Sermon: Advent Compline

Advent Compline. 5^th December 2007. Durham Cathedral

Isaiah 35:1-4;  Luke 2:25-35

Isaiah (35:1-4) gives us a picture of the desert rejoicing and blossoming. I find the imagery is very vivid - imagine a dry wilderness suddenly bursting into bloom. I once had a book of stunning pictures of desert wildflowers. The photographer had obviously trekked into the desert and found isolated examples of the most beautiful blooms, solitary flowers in a sea of wilderness, vibrant colours and often curious shapes and textures. Hold that image in your mind as an example of what the prophet says will happen when God acts for his people, but remember that it follows a reading we did not hear. In Isaiah 34 God ruins the glory of the nations, turning fertile places into deserts inhabited by a zoo of wild animals fill the air with a cacophony of noise. But now there is a different promise to reverse that fate, there is not just the isolated bloom but the promise is that the desert will blossom abundantly - field after field after field of glorious and varied beauty in the place of barrenness and dryness. That's the visual image of the promise held out in Isaiah, and God is the God of both situations: we miss the point if we measure God's presence with us in any situation by our sense of well-being and fail to recognise that disturbance in our lives is often a sign of God's activity.

The people to whom Isaiah speaks need help: they are a people of weak hands and feeble knees, compounded by fearful hearts. Having such a hope as the one Isaiah has outlined doesn't automatically make it easy to trust, doesn't automatically cancel out the feebleness and fear. Instead the people need encouragement and strengthening, which Isaiah exhorts others to give by reminding them of God's power and might, God's will to save them. It can be hard to look at a dry wilderness and imagine it carpeted with flowers; initial enthusiasm can give way to cold reality when there is no immediate fulfilment of the dream. The miracle for the desert is in the coming of the water. And, thinking in biblical imagery, as no doubt Isaiah is here, we know that the giver of water is God. As I said in a sermon recently, in the Old Testament God is more often referred to as the one who gives or withholds water than as king. So Isaiah gives us a picture of God's rain falling on the wilderness, causing it to blossom. Today, piped water deprives us of an image of God as the one on whom our very existence depends, an image that could add vibrancy to the Advent invitation to revisit our total dependence on God, to revisit our desire for God and to discover through the night of waiting that God does indeed come.

And because of the certainty of this promise that God will come to save them, the people are to help one another to hope. Hundreds of years later (Luke 2:25-35), one of these people was Simeon, a righteous and devout man who was looking forward to the consolation of Israel. Not only had hundreds of years passed in the nation's history, but a lifetime had passed in his own history; and yet he hung on in hope, living a righteous and devout life, fortified by a promise that he would not see death until he had seen the Lord's Messiah. We don't know when this promise was given, or how it was given, but it is possible to imagine him growing older and feebler, wondering if - back in the past when the promise was given - he had not been mistaken; if he had not made it up in his excitement or embellished it with the passing of time.

How was Simeon able to maintain his hope? the answer seems to lie in the double indication of the fact that the Holy Spirit rested on him and guided him, so that after all these years of waiting his hope was still so vibrant that he responded to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and went into the temple: a routine thing to do, but important that he did it at that precise moment. If we are waiting in hope for something it is often hard to do the routine thing but in a slightly different way - we tend to expect the long awaited event to be ushered in more dramatically. And, if Simeon did expect something out of the ordinary, he didn't find it - only a typical Jewish couple bringing their firstborn son to present him to the Lord and redeem him. It would have been so easy for Simeon to miss the promised, long anticipated blessing because it appeared in too ordinary a fashion. Who would expect to encounter God's promised Messiah in a human baby born to poor parents? Who would expect God to come to us definitively in the ordinary, unspectacularness of the duties of human life?

Perhaps it is because of his experience of a long wait, suddenly fulfilled in an unspectacular way that Simeon could tell Mary that not only was her child set for the fall and rising of many, but that a sword would pierce her own soul. Waiting long in expectant hope opens us, if we are willing, to the pain as well as the joy of God's promise as it is played out in our human experience. In years to come when the sword pierced her soul, Mary would need to remember the example of Simeon who waited a lifetime in the hope of God's coming and was still attentive enough to see God's coming in a baby. The desert blossomed, but initially in fragile beauty that was almost destroyed at Calvary - I wonder if, as she watched her son suffer, Mary could hear Simeon's words echoing down the years and strengthening her weak hands and fearful heart at that time? That was the Advent hope played out throughout the joys and sorrows of Mary's life. That is the Advent hope played out throughout the joys and sorrows of our lives.