Waiting -1

When I was a teenager in the late 1960s each year I loved watching the Blue Peter presenters making an Advent Wreath out of a pair of wire clothes hangers and some tinsel and four candles.

A few years later I enjoyed the Two Ronnies sketch set in a hardware shop and the hilarious conversation about ordering fork handles. In fact I've been known to produce fork handles on Advent Sunday.

The Advent Wreath or Crown has become a standard part of keeping Advent in any liturgically based Christian congregation and it's even got official bits in the Church of England Advent material.

It's a great way to count down to Christmas, balancing the advent calendar and much less fattening than 24 chocolates!.

But just as, a few weeks ago, I was suggesting  that we would do better to live OUT of the moment, rather than IN it, so now I'm going to suggest that Advent will serve us better if we try to avoid thinking of it as countDOWN, but maybe think of it as a count UP. 

Counting down is what we do when we are looking forward to the next few weeks hurrying by so we can get to the main event. Which is understandable if we're looking forward to a holiday or some personal celebration. But it's a pity to let Advent simply slide into being a time to "get through" in order to arrive at Christmas. 

If it was up to me all Christmas Carols would be banned until tea time on Christmas Eve. Happily for everyone else, it's not up to me and the fact is we have to live where we are and balance the early celebration of Christmas with the rather different demands of Advent.

To count UP to Christmas doesn't require a shopping list or a to do list or really an kind of list, though they will impinge on our lives whether we like it or not.

It's the waiting that's important. Waiting is not the same as anticipation, which dwells on what is coming, rather than here and now, which, of course is all we've got.

Whilst the four Sundays of Advent move through the themes of the Patriarchs and the Prophets, John the Baptism and Mary the Godbearer, it's well worth picking up on a slightly older (medieval rather than early Church) rhythm which might helps us balance out the distractions of counting down.

This is another four fold rhythm - the Four Last Things, namely: Death Judgement, Heaven and Hell. At first these seem rather dreadful, literally being able to fill us with dread. And there's some rightness in being arrested by this fearsome foursome and letting our minds be brought to a sharper focus.

Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell could turn us right off. But please don't stop listening (or reading!) because, properly understood, they are actually liberating bits of Christian thinking which are very helpful in growing our souls.

Unlike the Advent Candles which progress from one theme to the next, the Four Last Things have to be held together for the four weeks of Advent - the first four weeks of the Christian Year, of course!

So let's take a first look at them... Death... well, come on! It's the one certainty in life. To be blunt, the older we are the more we need to face up to this one.. not morbidly, but honestly and openly, full of Christian hope in the resurrection. Death, quite literally, earths us. We have the knowledge  that life is not a gift, but a loan, a loan which we will one day hand back This sharpens the mind and encourages us to avoid the self "kidology" (as a long ago colleague of mine used to call it). And we do kid ourselves a lot... we can so easily avoid difficult questions by being less than honest with ourselves, even when everybody else can see exactly what we're doing!

So Death, oddly, wakes us up!

Judgement is not the same as condemnation, though we so easily speak as though it was. Judgement is learning to know ourselves the way God knows us. Because only God can judge. We must not judge others and we cannot judge ourselves. This kind of judgement, if we accept it, is quite liberating.

Heaven sounds like a nicer subject, except we know less than nothing about it ! What we do know is that it our destiny. But we also know that it is isn't simply future. 

Nearly every Christian tradition celebrates the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion. The Holy Eucharist, the Mass or The Liturgy, as it's called in different traditions. In this sacramental meal, whatever  different traditions think might (or might not) be going on in the Communion service, we are actually taking part here and now in the the heavenly banquet which is outside time. Heaven brings what we call the future into the present. We aren't waiting for eternal life. We are already living in eternal life now. That's what heaven means. So this moment, every moment, is full of hope, joy, and peace. Or at least it can be.

So what about Hell? Where, too often, Christians are fixated on ins and outs, black and white, winners and losers, sinner and saved, hell becomes a place or torment for other people. The ones who aren't like us, believing what we believe, behaving like we behave and so on.

The one thing that is clear from the New Testament is that hell is where we get stuck with ourselves. No wonder there's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

God never meant for us to be alone... remember Genesis? "It is not good for man to be alone"! Sin alienates us from God, from the world, and from each other.. and finally ourselves. Our western society has many good things about it, but one of its deepest sins is to encourage us to be individuals with our personal everything. True community is being eroded by a culture that pushes us to be "stand alone persons" who ultimately have no responsibility for each other.... we're on our own.

There's a lovely story of a western anthropologist working in an African village. He watches a group of little boys playing together and gives them a challenge. "Whichever of you can run fastest to that tree can have all the fruit in the basket. Three, two, one, go!" The boys run... but not before they have all joined hands in a long line and run together and share the fruit. The anthropologist asks them why they didn't race.. the winner could have had it all! The boys were astonished at the idea. "Why, then some of us would go without, and that would be sad and wrong." was the reply.

There is a Bantu philosophy called UBUNTU. It means something like "I am because we are". The boys knew it instinctively.

Hell is all around us, and if we want it we can have it for ever. But the final twist is if that's what we will discover is that we are not only alienated from others... but also ourselves.. we would hate our own company!

So, we have Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.

Advent is an opportunity to stop and wait, to let the Four Last Things mull around in our minds. Yes, I'm mortal, and I need to get to be able to say that that's OK. Yes, I need to learn know myself as God knows me, which is both disturbing but utterly liberating. I'm already there, at the heavenly banquet, anyway, so death and judgement simply sharpen that up... and hell reminds me that I'm not alone, can't be alone, mustn't be alone, but must learn to live with others in love and find my true identity with them, not separate from them.

Let's use Advent to allows these four themes to "stew away" quietly together in the background as we wait out the first month of winter and our count UP to Christmas.

R S Thomas, poet and Church in Wales Vicar of Aberdaron in North Wales in the late 20th century tells us the meaning is in the waiting. T S Eliot, an American academic and poet who became a British citizen in the 1930s,  tells us that the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

And let's use centring prayer - I hope you can do it at least once every day... to help us to stop, and to wait. The Four Last Things are the foundation of a maturing life! So we'll continue to think this through next week and the week after as we count UP to Christmas.