 |
| Detail from Fra Bartolomeo's Vision of St. Bernard |
I don’t know about
you, but I really don’t feel strongly about the Gregorian calendar as most of America
uses it. January to December, twelve evenly spaced months, with a handful of
holidays, each proceeded by shopping seasons and themed napkins, and
accompanied by maybe one Monday off of work. It’s just one straight line, front
to back, left to right, over and over again. Pretty boring stuff.
So I never
would’ve guessed that when I became Anglican, one of the things I’d fall in
love with would be our Church calendar! It’s a wonderful thing. I was taught
that it isn’t a line, but a circle, reminding us that God is both beginning and
end, recalling God’s eternity. And the Church’s calendar isn’t an even grid,
but is a cycle of changing seasons, running close to the seasons of the natural
world.
These seasons
are anchored in the stories of our tradition, and especially in the life of
Christ as we know it in the Gospels. The movement of the seasons is the
movement of stories, as a collection of narratives draws us along. And in each season, in each different color
and pitch, we’re invited to hear echoes of our own lives. Each season is
capacious and complex enough to speak to us no matter where or how we find
ourselves that year.
To
refresh your memory: Today is the first day of the church year, the first
Sunday in Advent, as we prepare the mystery of the Incarnation; then comes
Epiphany and the brightness of how God is revealed to us; and Lent, the solemn
penitential season, dark and full of God’s mercy; and Easter, that bright white
season of alleluias and the Resurrection; then Ascension Day, as Christ leaves
his disciples, and the fiery red day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, and the
long green growing season of Pentecost. This ends—last week!—with the feast of
Christ the King, a reminder of Christ’s kingdom as it is coming into being and
as it will be.
And then, back
to Advent again. The word “Advent” is from a Latin word that means “to come.”
In Advent, we slow down from the rush of summer, and quiet our minds, and try
to pay attention as we wait.
But
what are we waiting for?
Since we’re in church, the answer
to that question is, naturally, “Jesus Christ.” We are quieting down, opening
our eyes, and waiting for Jesus.
But the trick in
Advent is that we’re waiting for him twice.
Most obviously, as we live in the narrative of the prophets and the Gospels, we
await his birth, this long-awaited “righteous Branch” which will “execute
justice and righteousness,” as Jeremiah says. The Nativity is the strange and
humble way in which this righteous branch springs up, a vulnerable beginning to
the security and safety promised in Jeremiah.
But
as you probably noticed in our reading from Luke today, Advent also begins with
a different coming of Christ—the second coming, “that last day when he shall
come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead,” as the
Collect says. This part of the story is as of yet unwritten, except for in
broad bright symbolic visions. The signs mentioned in Luke, we have seen them
already—we see distress among nations; we hear the roaring of the sea, we feel
the fear and foreboding in the world. The folks who wrote the Gospels had
first-hand experience with such things, and they wanted to remind each other
that the kingdom
of God, with its new
green leaves, is near. So in this second coming we await a Christ who will
bring to its fullest blossom and fruition the kingdom which is already alive
and growing on earth.
The
season of Advent is a strange layering of a beloved past—a fulfilled
promise—and an unknown but promised future. Christ is coming.
And!
if that’s not enough narrative and movement for you, just wait, there’s more!
Because St. Bernard of Clairvaux, an eleventh century monk, in his sermon on
Advent says that there are in fact “three comings of the Lord.” Bernard says, “In
his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and in our weakness; in this middle
coming he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in
glory and majesty.” This middle advent is “a sort of road by which we travel
from the first to the last.” Unlike the other two, it is invisible, and hidden
“within our own selves.” Christ is coming to us—now.
What
does it look like to wait for this invisible advent of Christ’s spirit and
power? What should we do to be ready for it? And what does it look like when it
happens?
St. Bernard
reminds us of John 14:23 : “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my
Father will love him, and we will come to him.” He then asks, “Where is God’s
word to be kept? Obviously in the heart, as the prophet says: I have hidden
your words in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. Keep God’s word in
this way. Let it enter into your very being, let it take possession of your
desires and your whole way of life. Feed on goodness, and your soul will
delight in its richness. If you keep the word of God in this way, it will also
keep you.”
That’s how we wait for the middle advent—by
keeping God’s word in our hearts. Today in our Gospel we were warned against
letting our hearts be weighed down with dissipation—be spread thin, lost, spent
wastefully. Instead, like St. Paul,
we should ask that the Lord will strengthen our hearts in holiness. We can say
with the Psalmist, “Show me your ways, O Lord, / and teach me your paths.”
Now,
as to what this middle advent looks and feels like, Bernard has his own story
to tell. He says, “I admit that the Word [Jesus Christ] has also come to me—and
I speak foolishly—has come often. As often as he has come to me, I have not
perceived the different times of his coming . . . I perceived that he has been
present, I remembered that he had been there. Sometimes I was able to
anticipate his coming, but I never felt it, nor its departing either. Even now,
I don’t know whence he came into my soul and where he went . . . and by what
way he entered and left . . .”
This
invisible advent of Christ in spirit and power is not easy to pin down. When I
first read this, I thought, Oh man, I definitely know the feeling of having
just missed the point! But I think St. Bernard is simply explaining here what
it’s like for us—finite humans, moving along in time and space—to encounter
God.
Sometimes Christ
comes to us in an interaction with another person, a friend or a stranger. Sometimes
Christ comes in the words of the Bible, as we read it alone or hear it in church,
or suddenly remember a verse in the middle of the day. Christ comes to us as we
sing together, Christ comes as we take Communion, Christ comes when we share
meals.
And sometimes,
Christ comes to us in complete silence, with a slow or sudden but certain sense of his immediate, immanent presence to
us.
All
of these, are a kind of middle advent, and these are the advent which we live day
after day and year after circling year. Christ has come.
Now, the season
of Advent has neither the unrelenting joy of Easter nor the unbroken solemnity
of Lent. Advent is called “mildly penitential.” (Which, for the record, always
sounds to me like “partly cloudy” or “fold in gently”.)
But this isn’t a
wish-washy thing—it’s mildly
penitential because our attention is caught in tension between a serious
penitence and a sense of joyful hope as we wait to see what God will do.
Yes, we admit that our hearts are often weighed down with dissipation, drunk on
the unnecessary excess of life, and tangled in worry over things that don’t
actually matter. Yes. We know this is wrong, and we ask for God’s mercy and
grace as we work to right ourselves and our world.
But we also know—we also know that something good
is coming. We know that the Lord’s compassion and love are, as the Psalmist
says, “from everlasting,” that for those who are committed to him, “the paths
of the Lord are love and faithfulness.” We remember that Jeremiah’s promise was
for us, too, and that in our own lives there are righteous growing things
waiting to spring up. We know that Jesus will be born in Bethlehem; we know that he will come later,
in unimaginable glory; and we know that he will come to us, now, today, tomorrow, here, in our
lives.
This balance,
between penitence and happy anticipation, feels to me like kneeling in sincere
confession with a small smile in the corner of your mouth. We know we are
imperfect, and we need God’s mercy—and,
we are confident in God’s mercy, happily awake and alert to see what God will
do next.
What
makes this prayerful anticipation even better is that Christ is coming to us no matter what. Are you happy, is your
heart light? Christ is coming to you. Are you weary, is your heart heavy?
Christ is coming to you. Are there parts of your life which you know are not
pleasing to God or even to you? Christ is coming to you, too.
Christ has come,
and is coming, and will come, and we don’t always know what it looks like.
So I have some questions
for us as we pray both together and alone this Advent. We might think of these
when we find ourselves alone on our walk to class or work; perhaps as we lie
down to sleep, or as we brush our teeth in the mornings. When we take a study
break, or when we turn off the computer to look out the window, maybe we can
say to ourselves:
Christ is
coming. Where is my heart?
Christ has already come to me. When did he do
that? What was that like?
Christ will come to me. What might that be
like?
God has been
made manifest to us, and he will be made manifest to us again; am I awake? Am I
watching? He is coming—where is my heart?
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment