My friend and colleague Dr. Andrea Mann returned home to Vancouver yesterday after a few weeks of travel. Hers was a particularly risky pilgrimage. Andrea serves the national life of the Anglican Church of Canada as Director of Global Relations and has carried huge responsibilities over thirty years for our Canadian Anglican partnerships with other Anglicans the world over. This trip was a mission of solidarity with Palestinian Christians – beloved members of this Body of Christ, living in the West Bank and other occupied areas within Israel, and an opportunity for her to witness up close the realities on the ground, especially for those who for over 13 months have not been able to move freely, or to work or to go to school, who face violence and threat of detention based principally on their race. I am looking forward to hearing what she will have to report.
Andrea is someone whose character I continue to admire. She is steady, unflappable even, and her decisions do not come without obvious serious discernment , realism, and attentive focus on what is right and good and what are the risks involved. And time after time she has witnessed to me that when we take up a calling, the gifts we are given to follow that calling equip us with what we need for the journey, especially when we lean on others with a shared sense of call. I am grateful that our community here for the past couple of weeks has been praying for her on her journeys. In the midst of war and a world it seems gone crazy with fear and greed, addicted to self-serving lies and violence, my colleague reminds me that Christian character matters and makes a difference.
I read recently during my sabbatical studies of Anglicanism, a suggestion that Anglican aesthetics involves two main things: reticence on the part of the pronouncement, and patience in its reception. This is another way of talking, I suppose, about having spiritual, heavenly treasures and being very aware that we carry them in fragile clay jars and need to handle them with care; and that patience is a particular gift of the Spirit that bids us to travel over the same terrain over and over again – more or less the same liturgies, more or less the same patterns of prayer, with words that can rise up our hearts with their familiarity. These are some of the ways that Gospel-shaped character develops, by repeated self-examination, confession, and reception of our being forgiven and freed to start again; by repeated calling to mind all for which we are grateful; by renewing our focus on the quiet call of God amidst all the yelling from the realms of earthly political and economic powers and principalities.
Advent is a particularly important time to work on those practices which shape our spiritual character. It is a time of waiting – a time of pregnancy as we anticipate the birth again of God in the child Jesus. But it’s not a passive waiting, nor an escapist passing of time that we’re called to. No, Advent stands as a particularly sharply defined season in which we are called to an engaged, confident, present-focussed, attentiveness to reality. Advent calls for what the Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister calls “urgent patience.” Advent is a time to put virtues into practice, and practice means going over and over again exercises that develop Gospel virtues.
Today’s Gospel reading speaks of horrors that abound in the world. I don’t need to rehearse these, nor do I need to name for you what you experience in today’s tumults and stresses. Instead, I want to point to the good news embedded in Jesus’ words to us. These words are about the Gospel-shaped character that we are both called and empowered by God in the Holy Spirit to grow in our lives. Stand up! Be assured! Be on guard! And Be alert!
Stand up: Know your ground. Trust your self. You are not nothing. You matter. You have worth. You are called to a full life, to live in love and peace and to experience the graces of little and big reconciliations in life, to know what it is to be forgiven and to start again, and to inhabit God’s generosity. Stand up! You may participate in the economy, but you are not reducible to being a customer, a consumer. Stand up! You may make decisions and act on them in civil society, but you are not reducible to just being a voter. Stand up – because you are beloved by God. Perhaps one Advent spiritual exercise might be to ask myself what makes me reluctant to stand up, to let my light shine. Stand up, let your light shine! I need your light to help me to find mine.
Be assured! Live in the faith and trust that have been given to you. Know that the reign of God is near, and lean in to the assurance of God’s presence. Grow the awareness of God’s presence by paying attention to love. Do you have even a tiny glimpse of what it is to be loved and to love someone, or even to love an idea. To be loved is to become new again, said somebody. Love sees us as we are, as we really are, and also as we can be, and frees us to fall in love with God’s promises of ultimate peace and harmony. Being assured means that we can live lives that sow goodness for the next generations. Sr. Joan Chittister writes: “Life is not about change – Ecclesiastes reminds us – life is about sowing. The function of each generation is… to prepare for change, … to sow the seeds that will make a better world possible in the future. ‘Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never ear them.’ We must live by the love of what we will never see… that’s what sowing is all about. It requires trying when hope is thin and fragile and faith is stretched, and opposition is keen.” Perhaps an Advent spiritual exercise might be to ask what I am called to sow, to plant with assurance, in order for others to have hope. Be assured! I need your assurance to help me to find mine.
Be on guard! -specifically against “dissipation and drunkenness”. Beware of those things that claim our attention but have no value in and of themselves. Whether the escapism of too much alcohol or too much television, or the dissipation of energies and attentions by superficial social media or even news scrolling, these powerful forces want to create of us passive, addicted, unthinking quasi-subjects who only have an illusion of actual freedom. No, we have the assurance of God’s presence, and the grace that empowers us to stand up, and to shake off those things that overstep their authority in our lives and try to author us in their own image. Perhaps another Advent spiritual practice may be to ask what things are making unreasonable claims on my time and attention. Be on guard! I need your discernment to help me to find mine.
Be alert! What is good medicine for souls tempted to distraction, or to settle in to a life lesser than what God wants for us? Be immersed in what is real. Pay attention. The wisdom of discernment comes from real grappling with what is real in one’s life – the fundamental giftedness that is our life, the particular gifts with which God has graced each of us. And laugh. Again, from Sr. Joan Chittister, who describes laughter as the “atrium to wisdom” – laughter lets the light in, often illuminating reality for us in ways that help us to make sense of it and to find our place. It is “that breath of the Spirit that comes in the irrepressible awareness of the incomprehensible, the impossible, and the disjunctive in life. … Laughter marks the moment when all the rules of life fail, and the world does not end, when the playing field of life is levelled and serfs laugh at kings… when children confound their parents and the little people of the world win the day.” Be alert to all of the realities of life, in unfiltered ways, to let in all of the contradictions and find there the levity of Jesus “who foolishly questioned the authority of the state and smilingly stretched the image of the Church.” Maybe one Advent spiritual practice might be to be alert to what causes a chuckle to rise in my throat, and to welcome the renewed alertness to the moment that laughter brings. Be alert! I need your realism and your ability to laugh in order to help me to laugh at myself and to grow my own realism.
In all of these practices, may we grow together into the stature of Christ.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.