In
some ways, the feast of the First Sunday of Advent is the most poignant
of the year—more than Christmas, more than Easter, more than Pentecost.
For on that day we gather as a believing community to affirm our faith
in the re-arrival of the Lord.
Not his birth, not his up-springing, not his radiation. All of these have the splendour and, so to speak, the glamour of the absolutely novel: but Advent has to do with repetition, second chances, recycling—and who is charmed by these things? If the Lord can bring off our allegiance in the face of potential tedium, that will be a real triumph. Winning the hearts of adults, who have been round the traps before, is a piercing sort of thing to do.
The first reading for today (Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1, 3-8) is quite frank about all this. It says, 'You, Lord, yourself are our Father: "Our Redeemer" is your ancient name'.
To be ancient is a fine thing, but a remote thing; our hearts do not leap at its mention. And the reading goes on with its refrain of 'you were ...' and 'we were ...' It is sound stuff, but half-distant stuff, like breadcrumbs. A mouthful of breadcrumbs is not the same as a mouthful of fresh bread. It is as if Isaiah does not want to take us by storm, and wants instead to address adults in their adulthood; wants in fact to address the unstaling God out of the time-seasoned state in which we find ourselves.
And indeed the brunt of today's festival—the Fiesta of Arrival—is that the redeeming Jesus is here for us at whatever point we have reached in our lives. 'Advent', 'Arrival', 'Coming', is not just a moment blocked out on the calendar, but a point of stimulus in our hearts.
Advent stands for incursion and prompting, the touching-off of possibilities. Advent is the season of provocation, of the Spirit's startlement. And it is, quite expressly, designed for those tempted to regard themselves as browned-off, and burned-out. A word used for some of Australia's natural life under stress is, 'die-back'. Advent is here, is now, for all of us who are prone to die-back. It proclaims the possibility that we can live-forward.
In the reading from Isaiah, one image used is that of the wind's dispersal: 'We have all withered like leaves, and our sins blew us away like the wind'. Early in this century, Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem in which, speaking of the rubbish of time, he has the refrain, 'The wind has blown them all away'. About fifty years later, Bob Dylan was singing, 'The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind'.
In both cases, what was at issue was frailty, and the puffball, mortal, human condition. But Isaiah does not rest there. Today's reading concludes, 'And yet, Lord, you are our Father; we the clay, you the potter, we are all the work of your hand'. Clay pots are still fragile things, but they may, as here, be shaped cherishingly—so much so that all of their fractures cry out for the re-intervention of the potter, the blessing and healing touch of the maker.
It has often been pointed out that our word 'holiness' is a particular use of the word 'wholeness'. To be holy is to not be blown to the four winds, not to be dissipated or exploded, not to be wasted. It is to be held together around a centre, which is nothing less than the radiant and receptive heart of Christ himself.
When, in our Eucharist, we stand up to profess our faith in the continuing drama of our Lord's life among us, and when, a little later, we make a meal of his divine humanity, and drink to his unfaltering presence among us, we will be saying that we hope very much to come in from the wind of futility, of nothingness, of the howl amongst the planets of the heart.
That is what Advent is about: our coming home to him, and, far more importantly, his coming home to us.
