Advent 1 Year A

I was sorry to hear that Tom Stoppard has died. I would guess that I’m not alone in having seen some of his work more than once. His gift was to draw us into his story telling, to make us believe in his characters, even when we didn’t like them very much. To suspend our everyday reality and immerse ourselves in a world that he had created for us and to allow ourselves to be challenged, perhaps discomforted by that world. And when I revisited one of his plays, it still had a freshness and a draw. It was almost as though one could forget what was about to happen because we were immersed in the moment that was unfolding.

It would be all too easy to wander through these four Sundays of Advent with a mindset that we know what’s coming and there really isn’t a great need to immerse ourselves in the moment or to listen too carefully. To imagine that there aren’t any surprises in the story, it’s all been rehearsed many, many times. But, if we can find a way to listen with fresh ears, to be in the moment of the telling, we may find that our experience of journeying through Advent is changed.
We’re not necessarily talking about life changing moments, but something more subtle or nuanced.
We’ve already had an example of that this morning. The sharp eared among our regulars will have heard that our Director of Music has rewritten the Gospel acclamation for Advent. It’s a small change but one that might help to keep things fresh and interesting. Hopefully it catches our attention and so helps us to listen a bit more carefully; to be that little bit more involved in the here and now. There’s a question here about the telling – the words of the Gospel acclamation are the same as they ever were. What’s changed is the presentation.

The narrative we will hear unfolding over the coming weeks is the same as it ever was – but the way it is told changes. This year we are hearing Matthew’s Gospel, last year it was Luke. We have the opportunity to hear in a way that we may not have noticed in previous years, to hear something that might even take us by surprise. The story that we know so well is offered through a different lens. Matthew brings drama into our worship from this very first Sunday. He forces us to engage with a different starting place. This morning he is setting out what’s ahead. You can’t know the timing because this is God’s story, not yours.
The content of the unfolding story that we will hear over the next four weeks doesn’t contain anything we haven’t heard many times, but I hope that each one of us will find moments that take us by surprise week by week. That might be more likely if we can find ways to make it fresh, to focus on the telling and the sharing. Can we find ways to listen more intentionally in the moment, to engage with the drama that is inherent in what we will hear both in words and music and to allow that to unfold, to have its own momentum. It's the most extraordinary story, so why do we have a tendency to make it mundane?

This is a story that is about surprise from its very beginning. It’s full of drama. The prologue begins with Elizabeth’s surprise at her pregnancy. Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the innkeeper, the Magi – they all are taken by surprise as they take their part in the scenes that feature them.

Today’s Gospel reading majors on surprise. You may think you’re ready, but God will take you by surprise. You may think that you can prepare, that there will be some warning, but that’s not the way that God works.
The events and the living out of those events will unfold at their own pace and you are not in a position to change that.

On the whole, we don’t really welcome surprise in our day to day lives. We like to anticipate what might be coming our way. We like to feel that we are in some kind of control. How easy it is to delude ourselves. We do like to observe drama – our celebrity culture testifies to that - we perhaps even take delight in some of the drama that unfolds around us, but we don’t generally welcome drama in our own lives. We think that we can do without the drama because we can do without the unpredictability. But actually the nature of our Trinitarian God is to create unpredictability. Who can second guess the movement of the Holy Spirit? Which one of us can plan in advance how God might call us into living the next chapter of our life? We talk about God bringing us into transforming change, but we can expend an awful lot of energy resisting that change.

As we engage more deeply with the things of God, we are more and more likely to find ourselves being surprised by the nature of God. As we allow ourselves to be open to the movement of the Spirit in the words and imagery of Scripture, not just reading or hearing what is on the page but hearing it, attempting to live it, in our own time and context, so we have opportunities to be open to the surprise that is inherent in the nature and presence of God.

Over these next few weeks, we can easily zone out, imagine that we already know it all. And we do, of course, know where this is going. We know the Nativity story – and beyond. We know the cycle of birth and death and resurrection that is at the heart of who we are as a community. But we don’t, and can’t, know it all.

God is constantly looking to surprise us. God is constantly seeking ways to open our hearts and our minds, to encourage us to bring fresh eyes to that which we think we know so well, fresh eyes to that which we may imagine to be mundane.

If we can find ways to re-connect with the drama of the story, if we can find ways to immerse ourselves deeply in today’s bit of narrative, we may find something we hadn’t anticipated as the story unfolds, we may be surprised to find ourselves drawn in, in an unexpected way. Drawn in with new insights, new connections, being open to the possibility that it might impact, perhaps even change, our lives.

These weeks are precious. They encourage us to wait attentively, openly and trustingly. They encourage us to prepare to really welcome God, to expect God to arrive, not just in the unfolding drama but even in our own very ordinary lives.