Second Sunday before Advent

[This sermon was given at a Deanery Evensong used as an opportunity to prepare for Advent – given that for any of us Advent is a busy time – and using lectionary readings set for the First Sunday of Advent.]

Anticipating Advent : Psalm 44 and Isaiah 51:4-11 and Romans 13:11-14.

When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, I watched children’s television. I was lucky enough to belong to that generation of children who grew up watching the Golden Age of children’s television, the days of the legendary Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate, whose work included my personal favourite, Ivor the Engine, and also the much-loved Bagpuss.

Bagpuss – as you will remember if you were a child, or indeed a parent, in the 1970s and ’80s – was a stuffed toy, a cat, large and saggy with pink and off-white stripes, the favourite toy of Emily, a little girl who collected lost and broken things and displayed them in her window so that their owners, passing by, might see them and reclaim them. Each of the 13 episodes would begin with Emily singing to Bagpuss -

“Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss
Old Fat Furry Catpuss
Wake up and look at this thing that I bring
Wake up, be bright, be golden and light
Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing.”

- after which Emily would depart, at which point Bagpuss would wake up, or, come to life. And when Bagpuss woke up, all his friends woke up too, and went to work first identifying and celebrating the new item Emily had brought them and then mending whatever was broken.

“And so their work was done.
Bagpuss gave a big yawn and settled down to sleep
And, of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep,
All his friends go to sleep too.
The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ.
Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls.
And Professor Yaffle was a carved, wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker.
Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old, saggy cloth cat,
Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams,
But Emily loved him.”

When Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up. And when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too. But what has this to do with anticipating Advent?

Psalm 44 and Isaiah 51 are both songs sung to cause God to awake. Both express something of the disorientation, distress, or yearning experienced when we are out-of-sync with God, when we are awake but he is asleep. And if the image of God being asleep suggests to us more the limitations of human experience and human language than the reality of the divine nature, then perhaps we need to appreciate afresh that human experience and human language is all we have. For God has made us human; to know him, as humans; and has revealed himself to us, as humans. So rather than being overly knowing, let us, with childlike acceptance and wonder, enter into the story.

Romans 13, on the other hand, holds us in a moment where God is just about to wake up, and depicts one of his friends urging his other friends to be ready to shake off sleep too. We are suspended in time with them in this very moment: for with God a thousand years is like a day, two-thousand like no time at all. So in our Lessons we have images of being out-of-sync and of being in-sync with the cycle of rest and work for which we were created and which we are meant to experience, to share with God.

Perhaps more than any other time of year, Advent is a time when it is easy to be out-of-sync. For Advent is given to us as a gift of sleep, and yet that sleep is threatened by Christmas-come-early with its round of lights and baubles and carol services.

In calling Advent a gift of sleep, I don’t mean to imply that we do nothing. Unlike Bagpuss and his friends, we are not ever inanimate objects. For us, sleep is a time when the body shuts down certain activities, such as being alert to the constant threat of attack, in order to turn our attention to making sense of the world, through the processing of our memories, the consolidation of our learnings, the mysterious deconstructing and constructing of our dreams. For us, sleep is when our beloved and treasured parts and our longing-to-be-loved and broken parts wake up. We cannot wake from sleep ready to face the coming day unless we also sleep well; unless we allow ourselves to become one with Jesus, who slept in the middle of a sea-storm; unless we use the night wisely, not as a cover for evil.

We know that December can be a mad time, and so we offer you the gift of this evening, to anticipate Advent. We offer you this time as a lullaby, to sing you asleep, to sing you alive to a deeper-than-surface reality.

Is there anyone here who, like the psalmist, feels that God has rejected us and brought us to shame, has scattered us and sold us for a pittance, has made us the taunt of our neighbours, the scorn and derision of those that are round about us?

Is there anyone here who, like those depicted in Isaiah 51, are troubled by injustice, long for deliverance from oppression, or are weighed down by sorrow? Is there anyone for whom the heavens are vanishing like smoke and the earth wearing-out like a garment – for whom life is unravelling?

Is there anyone here who, like the believers in Rome, is wrestling to take a stand against revelling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, quarrelling and jealousy? These words could be an advertiser’s strapline for Christmas and New Year, from the office party to family feuds. We may find ourselves wrestling with some or all of these temptations, whether wrestling within or without, against ourselves or against our society.

If our Psalm and our Lessons evoke fitfulness, they are juxtaposed with the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, songs of hope and trust. There is much to be teased-out in sleep: a making-sense of complexity; lamenting our brokenness, and that of the world around us; a recognition of loss, and the hope of being reclaimed. There is even a mending that takes place as we sleep, as we rest, as we are cherished and sung-over.

Advent is a season of preparation: of our preparing to celebrate the first coming of the Christ, and of his preparing us to celebrate his return. The Christ-child is hidden in the womb. Christ the King is hidden in the heavens. God is asleep. But the child will be born, the King will appear, God will wake up – and we with him. For now, do not be troubled. Be at peace. Sleep. Dream. The day is near; and when it arrives, you shall be made new.