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Advent: Future Present

Date: 2nd December 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jeremy Fletcher

The make of diary I have come to use starts today, Advent Sunday. The particular model is called the Minister: I’m not sure it’s specifically designed for clergy, nor that it consciously organises itself around the Christian year, but it’s rather pleasing even so. Today we start afresh, and the Christian year begins anew. So here we are then: new diary, and new year. In the cycle of readings we use on Sundays we’re also back to Year A; so everything is at the beginning.

I do feel what is perhaps a disturbing amount of pleasure when I open a new diary for the first time. The year lies before me, page after blank page of possibilities, with no messes, no crossings out, no clashes of appointments, no cancellations. I start putting in the fixed and wonderful events: birthdays, anniversaries, and the great celebrations which are both personal and corporate, like Christmas and Easter. If we’re lucky we can sort out the things we really want to plan for, like concerts or sporting events or holidays.  And then the professional planning for the future starts: in our part of the office we are probably more familiar with 2008 and 2009 at the moment: Christmas 2008 is sorted, and 2009 is being sketched out.

It is possible to spend so much time in the future that the present comes as a shock: more than once I have been convinced that a service can’t be taking place on the date someone has mentioned, only to realise it’s next years date which is fixed in my mind. Both personally and professionally I like mapping out what is coming up, but often to the detriment of relishing the present moment. Teenagers, on the other hand, have a magnificent facility for living almost wholly in the present: in a recent article a mother anxious to sort out her son’s plans for the week had to come to terms with the fact that he knew he would be out on Saturday evening, but that he did not know where because he and his mates would text each other when they were ready, probably ten minutes before.

Advent is the season of the future present. Since the fourth century there has been some sort of marking out of the calendar, the theological diary, to enable Christians to prepare for the celebration of Christ’s coming to us: that is what Advent means. The church year is a way of doing theology and discipleship and prayer with dates. There is no immutable law that says that the Christian year begins today, but Christians have just found it useful to declare that, at certain times, we will remember certain things. It’s like tying a knot in your spiritual handkerchief: use this time carefully, so that in a complex world, when the date to celebrate the incarnation of Christ comes, you’ll be ready. Advent is about looking ahead to December 25 th, to rejoice in the coming of the Christ who is already present with us. Rome the end of the year, and the period leading up to the shortest day, were marked by light ceremonies, a marking of the end and the hope of a new beginning. So Christian prayers at this time took on for themselves the flavour of reflection on consummation, of the end of everything, and the hope of rebirth. This was the season of joyful hope, of the future present with us as the ground readied itself to burst forth into newness and growth: in the darkness the light was both promised and present.

  As Christmas grew in importance as a festival, these themes of penitent preparation for Christ’s first coming and joyful hope of the end of all things and of new heaven and new earth, came together. If all we did over these next weeks was to eat the chocolate and burn the candle, get to Christmas unscathed and then put the decorations away we would only have scratched the surface of what this season can offer. This is the season of future present, of the knowledge that Christ’s coming as child means that God is indeed with us. And the whole future is present here: Christ risen, ascended, glorified, King of Kings and Lord of Lord, is here. Last week we celebrated Christ the King: it is Christ the manger child and the King of the Universe who inhabits our praise and comes among us by the Spirit. In Advent we celebrate that presence, even as we wait for its final fulfilment when he comes in glory.

My living in the future took on another facet last week when I spent four days conducting an Advent retreat: I’m already Advented out! I console myself with the knowledge that the church year is there to serve us, not to enslave us, and that Advent has varied in length anyway in different places and cultures. Some people call it St Martin’s Lent: in Tours it started on his day, November 11th. And I have relished the opportunity to concentrate on Advent themes without the insistence of the pre Christmas celebrations which nag away from now onwards. Though I did enjoy my Turkey at the first Christmas lunch of the season yesterday.

Advent is future present: Christ who will come and make new heavens and a new earth living among us now. Christ who will release us from all that holds us back, who will speak for us before God at the final reckoning walking gently alongside us and forgiving our wrongdoings and our failures now. Christ who will beckon us to himself beyond death already living the resurrection life in us. All of which could be very individual and personal, and it should be nothing of the sort. For the future heavens and earth present now are all about justice and righteousness, about the ending of violence and the active presence of peace, about the healing of wounds, about the setting aside of ancient enmities.