One of the big differences – and there are many – between being a priest in a cathedral and most parish churches, is that you don’t have to get involved in all the practical stuff that is part and parcel of making a church happen. So, when I was a parish priest in Leeds it used to be my responsibility at this time of the year to drive out to a farm where the friendly farmer would give us a bale of hay each year for the crib. The down-side was that I used to spend the rest of the year picking bits of hay out of the car but it was great seeing the farmer and great to help get all that hay into the rather oversized crib that we had. Or, when it came to the Christmas social, it was my job to go down to the cash and carry and get all the stuff that Alma, one of our great parishioners and the mastermind behind all things social, would put on a list for me.
Even though I don’t really have to get involved in some of the nitty-gritty of that kind of stuff there remains something of a thrill when I walk into the Cathedral and see that all the preparations have been made by my colleagues. I walked in on the eve of Advent Sunday; all the altars had blue frontals and hangings for Advent, the flowers had all been removed and there were the Advent candles just waiting to be lit.
So many of our churches will have been in the same position on Advent Sunday morning, people arriving, ready to sing the Advent hymns and ready to see the first candle lit. It provides a most popular way of counting down towards Christmas, a visual reminder to everyone who comes in that Jesus is on his way.
As children we would be very keen to know how many days were left before our birthday or before Christmas, we would be keen to count down and as the day became closer we became more and more inpatient and more and more excited.
It is all of this that we bring to Advent. There is so much to prepare for, in church, at home, in our lives and we live in that sense of eager anticipation, both of the celebration of Jesus’ first coming as a baby in Bethlehem and his second coming as our king, as our judge.
I suppose what really encourages me and amazes me, and what sets my own heart on fire, is that we never tire of all of this, we never get bored when Advent arrives, we never decide not to do it this year, because “we’ve done that before”. St Paul in some of the earliest of his letters to those first Christian communities that were springing up around the Mediterranean seemed to be of the mind that the arrival of the Lord, the return of Jesus, the end times that he would summon in, was imminent. If you weren’t yet married, well, advises Paul, don’t bother, there’s not long to wait. But as time wore on and the Second Coming didn’t happen, instead of walking off, disappointed, bored, the Christian community has got on with living with eager expectation.
I love something that it says in one of St Peter’s letters to the Church. In his second letter Peter speaks a great deal about the Lord’s delay in coming and then in the great exhortation at the end of the letter says this:
Beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. (2 Peter 3.14-15)
The waiting is pure gift; the Lord is being patient with me, giving me the opportunity to change, to become perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. So in fact, it is not me waiting for God, but God waiting for me. That changes everything in my mind, that gives me real Advent hope.
In his beautiful poem Kneeling, the poet R S Thomas writes of “waiting for the God to speak” and then ends with this wonderful line:
The meaning is in the waiting.
Lighting the candles, one by one, over these next weeks is both a reminder to us that we are waiting on God and a reminder that God is waiting on us. Earth and heaven, humanity and the divine caught up in this great and meaningful act of waiting, until all is ready, until the hay is in the crib and our hearts become the place in which God will dwell. The meaning is in the waiting.
