and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT
(December 10th) 2023
READINGS
Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3: 8-15a
Mark 1: 1-8
There’s hush of expectation, and a quiet in the air,
and the breath of God is moving in the fervent breath of
prayer;
for the suffering, dying Jesus is the Christ upon the throne,
and the travail of our spirit is the travail of his own
I
grew to love that hymn when I was introduced to it by a parishioner in one of
my New South Wales parishes, young woman of Methodist extraction, though the
granddaughter of a wonderful Anglican bishop. But it was for me, above all,
this sense of a hush of expectation, especially at this Advent time of the
year, that captured my imagination.
It
seems to me that, while there may be some expectation particularly in children’s
circles at this time of the year – and that expectation tends to be of the
coming of a rotund gentleman in a red suit rather than an infant incongruously
in a manger – nevertheless any sense of hush is 180 degrees removed from our
experience in the weeks leading to Christmas. From around about late August
onwards as hints of Christmas trade begin to appear in supermarkets, I begin to
wish that I was living in a Buddhist or Islamic country in which I could
maintain my belief in the birth of a vulnerable Christ child, but not be
bombarded with songs about jingling bells – and I refuse to make reference to
the odours of Batman – or across the Tasman, and perhaps to a lesser degree
here, rusty Holden utes.
It
seems to me precisely that divergence that preys most on my mind in the weeks
before Christmas. I find myself seeking peace and quiet, taking long walks not
just to reduce my own resemblance to Santa Claus but more importantly to find
at least some hope of encountering the still point in a turning world. That
phrase that T.S. Eliot, amongst others, most memorably called the encounter
with Jesus, is a powerful understanding of Jesis. As Patti Smith mused, albiet
is without specific reference to Jesus, the prhrase points to a solid anchor in
the complexities of human existence.
For Eliot, in his “Burnt Norton,” “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.” The dance, as Sidney Carter emphasized in his controversial hymn “Lord of the Dance,” is everything: “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
Or, when Eliot was being more of the
church warden that he was, there is only the Christ.
The chaos of the weeks before
Christmas contrast radically with the hush of expectation celebrated in the
hymn that I’ve mentioned. We are called to be a contrast society of Jesus, a
counterculture of hope. The hard part for us as Christ bearers is to shut out
at least some of the noise of commerce around us, to pause enough to allow at
least the possibility of the encounter that Eliot emphasises. We are called to
encounter the God who is before creation and after creation, and who holds
creation and all time within that realm, impossible to understand but that many
of us are learning to call “Godself.”
If that seems a convoluted and
incomprehensible sentence or two let me put it in more biblical terms: in
advent we are challenged to pause long enough to reconnect with the God “who
was and is and who is to come.” That God who in Christ came into human view
vulnerable, defenceless, born on the edge of a crumbling empire, rejected by
humans with the exception of his own family, soon to become according to the
legends a refugee in Egypt.
We have a week or two left of this
season of Advent. Let us hope and pray that we can find touches of the God of
stillness and peace amidst the fanaticism of commerce and sometimes dangerously
wild celebration of a southern hemisphere summer.
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