Advent
Today
the Church starts to celebrate the great season of Advent. This is a time
of preparation for Christmas which has increasingly become a holiday cut off
from its purpose of celebrating the birth of Jesus. It is, therefore, important
for us to recapture the season of Advent as a time for preparing for Christmas.
The
advent season has many customs. Many people buy Advent calendars which have
a sort of count down to Christmas day often with chocolate in them. Ian and
I this year found a wonderful European tradition of having an Advent candle
where you light it for a certain amount of time each day during advent and
then have the candle as the centre piece on the table for Christmas day itself.
The Church uses the colour purple it its vestments as purple is always seen
as a royal colour - and this season is one of waiting for the birth of the
King of kings.
The word "Advent" comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming." Advent includes the four Sundays before Christmas. The season of Advent has been set aside as a time of preparation for Christmas since at least the last half of the 6th century. Advent is a time for self-examination and asking for forgiveness as the church is preparing for Christ’s Second Coming as it prepares for Christmas. Advent is a time of expectation, and hope, in our lives and in our world. It is a time of waiting and longing.
What were the prophets waiting and longing for?
I would encourage you, as part of your preparation for Christmas, to use the daily devotionals we have prepared for Advent. They will include one of the set readings for each day of this season and the vast majority of these come from the Old Testament. They are concerned with the great prophecies about the coming of a Messiah. The Jewish people were waiting and longing for a Messiah, a great leader who would be born of the House of David and who would set the people free.
King David was the greatest King the Jewish people had known. Under his rule their enemies had been vanquished, a loose confederation of tribes had bound together to become a kingdom, the nation had become a regional force to be reckoned with, the Temple had started to be built and his reign was the highpoint of the Jewish Kingdom. From as soon as his son took over everything went wrong. A Messiah had to come, therefore, from the line of David. Some of the Advent hymns we sing talk of Jesus coming "from the root of Jesse". Jesse was David's father and it is simply another way of saying that the Messiah would be from the line of King David.
By the time we get to the 1st Century the Jewish people were longing and waiting with great eagerness for the Messiah to arrive. The Messiah would, they thought, re-establish the great kingdom of King David. He would repel the Romans, vanquish the enemies of Israel and would make her a force strong again in the world. The Jews had endured centuries of occupation from the Romans and, before them, the Greeks. Under the Greeks they had been forbidden to practice their religion, in Rome they were seen as strange outsiders who were rather anti-social because they wouldn't worship the emperor.
So the Jewish people were longing to be free, free to practice their faith without persecution, free to be a nation worthy of respect, free of oppression. In essence they were longing to be free to be themselves.
What are we waiting and longing for?
It seems to me that many people in our communities can identify with this waiting and longing that we see in the Jewish people at the time of Jesus.
> Many of us have experienced longing for a time when we would be free to love in the way we felt called to.
> Many of us have been waiting for a beloved to come and enhance our lives.
> Many of us have been longing and yearning for a physical body to come into line with our mental self image.
> Many of us have been waiting for a world where we can dress as we please without attracting a second glance.
> We long and yearn for justice in our world, where people will no longer be valued for how much they earn, but for who they are.
> We wait for a world where the old do not die of the cold in the winter, a world where Africa is an abundant continent with well fed children.
> We long for a world where doctors and medical researchers have all the money they need and it is armies that need to have raffles to buy new equipment.
> We wait for a world where the scourge of HIV and Aids is only a memory.
We can identify with the yearning of the Jewish people, because we too wait and long for things to come right. We too have experienced waiting and yearning in our own lives.
When I was a teenager I knew I was gay. I also knew that the Church taught it was wrong to feel like I did. I yearned for something to give, either to loose my gayness or to find a way of living without God. Of course I could do neither, so my two most favourite songs of that era in my life were the Pet Shop Boys "It's a sin" - a lapsed Catholic's national anthem and Van Halen's "Why can't this be love?" I waited and yearned for something to change; knowing I was called to be a priest. Of course what changed was what I expected least.
How was the waiting and longing of the prophets fulfilled?
In
the slow course of time, something changed for the Jewish people too. God
heard the cry of their hearts and responded to them. The reading we are about
to hear from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is part of this response.
[Isaiah 9: 1-7 & 11: 1-9]
God did send a Messiah. He would be the King of kings. He would allow people to find their true freedom. He would establish a new Kingdom which would last forever. All these things came true, but not in the way the people were expecting. There would be no violent over-throw of the Roman Empire - though the seeds of Rome's doom were born in that manger in Bethlehem. Far from re-establishing Israel as a strong nation, the Jewish people were scattered over the four corners of the Earth after the Romans suppressed a revolt some 60 years after Jesus was born. But that scattering over the earth helped to spread the Christian gospel.
The birth of Jesus in that stable allowed everyone to find freedom - freedom to be the people God wants them to be. Freedom from the bonds of sin which keep us chained to addictive and destructive behaviour patterns. Freedom from insisting on our rights without thinking about and accepting our responsibilities.
How will our waiting and longing be fulfilled?
As a young gay man trying to sort out my faith, my calling and my sexuality I found my true freedom in Jesus. My yearning, longing and waiting was answered when I found MCC. This was not the answer I was expecting, wanting or hoping for! Just as the humble baby born in the manger was not the answer the Jewish people were waiting, expecting or hoping for. Nevertheless, my freedom is bound up in my call to follow Jesus.
I found other interpretations of the passages of the Bible that had plagued me for so long. I found a community of people who just got on with being Christians instead of having to constantly justify themselves -after all we believe that we have already been justified!
I found the answer to my yearning to love as I felt called to, but the answer wasn't quite what I expected. Eventually I found a beloved with whom to share my life, but that again didn't happen when I expected it to; I found myself surprised by joy.
Some of us are yearning to have the right body - some of us find that getting the right body doesn't solve all the problems. Finding a right relationship with God which gives us grace and peace and freedom, helps in the transgendered journey and gives grace and strength for it.
Accepting Jesus into our lives doesn't change the world overnight, but it does give us the strength, the grace and the peace to help change the world, to help work for a world of justice, of peace and of plenty. We use our gifts and our skills to herald the coming of the kingdom - a kingdom that our people are waiting and yearning for - even though they don't yet know it.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.