We’ve stayed up!
We’ve stayed awake
to make this night,
this night above all nights, holy.
And we’ve sung praise to this holy night.
Perhaps for the first time tonight in this church
have we sung congregationally the lovely carol, Cantique de Noel.
Noel is a word from Anglo-Norman French. It means birthday.
So when we sing Noel, we are singing a birthday song to the world –
a new beginning sung into the night.
This holy night we see God
as light, forever a-light in our darkness,
a light in our fears, aloneness and confusion.
Tonight we see night as the time God acts.
God’s creation begins in darkness.
That’s our Genesis.
The Exodus began in the dark.
The resurrection begins “while it was still dark”.
God works the night shift.
Tonight we see God –
the very nature of God,
seen and worshipped
as the smallest,
the most vulnerable of life.
This is how we see God,
in a stable, in the busyness
of a crowd of people, in a state
preoccupied by the presence of enemy power.
We see God in that darkness,
and we begin to love the name of that baby,
Jesus, the one who saves us
by joining our darkness with the lightness of love.
As night follows day, he is with us
in the darkness of hurt and disappointment,
rejection, betrayal, the loss of loved ones,
the anxiety of making ends meet,
in a world of war, and a world in flight –
he is with us, our boy, Emmanuel.
Grace doesn’t come with a sword
to overcome the darkness with a spectacular blow.
Instead God illuminates the darkness
with everlasting companionship.
And in this new light, we see ourselves again
as the very image of God.
This holy night, God appears small,
and that smallness reveals what God is always like.
The manger isn’t camouflage, it is revelation.
The manger is our mirror image.
We are made in the image of God,
not born to be high and mighty, first and foremost,
but born into smallness – humble at heart.
And this is the best possible light,
this night, to see one another.
Even though we are in the dark
God helps us see his work begin in smallness,
even with the least, the last and the lost.
God imagines us all worth visiting,
all worth illuminating, all worth saving.
And perhaps, finally,
this holy night invites us
not only to consider how we see God,
or how we see ourselves,
or how we see one another –
but how God sees us.
God does not look for the impressive,
the sorted, the strong.
God looks with delight
upon those awake in the night,
those keeping watch,
those doing their best to get through.
This is the light God shines upon us:
not a searching light,
not a judging light,
but a warming one.
A light that says,
You are worth visiting.
You are worth staying with.
You are worth saving.
This holy night,
God sees us as beloved.
And that is blessing enough
to carry us back into the dark,
Unafraid.
Good night.
Tag: Emmanuel
Opening Advent Doors
Advent is a time for praying for the coming of Emmanuel, that God may be with us, and for each of the evenings of the week before Christmas there is an “O” antiphon. Each of the seven antiphons is prefaced by “O” and addressed to the Messiah according to the names for him found in Isaiah. The “O” expresses our longing. The seven antiphons are addressed to Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King and Emmanuel.
Doors are very much a theme of Advent. Doors are both barriers and openings. We open a “door” a day on our Advent calendar to signify our willingness to open our hearts to the coming of Christ. Many decorate their front doors in a way that invites the stranger, in a way that begs to be opened (as in the door of one of our neighbours pictured above). Some doors are hard to shift and many are locked behind them.
Malcolm Guite has written a beautiful poem in response to the O Clavis antiphon (based on Isaiah 22:22):
O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
This is Malcolm’s response (which is set in a beautiful image by Linda Richardson):
Even in the darkness where I sit
And huddle in the midst of misery
I can remember freedom, but forget
That every lock must answer to a key,
That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,
Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard,
Particular, exact and intimate,
The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.
I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free
Cut to the quick to fit, the master key.
The poem senses despair but also senses freedom, if only we could find “the key I threw away”, that “turned and over turned with certain touch and … opened my darkness to the light of day”. I love the sense of freedom because “every lock must answer to its key” and “each dark clasp … must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard”.
There are so many locks to spring. Back in the 14th century, Hafiz wrote about the sort of people who lock others up, and the sort of people who work in the darkness to set people free. They “drop keys all night long”:
The small person
builds cages for everyone
he
sees.Instead, the sage,
who needs to duck his head,
when the moon is low
can be found dropping keys, all night long
for the beautiful
rowdy,
prisoners.
What are the cages, catches, vices, locks and blocks that bind us? What needs to be undone for peace to be declared on earth?
You may be interested in the Jesus Doors by Cheshire artist Ali Hutchison and the Advent Haikus Jim Bridgman has written for every day of Advent as part of his blog which is Really Nothing but which is in fact, quite something. You might also be interested in The Advent Door by Jan Richardson.
Ero Cras
The Antiphons are one of the cool features of Advent prayer as Christians look forward to the coming of the Kingdom of God. There are seven Antiphons. They all begin with “O”, which is then followed by a title or attribute of Christ. There is one antiphon for each day of the week from December 17th. The Christian faith is spelled out in the initials of the Latin titles in the antiphons. Each title is drawn from Isaiah’s prophecy. Here’s the list (thank you wikipedia), together with reference to Isaiah:
- December 17th: O Sapientia (O Wisdom) – Isaiah 11:2f; 28:29
- December 18th: O Adonai (O Lord) – Isaiah 11:4-5; 33:22
- December 19th: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse) – Isaiah 11:1 and 10
- December 20th: O Clavis David (O Key of David) – Isaiah 22:22, 9:7 and 42:7
- December 21st: O Oriens (O Dayspring) – Isaiah 9:2
- December 22nd: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations) – Isaiah 9:6 ; 2:4
- December 23rd: O Emmanuel (O God who is with us) – Isaiah :14
The initials read backwards from the 7th to the 1st antiphon. They spell out ERO CRAS which means “Tomorrow, I will be there.” This faith in tomorrow is borne out of the compassionate response to the realities of the present tense/tensions which are rightly seen as lamentable. Richard Beck, in an Advent meditation, describes Advent as “sort of like a lament. Advent is being the slave in Egypt, sitting with the experience of exile. Advent is about looking for God and hoping for God in a situation where God’s promises are outstanding and yet to be fulfilled.” In a world where everything is “now”, we sometimes lose patience and sight of the fact that now was never intended to be the time, when our churches were to be full, when kingdom was to come in all its fullness. Now is a time of exile, a time of alienation, a time for not being at home in the world, a time of waiting for tomorrow, a time of lament, a time for hope.
Enya captures the spirit of waiting and the hope of tomorrow as she sings the 7th of the antiphons – part of the hymn O come, O come Emmanuel .which paraphrases the seven antiphons.
You may be interested to read about the long now.
Grits and Grains 
