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


‘This is the Place’

Introduction

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, draw us nearer to yourself

that we may know your will;

loving Lord Jesus, fill us with your joy and peace

that we may respond to your call;

Holy Spirit, inspire us

that we may celebrate our faith,

and give glory to you, God,

ever blessed Trinity,

now and forever. Amen.

In the first reflection I spoke about God’s very simple invitation to receive the loving gift of the shape of the day – there was evening and there was morning, and God said….The day of our discipleship and ministry in the kingdom of God begins with quietness, reflection, listening and the trust that gives us confidence enough to rest.

Now I want to offer reflections on God’s loving, creative, blessed gift of time. Again, you might protest that only a retired priest who has become out of touch with the realities of day to day ministry could speak of time as a gift from God. Surely it is the reality of time that brings us so much stress, so much over-stretch in our ministries. Well, let me begin by getting one thing clear. I do not believe that individual over- stretched clergy by ourselves can just resolve to ‘do time better’ and be successful at that in the long term. We belong to a fellowship of churches engaged in mission; and too often our mission has the spiritual and theological energy torn out of it and becomes seen as little more than church project management of one sort or another.

Alongside the sheer logistics of organising ourselves well enough to meet the demands of our particular ministry context, there is a seemingly relentless flow of demands from community members, diocese and the national church. We are told by holy people that Christian ministry is primarily about being rather than doing and we are tempted to respond with a hollow laugh. So, what we need for us to be able to receive God’s gracious gift of time are some major changes in the spiritualities and practices of our Church, as well as a renewed openness to and a renewed awareness of the presence of God holding out to us this precious and gracious gift of time. God who holds out the gift is God who gives the very simple invitation to receive time for our blessing and for the blessing of the people we serve. Let me be clear. I do not believe that we can organise the kingdom of God into existence by doing church better (even if it is obviously true that often we could do church better than we do.)

Living in Time with God

My own relationship with God can sometimes get a bit techy – at least from my side. When I find myself running so quickly I can hardly think and when people seem to want contradictory things from me at the same time, I find myself saying to God, ‘Well, great for you. You are God and I’m not. You live in eternity and I’m stuck with trying to do your work in time so why don’t you stop just sitting there on your heavenly throne and give me a hand?’

Well, if we’re supposed to have a living relationship with the living God, the relationship can stand a bit of exasperated honesty – even if the theology of it is truly dreadful!

For the truth is that from the very moment when God chose to breath creation into being, he committed to being present, always present, within creation. In creating time God committed to living within time. God committed to living within all the times where his beloved creatures would find ourselves in our joys and our sorrows, in our belonging and yes, in our lostness, alienation and confusion. The kenosis – the self-emptying of God - that reaches its furthest point in Jesus Christ taking the form of a slave and submitting himself to death on the cross, begins with God’s decision to be alive and to move and to walk and to speak with his beloved creation within time.

This journey through Advent and Christmas to Epiphany that we are about to start celebrates exactly this. God’s promise and God’s delivery on this promise to be present with us, within time. St Paul lays this on the line in one of his earliest writings. In the middle of a plea calling Christians to live like people set gloriously free instead of living with the mentality of people tied down in some sort of slavery, he says, ‘When the fullness of time had come God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as children.’ (Galatians 4: 4 – 5)

Time and again in the Gospels we are told that at a particular time - before the start of day, in the middle of the day, late at night Jesus met somebody, did something, said something. At the beginning of his ministry we are told exactly what time Jesus met some of his first disciples. ‘They asked him where he was staying and he gave the response, as deep as it was direct, ‘Come and see’. They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.’ (John 1:39)

And when Jesus comes to the cross, the synoptic Gospel writers are very careful to tell us what time it was when it was all happening. Mark tells us Jesus was crucified at nine o’clock in the morning, Mark, Matthew and Luke tell us that darkness came over the earth from noon until three in the afternoon when Jesus actually died.

And of course, we have throughout the Gospels, but especially John, with his repeated use of the expression ‘the hour’ or ‘my hour’ or ‘his hour’ the sense that in Jesus the time is coming to its fulfilment. So, John has the whole series of passion narratives beginning with Jesus connecting his own awareness of who he is, where he is going, what he is for with his knowing what time it is. See John 13:1 – 5, especially verses 1 and 3.

I’m sure all of us are aware of the difference between the two words for time – Chronos – the time of day; Chairos – the right time for something to happen. It would be tedious for you to have me spell out the references to these. The point is that in those tetchy moments when I snarl my prayer about God living in eternity while I have to struggle on in time, I am telling the truth about my self-pity and frustration, but I am not telling the truth about time. For by God’s grace – and I just can’t help praising him for it – both these realities of time are bound up together like the two main chords of a single rope. God did not enter our kind of time from eternity when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. God has been present in time since there ever has been time.

That is why when the Psalmists sing aloud in their frustration, ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? (35:17). How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself for ever?’ (89:46), they are not just yelling hopelessly into thin air. They are crying out, as people have cried out through the ages our protests toward God who is present with us in time. In Jesus God is intensely present with us (if I can put it that way) in time.

Introduction

Give to your people, O God,

a bold vision and a daring love,

a refreshed wisdom and a courteous understanding,

that the eternal message of your Son

may be proclaimed as good news for our times,

through him who makes all things new,

even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We have received God’s very simple invitation to welcome the gift of the shape of a day, and the gift of time to know God is not far away from the busyness of our ministries, but very close, very near, holding out his scarred hands in kindness, grace, and love and joy and laughter. Now we come to receive God’s very simple invitation to know what it is to be ‘in place’.

I guess we all have places, physical spaces, that are special for us, places where we find ourselves wanting to return to, places where we have learned that we can seek God’s face and be met with God’s mercy, kindness and grace. 

For me these places include Alnmouth Friary in Northumberland on the north east coast of England where I first really discovered the joy of being held in the love of God some ten years after I had been ordained; the simple crypt in the basilica at Assisi where Francis lies in his casket, the little poor man whose heart’s desire was to be close to Jesus and to be as like Jesus as possible, and who has had a huge and wealthy church (albeit a very beautiful one) dumped on top of him; the pavement outside the Royal Festival Hall in London, where my girlfriend agreed to be my wife; the little patio beside our garden shed that I use as a sort of outdoor chapel. There are others too, some of them obviously holy (‘thin places’), most of them just ordinary, but in each of them I have come face to face with the love of God in Christ time and again.

You will have your special places – some of them well established as holy ground; many of them just ordinary, but personal to you because here you have in some way or other found yourself receiving the grace of God that gave you renewed strength to keep going when your ministry has been tough, or has even been hurting you.

So, we have places which are special

  • Because our roots are there – it feels where we belong
  • Because we have found them to be for us ‘thin places’
  •  Because there you have no trouble feeling ‘in place’
  • Because in this place something in particular happened between you and God.

A couple of years ago I was visiting a Buddhist stupa in the far north east of India. I got talking with a monk who had quite good English. He told me that for 20 years he had been a Baptist minister in Sri Lanka, but he had grown increasingly impatient with the way Christianity was so bound to the earth, so hung up with attachment to family and community and the ordinary things of life.  He was seeking something higher, more spiritual, that would release him from the attachments of earth and set him free from all desiring.  He was a lovely human being and I found his longing for release leaving me thoughtful and quiet.

For in a way he did have a point. Leaving aside the way people in congregations often behave that can seem light years away from the central concerns of the Gospel of Jesus, Christianity, in common with the other two Abrahamic faiths, is deeply rooted in the locations and times and seasons and pressures of the world as it actually is.  The Bible calls God’s people to a renewed, deeper, fuller and more fruitful engagement with the realities of the earth that God has created and that God loves.

Many of the places where the events and conversations we read about in the Bible can be easily identified. You can go and visit them and stand in pretty much the same places as many of the characters in the Hebrew Scriptures and almost all of the characters we meet in the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. You can go there and stand there just as did Jesus and Pilate and Paul and the rest of them. This local and historical rootedness of Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) is part of the scandal of our Christian believing and discipleship and ministry. For we do not put our trust in some disembodied phantasmagorical deity, but in the living God who out of love created the earth, has never stopped loving the earth and everybody in it; and who in Christ the living Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth.

For many years I refused to visit Israel / Palestine because of my abhorrence for the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.  Eventually, I climbed down off my high horse and swallowed my pride and went with a pilgrimage group from our diocese. I found the experience was one full of ambiguities. Like many pilgrims I found the Galilee-based time heart-warming and inspiring, though I burst out laughing as the first thing we saw on a bend in the road at Cana of Galilee was ‘The First Miracle Wine Shop’!!

And I found Jerusalem depressing, the big concrete wall of separation  distressing, Bethlehem, with its view across the valley to a huge Israeli ‘settlement’, disturbing. Other people in our party had different responses and I guess that you will have your own stories to tell about your own encounters with the ‘holy places.’

But isn’t that the whole point of this season of Advent through Christmas to Epiphany that we are about to celebrate. That when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, it was the real world that Jesus came into – the world where grace was and is in very short supply; and where truth was whatever particular people would choose it to be.

The Gospel stories of Jesus are about deep and transforming engagement with people in many different places, often at crisis moments in their lives. When Jesus came lepers, bereaved parents, wealthy magnates, poverty-stricken beggars, abused and isolated women, young mothers with toddlers, soldiers, tax collectors and a whole lot more found themselves healed, consoled, welcomed with forgiveness, blessed, reconciled with God and with their communities, even witnesses of resurrection as the places where they lived became places where the kingdom of God had indeed come among them.  To be sure, the fulfilment of this transformation was, and still is for us now, a mixture of blessings received and shared in the here and now, and the vision of the glorious promise yet to be fulfilled that, ‘The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ; and he will reign for ever and ever.’ (Revelation 11.15)

As we come to this time in the Christian year and in our ministry year, we come to it as people fully engaged – comfortably or otherwise – in the places we have been called to serve.  I don’t know about you, but I find that unlike the season of Lent, Holy Week and Easter (which do have their own challenges), this season of Advent through to Epiphany is one that we really have to fight for.  We find ourselves struggling to retain its Christian focus, it’s Christian integrity. The prelude to Christmas in our own local churches can be as spiritually and theologically compromised in its own ways as that of the rest of the world. Lots of Carol Services (my record was 19 in two weeks!); lots of Christmas dinners, Christmas tree festivals and a whole lot more, threaten to bury the season of Advent through Epiphany under tonness of this, that and the other.  In my own ministry as a diocesan training officer and now as one offering pastoral support and spiritual direction to clergy and others, I regularly find clergy getting stressed, upset and angry as they feel forced to submit to their role in the whole ‘performance.’ 

At one of those key times when we feel we ought to be deeply ‘in place’ as regards the things of God and the message of the Gospel, we can easily find ourselves ‘out of place’ as ‘the true message’ of Christmas struggles to find its voice singing out the real song.

This can be difficult even if you normally find yourself feeling ‘in place’ in the community and church you have been called to serve. If you find yourself feeling ‘out of place’ anyway, the whole business can be hugely demanding on our vision, our love, our patience and our joy.

I became rector of my parish of St John’s the Thursday before Advent Sunday. The resident self-supporting minister was very uneasy about my arrival. Throughout the vacancy of two years, she had placed herself in the rector’s prayer stall. I didn’t know at the time, but she had also applied for the position of rector.  The day after my induction service she told me was worried that I would take over the arrangements for Advent and Christmas which she had planned months in advance.  I replied that she was a much more experienced priest in this church than I was, and if she would be happy to be the lead minister for Advent and Christmas, I would be happy to assist in any way possible.  At the nativity service I was alarmed to find myself playing the full-dress roll of a baby camel among the other animals in the life-size crib. I have rarely felt so ‘out of place’!  In the coming weeks I discovered that being a camel at the nativity service was about the best thing I could have done. The SSM felt affirmed and trusted in her ministry enough to begin to relax in it and release key parts of it, and the people in community felt it would be alright to have a mad priest like me as their rector ‘in place’ among them.

The reality is, I think, that the circumstances surrounding the celebrations of Advent and Christmas (Epiphany tends to get lost and needs to be revived because that is what gives meaning and purpose to the whole sequence) are actually no more theologically and spiritually compromised than the circumstances of Jesus the Word becoming flesh in Bethlehem of Judea in the first place.   I think we can usefully do two things to get our spiritual bearings and help our sense of being ‘in place’ as we come to this increasingly intensive ministry season.

  • a)   Personally, commit to accepting God’s very simple invitation we welcome the incarnate Christ into our all too incarnate ministries. We are called to go deeper and to call anybody who will listen to go deeper in Christ with us.
  • b)   We can also go lighter, and allow ourselves to join in the joy and laughter and celebration in whatever way works with the kind of person we are and the kind of person we can become in Christ.  For one thing the Gospels very clearly tell us is that Jesus was the kind of person that outcasts, ‘sinners’, ‘tax-collectors’ and other low-life actually wanted to be with; and when they found themselves in his company, they discovered that were more than welcome to be in place in the kingdom of God that he came to preach

Conclusion
Two things.
  • First, we come to this particular Advent season at a time when there is real anxiety for so many people in our land and in our world. The whole experience of COVID 19 is making people ask where they belong and if it really is safe to be in the places they have normally been happy to go to – shopping, theatres, church services, etc.  Literally, are we to be ‘in place’, in our land and our community or to feel always anxious about the place and the state and the conditions we are in? All this in addition to the questions that so many families face about the day-to-day business of getting by and the whole range of challenges and opportunities we face every day in ministry. (as I write this, I’ve had an email from a close friend telling me she has finally decided to seek a divorce from her husband and as the priest who prepared them for marriage, I am feeling deeply upset about their conflict and distress). This underlines the vital importance for us as working ministers to see Advent as the season to get ‘in place’ in our relationship with God and in our vocation as priests – to ‘repent, for the kingdom of heaven is 
  • Second, most of us are aware in any case of a necessary ambiguity about the location of the pastor in relation to the churches where we serve.  Is it our calling to be central to the life of the churches in the communities we serve; or is it our calling to minister at the margins and beyond the margins of the churches where we serve?  The answer of course, and I say this not just because I am an Anglican (!) is both.  We are called to be central, serving and leading the people in the worship of the living God in Jesus; at the same time as we are called to be marginal because we share in the mission of Christ which is to be with the people on the edges of and outside of the community of the already committed people of God. That is why there is a necessary discomfort as well as an essential joy and fun in our ministries.  That is why in this season of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany I believe God is calling each one of us to accept with joyful and generous hearts this very simple invitation to be ‘in place’ in Christ. Amen


canongordon.oliver@gmail.com

October 13 2021




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