Advent 1

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed I’ve spent more time praying in the dark. Sometimes it’s in church, once I’ve locked up after Evening Prayer. I kneel in one of the pews in the darkness, which is lit only by the flickering flames of the candles that remain alight – at the aumbry, to mark Jesus’ presence in the Blessed Sacrament, by the statue and icons, and on the pricket stand, a sign of other people’s prayers. Sometimes it’s at home, where again I kneel in the dark, lit this time by a single candle, whose flame both reveals and obscures the icons that surround it.

The darkness somehow seems an honest context for prayer, as I hold before God the world’s darkness, full of pain and suffering, of violent divisions and drowning migrants and mutating viruses, of hate-stoking rhetoric and those who bear its consequences. As I kneel I pray too for those I bear on my heart facing the darkness of illness and loss and trauma and pain. And there is my own darkness there too: the struggles and confusions and fears that shrink from the glare of light.

All these come forth in the dark, finding space in the shadows. Which may be why some of us find the darkness a difficult place. Turn on the lights, chase away the shadows, and perhaps we can keep the hard and messy stuff at bay. But while the world outside prepares for Christmas by turning on as many lights as possible, Advent begins in the dark.

Jeremiah speaks to a people facing the threat of invasion, destruction, and exile. Darkness looms over the people of Israel for whom the loss of temple and land would be devastating. Jesus’ words are addressed to his disciples and the early Christians facing the second Temple’s destruction, terrible violence in war, and persecution. As the darkness is faced, the Advent cry and prayer is given voice: ‘Come’.

Come, Wisdom. Come, Lord. Come, Root of Jesse and Key of David. Come, Daystar and King of the Nations. Come, Emmanuel. In the darkness, you can let your guard down, which is why I think it’s an honest place for prayer. In the darkness, you don’t have to pretend things are okay when they’re not, or come up with your own strategies and plans for dealing with all that’s difficult. In the darkness you can say you don’t know, you can wonder where God is or what he’s doing, you can realise you can’t do this on your own.

That’s where Advent’s prayer takes shape. From the knowledge that we need saving but can’t save ourselves. From our longing for justice and righteousness to rain down from heaven. From the captivity and unfreedoms that we don’t know how to unlock. From the pains we find it hard to bear, and the truths we don’t want to face. Come, Lord. Come and save us. Come and deliver us.

For the people of Israel for whom Jeremiah wrote, this prayer was not answered in the way they had hoped. As darkness encroaches, our prayer can often be for it to be kept at bay. But the people saw their holy city besieged, their temple destroyed, their land laid waste, and many of their compatriots carried off into exile. Was God deaf to their plea?

Or for the early Christians, marked by Easter hope, there was the contradiction of living through calamity and persecution. Will not God spare his elect? What does faith have to say in the face of so much that threatens to overwhelm? Where is the light that shines in the darkness?

To see the light you have first to stop avoiding the darkness. We can’t always see it when we’ve got all the artificial lights turned up to full beam. This is why Advent begins in the dark. It’s where we learn to hope.

And it’s in the darkness that we learn what to hope for. I often start by hoping that God will lift me out of the darkness, or make it go away. I imagine the Israelites hoped that God would stop the invading Babylonians in their tracks and preserve the temple, just as the early Christians hoped that God would spare them from persecution and suffering.

But in the darkness they learn something else. For Jerusalem falls. The church is scattered, or martyred. But they find that the God who dwells in the light also dwells in the darkness. In exile the people discover that God now writes his covenant on their hearts. From the persecutions the gospel goes out into all lands and the early Christians discover a hope that endures even through death. Others praying in the darkness of loss or guilt or shame or fear who may hope initially for their undoing are met in the darkness by a presence that holds out promise, like a bud curled tightly on a bare branch ready to unfurl into new life.

To wait in the Advent darkness is to wait upon this presence. We may find that the darkness starts off being filled with lament, as loss is expressed; or fear, as things we normally keep hidden start to surface. We may find ourselves feeling awkward or foolish, wondering if God is there at all, as doubts linger in the shadows. Or we may find relief, that here is a place where it’s okay not to be okay, where we recognise that our own strength and will can only take us so far, where we plead tentatively, ‘Come, Lord’.

And he does. Over the years I have prayed in the darkness for situations I am powerless to change, and for people for whom my heart breaks. I have prayed in anger and grief and fear and loss. I have welcomed the darkness as a place that hides my tears, and fought it as a place that asks for truths I haven’t wanted to face. In different words and in different situations I have whispered Advent’s prayer, ‘Come, Lord.’

He doesn’t usually come with a grand gesture or dramatic intervention. He comes in the graces given: of courage to face difficulty, of kindness to extend to others, of forgiveness that uproots even the stubbornest guilt. He comes in mercy that makes truth bearable, in consolation that comforts grief, and sometimes simply in strength to go on. He comes in the hug of a friend, through the prayers of others, in the hand extended in help or support.

He comes always as Emmanuel, God-with-us. When I hope for a God who will draw me out of the darkness I am met by the God who joins me in the darkness – who is born into it, crucified in it, and held by it for three days in the tomb. But his sharing of it means that there is no darkness which he cannot reach, no place where that bud of hope cannot unfurl to bring newness.

When I pray here in the darkness the only light is that given by the candles still burning in church. But those candles show me that in the darkness I am not alone. I am accompanied by the prayers of the saints, on earth and in heaven. I am kept company by Christ, present in the Sacrament as he is present in the world he loves. And so my prayer takes shape, gathered up out of the shadows, given courage and company by those flickering flames: Come, Lord. Come, darkness. Come, Emmanuel.