One of the places where people’s pent-up anger spills out is a self service checkout in a supermarket when it won’t scan the bar code of your shopping. The other day there came a message on the screen after my bread wouldn’t scan: “please wait, someone is coming to help you.”
We enter today into the season of Advent. A time of preparation, of longing, of repentance, of watching and waiting for God, who is the someone coming to help us.
And this Advent, we need help! With war and threat and violence and uncertainty, with discrimination and a lack of community and a yearning for peace, we pray, come, Lord Jesus. Please come and help us.
I think this need for comfort and help is why Christmas lights go up so early. The Advent of God long ago in human form began in the dark. The darkness at creation was flooded with light. The Psalmist sang that the Lord is our light and our salvation. Isaiah said with confidence about a new ruler to come that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Jesus came to a dark world to be the light of the world.
Isaiah foresaw it. Isaiah records the arrival of a leader, the formation of a government, that makes a definite difference to the fate of a nation. Comparing before and after this transformational event is like comparing night with day. Literally the difference between dark and light. This darkness depicted at the end of Isaiah 8 does not appear suddenly.
As you walk through the first eight chapters, you can sense the light is starting to fade. There is deepening darkness that overcoming and overwhelming the people of God to that point where Isaiah informs us of the ‘distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish’ telling of those who ‘will be thrust into thick darkness’ and then into this darkness, comes light. A divine intervention, a transformation, at the start of Isaiah 9 that makes all the difference. ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of thick darkness, on them has light shone.’ Before there is distress and darkness. Gloom and anguish. And then comes a light. Gloom turned to glory. Grief turned to gladness.
Please allow for a few moments of nostalgia. Every year at this time of year the Blue Peter team on children’s television would make their own version of an Advent Crown. John Noakes, Peter Purves and Valerie Singleton are among the names I recall from my childhood..
Two wire coat hangers, silver tinsel, four candles and four Christmas baubles, transformed into their Advent wreath.
This activity always forewarned us that Christmas was approaching, and we should be getting ready.
We need a time when we remember God listens to our deepest desires and assures us, he won’t leave us. We need a time when we stop our busyness and look for where God comes around us. We need a time when all we do is wait on God and expect his incarnation in our experience. We need a time when we look up and see the Kingdom coming again and await not a rerun of the first Christmas but an expectation that Jesus will return in glory – soon – and that his Kingdom will never end. We need to know despite ourselves and our world, there is a different story about.
And we need to enter the darkness. The Advent darkness points to the light of Christ. We need to accept darkness is real. We had a circuit gathering at Snape the other week. I parked in their car park. When we came out the car park was pitch black, there were steps to deal with. It was dangerous. I then couldn’t see my car. Thank God for a torch on my phone! We need to have conversations in the dark, the darkness of uncertainty, of pain, of confusion.
We have to admit that dark times are real. Last week I was at a school reunion. My year group had not seen each other for forty years. We acknowledged that for some of us school was dark and damaging and we shared a solidarity that we got through the darkness together and there was an enormous sense of healing as we found each other again and shared honest stories of how it wasn’t easy.
The prologue to John’s Gospel is read on Christmas morning but I’m drawn to it on Advent Sunday this year. We feel overcome and overwhelmed, I think. The help needed is urgent. Here’s the good news – God works in the dark and floods it with light. I’m travelling backwards and forwards from Leeds each night this week. People are very slow to dip their headlights on country lanes. All I can see for a while is a dazzling brightness which I cannot cope with.
Yet maybe that’s what God’s light is in us. It’s so radically different from the darkness it takes a time to get used to it. The light, the help is coming. Please wait. God works in the dark. We need the darkness in order to see the light. And God works from there. Here’s an extract from Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Learning to walk in the dark…
“As many years as I have been listening to Easter sermons, I have never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way. If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air. Sitting deep in the heart of Organ Cave, I let this sink in: new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
I love the story told recently in a service by a Bishop, of a man who had fallen down a very large hole and he screamed for help. Most people ignored his cries but then a man looked down at him in the hole and suddenly jumped in it landing next to him. “What on earth are you doing?” asked the man who’d cried for help. The man said “I’ve been in holes like this before and I know how to get out of them.” Help is at hand! Please wait, someone is coming to help you.
I saw another message in another shop several months ago. It said “we’re getting ready for Christmas. We apologise for any disruption while we make these changes.”
It won’t happen, but I reckon we should stop all meetings in Advent and just have bible studies and prayer meetings and silence and just tell the story to people. We need to disrupt our routine to meet him who wishes to disrupt our lives again. This Sunday some people are holding Christingle services, and some will light one candle on an Advent ring. This is all about hopeful anticipation.
Emmanuel, God with us,
our world waits in darkness,
longing for your light.
May the light of peace
dispel the darkness of conflict,
so war and wounding cease,
and all people can live in safety.
May the light of hope
illuminate the journey
of refugees seeking sanctuary,
as the Holy Family was forced to do.
May the light of healing
kindle in us a new vision
of all creation made new,
leading us to courageous action.
May the light of love
warm our hearts as we wait
for the coming of Christ,
the Light of the World.
He is coming to help us. We watch and we wait.
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