Advent Sunday marks the beginning of a new year in the Christian calendar but not, of course, the Julian calendar which everyone in the world uses. The latter designates January 1 as the beginning of the year – Julian being, of course, Julius Caesar, who introduced his calendar in 45 BC. So, it predates the life of Jesus. There was nothing special about 1 January in ancient Rome other than it marked the date when the new consuls, government officials, took office. Unlike the Julian calendar, the Christian calendar divides the year into themes that ask us to consider all facets of the Christian story.
In many ways, the Christian seasons are themes for reflection which help to create a mood that work to impart a mindset. This reflection, like all reflection, is not rushed. It involves thinking about something at different levels and not coming to a mind all at once, because it invites us to travel into ourselves and ponder the possibility of transformation. Not rushing to judgement before we have heard the arguments, considered the possibilities and challenged our prejudices and preferences. Sometimes people say: the truth hit me. Possibly so. But insight and wisdom are different … they come slowly and sometimes painfully, especially if they involve admissions and confessions about who we have become or what we might have done.
The Christian year begins with Advent and ends with the Feast of Christ the King – the proclamation by the Church that Jesus has authority and dominion over the entire created order but that the nature of his kingship is outside our expectation and beyond our imagination. But the entirety of the Christian message is not thrown onto a plate and served up to us in one sitting. Thank goodness. We would suffer spiritual indigestion.
Over the next four weeks we journey through the season of Advent and its message: watch and wait for God’s coming afresh and anew in this world and in our lives. We are encouraged to reflect on God’s creative power and our spiritual needs before we celebrate the coming of God in human form in the person of Jesus on Christmas Day. Sunday by Sunday throughout Advent the themes of weekly worship are faith, hope, love … those three gifts known to us so well from the 13th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. In fact, Paul linked them even earlier in his mission as they feature in his first letter to the Thessalonians, written about 17 years after the resurrection, when the expectation of the imminent end of all things was very strong: since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation (1 Thes. 5:8)
Faith, hope and love, Paul says, are the gifts to seek in the time of expectant interim between the comings of Christ, when the guarantees of stability and permanence are gone and all is in question. Let me concentrate today on faith and some of its alleged opposites.
Of course, the word and the experience of faith has not always meant the same thing. In medieval Catholic Europe, the opposite of faith was heresy. Faith was the given, revealed, and authorised version of reality. Faith was creed. It was not questioned or challenged; it was to be accepted and believed. To challenge existing doctrine, to hold divergent views, to look at life differently than the authorities of the day allowed, was to be a heretic, to be a rebel, to be socially disruptive and a saboteur of all that was good and right. You were an enemy of God and best placed at arm’s length from the rest of the Christianity community lest your corrupting influence infect and affect others.
In the 19th century, the opposite of faith was doubt. To doubt, to wonder whether something was accurate, right or true … was to side with science and philosophy, to suggest that knowing and professing the creeds was not that important, that some doctrines might not be true … some teachings might not accord with reality. To doubt was to place human ingenuity above the revealed wisdom of God. And if one element of doctrine were questioned or one aspect of belief were challenged, the whole edifice might come tumbling down. To dare suggest that the world was not made at 9am on Monday 23 October 4004 BC was to risk the integrity of the entire Bible despite the flaws and shortcomings in this method of calculating the world’s age. Doubters flirted with uncertainty and embraced fads that might further dangerous commodities like liberty and freedom.
Over the last thousand years, the strong anchor points of belief and of life have been threatened. There no longer seems a privileged standpoint from which to view truth and reality. All standpoints seem relative, every opinion seems to have its own virtue and its own logic. In ancient times, you did not choose to be religious; you simply were. In modern times, people had to start choosing to be religious. In the post-modern times in which we live, we now know that we choose to be religious – whatever that means. And there exists one of our problems: in choosing to be religious in one way we are afraid about what we might be saying about all the others, including no faith at all – even that they might be a distortion or falsehood.
In the 20th century, the opposite of faith was certainty. In contrast to an earlier mindset that our view of life and living was incomplete or partial because we could not see nor experience anything that was beyond the detection of our senses, there were those who claimed that complete knowledge and absolute truth were within our reach thanks to the scientific method and the power of human reason … and that soon we could give a compelling account of all there is – removing the need for uncertainty about ourselves and our world – and obviating the need for faith. Those who persisted with faith in God were either afraid or unwilling to grasp advances in science – they were people who preferred uncertainty and partial explanations of reality because it allowed them to cling to a God of the gaps – a God that was only as big as the things human beings had yet to explain. Certainty was the opposite of faith. Conversely, there were believers who alleged that certain things in the world were certain – that the existence of God could be proved, providence could be measured and salvation was a concrete concept that was reflected in the twists and turns of human history – visible to those with eyes to see. They preached faith but proffered certainty.
Having faith has meant different things in different epochs of human civilisation. Many people are so sure there is a God and many people are just as sure there is no God … or they live a life which implies that sort of certainty. The atheist mocks the believer; the fundamentalist denounces the atheist. At its worst, no-one listens and everyone is condemned – often with violent ferocity. We Christians ought to be very aware that our understanding of God, heaven and hell is incomplete and that we do not, and cannot ever, know all that there is to know – that we cannot be certain (and must not) about everything although we feel sure about some things.
But what of doubt – should we flee from it, or perhaps embrace it? Doubt is not a bad thing. It is powerful, it keeps us honest and ensures we are sincere. A wise person once said: ‘I am grateful to my atheist friends, they keep me from cheating’. Doubt reminds us that religious faith is not the obvious interpretation of reality. Doubt reminds me that there are other ways of seeing the world – because others see the world differently from us. Doubt destroys our sentimentality and makes us deal with the world as it really is … to let me hear and see the many things which say to others that there is no God. Doubt makes us open to the thoughts of people whose experience of life is different to ours and it can enlarge our sense of being human so that our empathy and sympathy are expanded.
As Christians, we are people of faith … a faith informed by the Bible, by tradition and by reason. We look at reality in the light of those three sources … and we find the essence of truth and meaning in the wonderful birth and the tragic death of Jesus, the Son of God. On this much we stand firm and resolute. These events, we believe, are crucial for any proper understanding of reality and any attempt to discern truth. But such events are radically unsuited to the way of this world. The Jesus story is inherently scandalous, too absurd to be accepted as a key happening by most, let alone all. It is because God’s ways are so different to those of human beings, that our decision to exercise faith … to see the world in the light of the manger and the cross, requires not just some casual nod, not just passing approval, but a profound ‘yes’. It demands a break with the world and its wisdom … to which we give an emphatic ‘no’. It requires a movement of the heart, the soul and the mind … especially in a country like Australia in which the expression of faith is no longer an everyday social custom. To say I believe and I have faith – that I choose to do something about my belief (because faith is belief in action), is harder to do, it costs more and so it means more. As for the Government’s desire to protect religious freedom, I wonder if it misses the point.
More and more, Christians and their belief will appear to be peculiar. I am not at all concerned by this because it will put the question raised by Jesus – “who do you say that I am?” – in the spotlight and require a firm and unambiguous answer. In the season of Advent, we concentrate on the coming of Christ – the wonderful truth that God is with us. Those who have faith, need to be ready for Christ’s coming and to be prepared to meet him. It is also a time in which we invite others, those with open minds and willing spirits, to consider what they believe … why they believe it … what comfort or confusion it brings them … and whether they have doubts that might be the opening to faith and a new reason for living … in companionship with one who said “have faith in God, have faith also in me: I go to prepare a place for you”. Even so, come Lord Jesus. Amen.