Sermon: The World's Last Night

‘What if this present were the world's last night?'  The 17^th century poet and Cathedral dean John Donne puts that question in one of his Divine Poems.  He was much exercised by thoughts about the end of the world and about death, the end of his world.  ‘This is my play's last scene, here heavens appoint My pilgrimage's last mile';  ‘Oh my black soul!  Now thou art summoned By sickness, death's herald, and champion'; ‘Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste, I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday'.  And with death come thoughts of darkness, for his was a troubled soul.  ‘To see God only, I go out of sight: And to 'scape stormy days I choose An everlasting night'.  For Donne, the winter solstice held powerful significance: the shortest day, the ‘year's midnight' as he calls it.  This precarious axis of the seasons when the sun's light almost fails is for him a metaphor of his spiritual condition: wondering, hoping but not always expecting that the light will grow strong again, half believing that it might not.  Midwinter raises anxiety about the last things: solstitium: the sun stands still in the sky, the light burns low, and life is short, and nature holds out no promise that she will ever renew herself or that this pale sun whose rays barely penetrate to earth could ever warm another living thing. 

For most of us, I expect, tomorrow's snowy solstice will pass unnoticed.  We are insulated from it not just by electric light and central heating, but by the business that occupies us in the days before Christmas.  But those whose lives are tuned to the rhythms of the seasons and the rise and fall of light pay attention: Pennine farmers, market gardeners, seafarers, astronomers, poets.   For billions in our world, less burdened by technology than we are, these primal rhythms are close to what it means to sustain life, hold out the prospect of a tomorrow as well as a today.  ‘What if this present were the world's last night?' is not the private fantasy of a morbid soul.  It is the Copenhagen question to ask when the planet is spinning relentlessly towards irreversible climate change.  The first victims to suffer, as the Archdeacon reminded us at the eucharist last week, will be the poor and voiceless of the developing world.  The world's last night is no longer the fantasy of a fevered imagination.  The apocalypse is now.

On the Sunday before Christmas, you may prefer the preacher to lighten up (an apt image for the solstice).  But while modern Anglican texts soften as Christmas approaches, the Book of Common Prayer maintains a tougher Advent focus.  Today's collect is one of the most majestic in the book: ‘O Lord, raise up thy power and come among us, and with great might succour us': we call on God as those who are helpless because he alone can rescue us.  In the Prayer Book communion rite, both the 3^rd and 4^th Sundays of Advent give us gospel readings about John the Baptist, hardly comfortable reading for Advent.  The Great O antiphons of Advent are a crying for the light at this dark time of the year: ‘O Morning Star, splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness: come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death'.  And when Advent at last utters the name ‘God with us' in the antiphon of the final day before Christmas Eve, it is longing and desire that run through it: ‘O Emmanuel, our King and our Lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour: come and save us O Lord our God'.  Come.... Come....It is futures that we fasten on in Advent: futures promised, futures glimpsed, and yes, futures feared as well. 

At the solstice, people used to kindle fires to keep light and warmth alive and cherish them for the long year ahead.  Perhaps it is the distant origin of fairy lights and Christmas trees; perhaps we still need to echo our forebears and in ceremony and symbol act out the issues of light and dark.  Our Advent Procession did precisely this.  The movement up the church from west to east was a movement towards the light, at first experienced partially, brokenly, as if it might be swallowed up again by the immense darkness in which we stood and wondered and waited.  Gradually that fragile light was established; it grew until it reached its full strength for the reading from the Book of Revelation about the heavenly Jerusalem and how that city ‘has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.' 

Yet the hope remains future.  We do not yet possess it.  We still pray ‘Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!', for the kingdom is not yet present and God's purposed not yet fulfilled.  We ask every day in Advent that we may ‘cast away the works of darkness' and ask that God may put upon us ‘the armour of light now in the time of this mortal life'.  We glimpsed the light of God's presence in that great climax of the Advent Procession, but then it was taken from us again: for it was but a glimpse of glory given for a while.  It had to subside, for at the end of the liturgy we had to go outside again into the night, like the winter sparrow in Bede's parable who flies into the warm lit hall only to fly out again into the cold and dark.  As the lights dimmed at the end of the Advent service, we sang ‘Come thou long-expected Jesus'.  The liturgy ended as it had begun, on the note of expect longing.  We knew that we could face the night, for this vision would sustain us, the unconquered Sun who is the glory of the nations.  We knew that though we walked in darkness we had seen a great light and need not be afraid.  And as the darkness wrapped round us again with the memory of the light we felt its ambiguity.  Darkness is not necessarily ominous and bad.  In the Bible clouds and darkness are where the presence of God is found.  ‘There is in God a deep and dazzling darkness' says the poet, drawing on a long Christian mystical tradition.  ‘Churches are best for prayer, that have least light' Donne says, a trifle mysteriously.  So Durham scores well there. 

On Christmas Day we shall see for the first time at a festival the ‘new creation' high altar frontal that was dedicated last month.  It shows the rising sun, its golden rays penetrating to and animating the extremities of creation.  It rises out of a blue sea, as if to remind us of Advent and waiting for the God's purposes to be fulfilled.  For even the birth of Jesus is not the end but the beginning of our world's redemption, the dawning of the light.  The sun has yet to rise completely and fill the sky.  Across the frontal is a thin red arc, almost invisible until you come close to it, the thread of pain and passion stitched across glory which is the cost of it, the destiny of the Holy Child.  On this first day of the week, this Sun-Day, we celebrate cross and resurrection while we hold in our hearts those who in their pain and passion wait each day for deliverance.  

‘What if this present were the world's last night?'  Only when we ask John Donne's question for our world and for ourselves can we begin to hope.  It is a clarifying question, for it tells us that there is work to do and darkness to dispel and lives to change.   There are five days of Advent left to us.  We must make the most of them, especially as after tomorrow the days will get longer again, and the light stronger; for the night is far spent and the day is at hand, the day of Christ whose glory fills the skies.

Advent IV 2009

(Isaiah 10.33-11.10; Revelation 21.22-22.5)