Rejoice, again I say rejoice

“I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance”.

Abundant life! I am not sure that that is the definition that many people would give of Christianity.
Philip Yancey, in his book “What’s so amazing about grace?” muses on the ungracefulness, the ungraciousness, the apparent ungracedness, of so much of Christianity, and of so many Christians. Grace – it should be one of our defining characteristics. You know the old acronym definition of grace: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. We should be visibly full of God’s riches, of his abundant life.

Similarly, Gerard Hughes in a recent talk on the subject of the “gap” between our everyday lives and our religious lives, asked us what the word “holy” meant to us. The conclusion was that we thought immediately of someone on their knees; someone with a halo; better still, someone on their knees with a halo. Not very attractive. Would we like to be “holy”, or live with someone “holy”, if that’s the sort of thing it involves? This, as Gerard Hughes pointed out, is pretty silly. Holiness actually involves being like Jesus, because it involves being indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And it therefore involves being filled with the fullness of life. And the fullness of life, life in abundance, involves joy.

This Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, has been known as Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday probably ever since the time of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. In the days when Advent was treated like a sort of mini-Lent it was the “day off”, so to speak, the day when you didn’t fast, the day when instead of black or violet vestments the clergy wore pink. That, incidentally, is the origin of the one pink candle on the Advent wreath. It used to be lit on the third Sunday and to symbolise rejoicing. There’s a similar Sunday in Lent, you may recall – the fifth Sunday, known as “Laetare” or “Be happy” Sunday. These seasons of preparation are seasons when we are, or should be, aware of our sinfulness, our need to repent, and the reason why the Son of God took flesh and died for us. The readings, in general, reinforce that atmosphere. But today – and today’s Lenten equivalent – are quite different. Today we remember not so much our sinfulness as the fact that our sins have been forgiven. Not so much that Christ died as that he rose again and all is well. Not so much that he came in poverty and was exiled, persecuted and judicially murdered as that he came at all. Today we lift up our eyes and look towards the Incarnation. And you know, that’s the reason why I so much hate our “consumer society’s” premature Christmas season. As some of you may know, I was a Benedictine nun for twenty years; and one of the wonderful things about that way of life is that the liturgical calendar, life with God and his saints, becomes much more real than the secular one. As the saying goes, “the veil is very thin”. In some ways, for me, it still is. At a certain point in Advent – more often than not either Gaudete Sunday, the day before, or the day after – everything shifts. When the Christmas season begins in September, or even on St Andrew’s Day, that shift is impossible, and the amazingness of grace – of the Incarnation – never really gets the chance to hit home.

Is it really more difficult to be a Christian in this society than in earlier times? It does seem so, it does feel as if everything conspires to make the veil as thick as possible. And if society militates against Christians, maybe it is time for us to fight back. Not by being argumentative, much less by being violent, but by making sure that our own minds and our own hearts, and if at all possible our own homes, are places where the veil is as thin as possible. The Advent and Christmas season is a perfect opportunity – the church takes us by the hand through them, if we will only go with it.

I don’t know whether any of you has had the same experience as I have recently had when faced with the newspapers, or the news in any form. It is so overwhelmingly bad, and so largely tragic, that it was threatening to become altogether too much. Sometimes it is a stark choice between going under or getting things in perspective – and that has got to be God’s perspective, or as near as we can get to it, as that is the only one that takes in all the data. It’s not easy to do, partly because obviously we haven’t got all the data, and partly because it can feel escapist, or unreal. Pie in the sky, in other words. Quite true, we haven’t. But it is certainly not escapist or unreal. Just as the liturgical calendar is the real one – the Kingdom of Heaven is within us NOW – and the secular calendar is simply the one that we run our day-to-day lives by, so the joy of the Lord is the real one and the struggles of this life are simply the ones that we have to get through somehow, with God’s help and according to God’s perspective, until...until…
I’ve mentioned before that I always read very slowly the texts I am to preach on, listening carefully for the phrase that God will underline in red for me. Today’s was” “At that time”. “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home.” I doubt if anyone else noticed it – we may all read or hear the same Scripture, but God uses it to say a different thing to each of us. The Fathers of the Church have a lot to say about the timing of the Incarnation, and why it was exactly the right time. In fact, whatever God does, he does not only perfectly, but at the right time, and it is wonderful to realise how the liturgy of the church guides us to see it. And that applies not just to the great sweep of history, but to our own lives. I am not pretending that life is one great picnic. For many people it is one long – or short – tragedy. For the majority of the human race it is a ceaseless life-or-death struggle. For us too, sometimes, in our western, middle-class, reasonably prosperous way, it can be a great struggle, sometimes more than we can bear without help. But the help is there, although sometimes we may have to swallow our pride, and find a lot more courage than we ever thought we had, to ask for it and take it. It’s known as grace.

So let me repeat some less well-known words of Julian of Norwich, which have been rather like a life-raft of joy for me for at least thirty years, and will be until that time of gathering and bringing home comes for me. I commend them to you for the same purpose:
He did not say: “Thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be dis-eased”; but he did say: “Thou shalt not be overcome”.