly into the sunlight. If we perceive the presence of God at all, it is always indirectly – always reflected light. So for Coleridge, the light of God can ONLY be seen in the dark, the night sky.

I like the complexity of this mixing up of imagery, the refusal to let simple binary oppositions box us into always using language in a particular way, or denying us permission to say this or that thing. St Paul wouldn’t allow his readers to set opposites against each other – male and female, Jew and Gentile. And the Psalmist doesn’t allow that simplistic approach either. God is my light. But he also hides me under the cover of darkness.

The author also plays with time in his Psalm.

He starts out with bravado – the Psalm is usually printed under the title, “A song of triumph”, and he recalls the past, and the confidence of his youth. And he also looks with hope into the future “I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. But in between, neither the past nor the future can successfully gloss over his anxiety as he prays:

My heart says to you, “your face God, do I seek”. Hide not your face from me… for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.

Times of stress and anxiety seem like they will NEVER END and it sounds as if the Psalmist is looking at his watch while he prays –
“come on, God, you should be here by now…”
he tries his best to wait for God but you get the clear impression that he thinks God is late.

And I like that – because it often seems to me that as we walk through the seasons of the Church year, things don’t happen on time. We have these great feasts and seasons of Church – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost – and year after year they tell and re-tell the story of salvation year after year. They give us a scaffolding, a structure on which we can hang the story of faith.

But our daily lives don’t flow in sync with the story. Sometimes we feel happy in Lent and miserable at Easter.  And as for Christmas – well, of course as we all know from advertisements and TV and shop displays, everyone is always happy at Christmas, aren’t they? Families always get along. Couples always feel romantic. Children never cry. Grandma is always sweet and kind… Or not…

Often we have this dislocated feeling of being out of time, out of step – a lot like our Psalmist, who summons up the confidence of youth, and defiantly holds on to hope for the future, while all the time he is actually living in the anxious present and wondering why God doesn’t turn up on time.

What do WE do when that happens? What do we do when Christmas is approaching and we aren’t ready for it? When Easter arrives and we feel depressed not elated, or when Pentecost comes and the last thing we feel is inspired?

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a child we had a maiden aunt. She was a wonderful woman, always full of excitement, and someone who knew how to squeeze every last drop of joy out of ordinary things. She lived down on the south west coast of England, where the beaches are long and flat, and the tide goes out so far that you can’t even see the sea at low tide. One summer when we went to stay – I think I must have been about four or five – I remember her creeping in to our room in the very early hours of the morning, at first light. She woke my sister and me, pulled on jumpers over our pyjamas and put our feet into shoes, bundled us into her ancient morris minor and drove away.

By the time we arrived at the shore, we were pretty much awake, and to our great surprise instead of stopping at the car park she drove right down on to the sands and headed out towards the sea. I’m sure it was against the bye-laws – in fact, I know it was against the bye-laws – but at sunrise there’s no-one there to stop you.  Way out on the sand she stopped the car, and out of the back she produced a primus stove, a kettle, eggs, butter, salt and pepper, and fresh bread, and began to cook breakfast. We ate omelettes and drank tea as the sun rose over the sea, and then went paddling in our pyjamas, taking in great gulps of the salty sea air.

You can see why we loved her. But she had one particular idiosyncrasy – she always, absolutely dependably, forgot all our birthdays. But at some random time of year – May, July or November – a huge parcel would arrive full of presents. It was always books: Auntie Margaret taught English Literature, and she always knew just the right book to buy. Inside the cover it would say “Happy Birthday!: or “Happy Christmas”, regardless of the time of year.  She introduced me to Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit, and The Adventures of Sam Pig, and later to Madeleine L’Engle.  It seemed madly exciting to get an unexpected present just when life was going through a tedious stage: and somehow, although they were early or late according to the calendar, they always seemed to arrive at just the right moment.

Whenever I forget a birthday or a Christmas card, I think of Auntie Margaret. Please, God, let me be like her – let me be the kind of person who sends gifts that someone will love, not just gifts to satisfy a deadline. But whenever God’s gifts elude me – when there is no joy at Easter, no wonder at Christmas, or simply no sense of God’s presence in between times – again, I think of Auntie Margaret. The gift will arrive at the right time, even if it’s not on the appointed date. Joy on demand is joyless indeed, but presents in July, and breakfast on the beach at sunrise, I can seriously live with.

If we confidently depend upon the knowledge that God’s gifts, unlike Santa’s, are not delivered to deadlines, then we can live within the seasons knowing that the gifts they represent will come to us eventually – not necessarily on time, and probably when we least expect them. So we can say with hope, and even with a little holy defiance,¹³ “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”