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This is the Time Prepared - Advent Reflections by Canon Gordon Oliver


‘This is the day’

Welcome!

Let us pray:

Grant us, O merciful God,

the will to seek you, whom we desire above all,

that we may find you and be found in you;

may your love and wisdom guide words spoken in your name;

may we find faith and hope

in the still small voice which tells us of your presence;

may we be one with you in Jesus our Redeemer. Amen

The purpose of these three reflections for ordained and lay ministers as we come to the season of Advent is to offer a sort of ‘godly-flavoured noise’ during a time when we are specially called to open our hearts and minds to the coming of the love of God in Jesus. With this godly-flavoured noise as background or as foreground God can speak with each of us the tender and tough word we need to receive, the word that can bring renewal, re-creation, and the refreshment of the hope the Holy Spirit gives – ‘the hope that does not disappoint.’ So, when you find your mind wandering as you listen or as you read, please invite Jesus to take you where he wants you to go, to show you what he wants you to see, and to give to you what he wants you to hold and treasure.

These coming weeks of Advent, through Christmas and into Epiphany will see us all being very busy in the things of God. We will face lots of organisational complexity which is supposed to make the worship and celebration experiences people will have times for them of warm acceptance, generous hospitality, and holy wonder. The miraculously silent or wondrously loud moments when people who are hardly looking for him encounter God in Jesus takes place in amongst all those bits that we find depressing or irritating because we think they are unholy. We long to see, for some people at least, times of real and lasting transforming from this seasonal encounter with the love of God in Christ.

At the heart of all this is our calling as ministers in God’s church, which is to offer a very simple welcome – a very simple welcome into our own hearts and lives for God who comes to us in Jesus. At the same time our calling is to offer a very simple

welcome to the people whose lives we will share - even just for a few minutes or hours – during this season. In these actions of very simple welcome, we are set alive and refreshed in our calling to be disciples of Jesus and ministers of the Gospel.

For the great principle of our living in Christ is that if our faith is growing at all, it is growing simpler.

This deepening simplicity of our faith is refreshed and renewed as the Holy Spirit surprises us by cutting through the complexities that threaten to bury our awareness of God’s presence; and by bringing resurrection moments when we know what a very simple welcome really is for, ‘The Lord is here; God’s Spirit is with us.’

Pope Francis tells a story about when he was a parish priest in Buenos Aries:

‘I remember a mother with young children, whose husband had left her. She did not have a steady job and only managed to find temporary work a couple of months out of the year. When there was no work, she had to prostitute herself to provide her children with food. She was humble, she came to our parish church, and we tried to help her out of our charity, Caritas.

‘I remember one day – it was during the Christmas holidays – she came with her children…and asked for me. They called me and I went to greet her. She had come to thank me. I thought it was for the package of food from Caritas that we had sent her. ‘Did you receive it?’, I asked. ‘Yes, yes, thank you for that too. But I came here today to thank you because you never stopped calling me Senora.’ (My lady)’

(Pope Francis: The Name of God is Mercy, Bluebird 2016, p.56

Italics added)


‘This is the day.’

I think our capacity for receiving this very simple welcome, and for genuinely offering it to the people we meet, is made greater when we have a deep sense of being held in the liberating embrace of God’s loving gifts of being in time and being in place. The pressures of daily life and of ministry often seem to conspire to distort our sense of time and with it our sense of purpose and our ability to be at peace about who we are, where we are and what we are for. Just getting through a day is about the best we can manage. The notion of living with a very simple welcome becomes the stuff of idealistic reflections by retired priests like me, rather than the practical reality of our lived discipleship.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m meditating on the Bible, I often find myself stumbling over something I’ve been reading for years, but have hardly noticed. This often happens when the Lord wants to show me something, to give me a more life-giving and faithful response to God’s call on my life.

I had one of these stumbling / light bulb moments when I was meditating on Genesis 1. Five times on this first page of the Scriptures the preacher who wrote it gives the expression, ‘And there was evening and there was morning, the [first] day, and God said…’

There was evening and there was morning – the first example in scripture of God’s gift of the shape of a day. Evening then morning and God speaking. Evening then morning and God speaking. God’s gift of a very simple welcome to the shape of a day, Evening, morning and the next thing God has to say that God wants people to hear.

It is worth recalling that scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures place the main editing of these creation stories around the time of the Babylonian Exile. If that is well-founded, then this opening of Genesis is given as good news for people who have begun to lose their sense of themselves, their place and their purpose because their daily experience tells them they don’t really belong where they are and they can’t do anything about it. They are living as people who are out of place and out of time. People who feel they are away even from the speaking of God who used to call them ‘my people’.

Into this disjointed and confusing time and place the preacher speaks. First, remember the wonderful goodness of God who created all the world and you within it. See again the sense of light and shade, purpose and order, colour and texture, form and shape, space and movement. See again the sense of rhythm and development God builds into it all. Hear the sounds and the silences. Wait and attend for just long enough to notice the heartbeat of God’s gift of time. Attend and listen for the way God speaks and for what God says. As you do this, begin to experience God’s gift of the shape of time, God’s very simple welcome to the shape of the day. There was evening and there was morning, a day, and God said…

From this we learn that God’s shape of a day starts with the evening. God’s shape of the day begins with the time of leaving done what has been done and receiving the gifts and the graces of the time for peace and rest.

What a contrast with the shape of the day as many of us experience it as serving Christians! Getting up, getting breakfast if you’ve got the chance, hurry the kids, kiss the dog, pat our spouse on top of the head, find yourself at your morning prayers. ’O Lord open our lips’ – because if you don’t, we haven’t a hope in hades! Through the day and into the evening, a day filled with people who give us joy and frustration, who inspire our faith and who test it beyond the patience of the angel Gabriel; a day filled with things to do that sometimes seems lightyears away from the Gospel we welcomed as our calling; somehow getting back home, grabbing a cup or a glass, flicking TV channels in the forlorn hope of finding something interesting or entertaining. Half -listening as your family try to talk to you. Staggering towards bed, lying down and trying to reflect on the day that has been and commend it all to God, then waking up in the morning already exhausted before you set out on it all again.

OK, this has sometimes been my experience. Yours will be different, because you are probably more deeply rooted and faithful Christians than me, but my guess is that for nearly all of us the rhythm of the day is morning then noon then night and God trying to get a word in edgeways if only we were able to pause and listen out for it. To be sure, we all recognise the problem and we all come again and again to review and reshape the pattern of our working. My purpose is not to reinforce the guilt-scripts of my brothers and sisters, but to give a very simple invitation to receive again from God who loves all of us the gift of God’s shaping of the day. There was evening and there was morning and God said…’ (I’m sure God speaks with us in the evening too, but you get the point.)

Andrew Bishop, one of the canons at Guildford Cathedral, has given us a wonderful study of God’s shaping of our day with his excellent study of the spirituality and theology of sleep, entitled Theosomnia. Andrew takes us back to some of the traditional shapes of Christian spirituality and liturgy, especially focusing on the shape of Night Prayer or Compline. If you have used Night Prayer or Compline you will have seen that it is built around a reflection of the shape of our day, the reality of our mortality, and the promise of resurrection to the new day with Christ. So, Andrew’s suggestion is that when we come to reflect on the re-shaping of our ministerial working time, we begin with the way we prepare ourselves to receive the gift of the day that has been; and to receive the grace and the gift of trustful rest in Christ that will prepare us to live in the new day that God gives.

Psalm 4 is the prayer of a person who is very familiar with the realities of distress, shameful treatment, lies and deception and the stress that comes with all these things. Yet this psalmist also has real confidence in God’s loving holding and mercy and trustworthiness and joy, so the psalm closes with words breathed into the time of darkness and night, ‘I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.’ (Psalm 4:8)

I love the words near the beginning of our Church of England Common Worship service of Morning Prayer, ‘The night has passed, and the day lies open before us. Let us pray with one heart and mind.’ The night and whatever darkness it has held is past, and the day of resurrection life lies open as a very simple invitation before us.

As we all know, the Genesis creation stories with their repeated rhythm of God’s shape of time, leads to the crescendo of God’s gift of sabbath rest. As the Bible testimony to God’s way of working with the creation develops, we see that the writers have placed God’s gift of sabbath among the stories about the purposeful beginnings of things; just as the writer placed evening and rest at the beginning of God’s shape of the day. I don’t think the importance of this has been better expressed by anybody than the way Walter Brueggemann puts it,

‘The celebration of a day of rest was, then, the announcement of trust in God who is confident enough to rest………

‘Sabbath is an unspoken prayer for the coming of a new sanity shaped by the power and graciousness of God……

‘The rest to be granted is not a sleep which escapes history. It is the freedom and well-being of a new kind of history…..the rest of God is an invitation to form a new kind of human community.’

Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, John Knox Press 1982. 

These gifts of renewal of God’s shape of a day and God’s grace of rest together form a very simple invitation of God’s love in Jesus to a refreshed joy in living our ministries. ‘This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ (Psalm 118:24)

Amen

canongordon.oliver@gmail.com 

October 13 2021


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