Second Sunday of Advent
As we shared last Sunday, we mark our journey to the Festival of Christmas by each week lighting a candle on our Advent Wreath. Each candle represents one of the blessings of Christmas: hope, faith, joy, peace and finally love that crowns all the rest. These are the true gifts of Christmas, the gifts given to us as those who seek the birthing of the life of Jesus more deeply in our hearts and in our world. In lighting each candle, we are reminded of how we are to be people of hope, faith, joy, peace and love.
On this second Sunday of Advent we light our second candle, the candle signifying the gift of faith. Its flame reminds us that we are to live in a spirit of trust.
Who do we trust, and why? What creates trust and what spreads mistrust? Our capacity to trust in in considerable crisis. Taking us back to Good Friday this year, I spoke about the crucifixion of social trust that we experience. There is hardly a sphere of our life that is not affected by this death. Indeed, Bernard Salt, writing at that time in The Australian suggested that our own decade is the one in which trust has gone bust. Our trust in the Church has largely died. But not only the Church. We have contended with the exposure of intimidation and assault from stars and celebrities in the entertainment industry through the MeToo movement. Our trust in other institutions such as the financial sector has also died. Our trust in institutions to keep our aged and those with disability safe has died. But as Salt comments, “the loss of trust breeds cynicism and creates social division; it rationalises self-interest; it is the antithesis of a united, loving and generous society.”[1]
Subsequently, we are provided with the context of the article Michael Leunig penned some years ago, “In the midst of madness.”[2] He began the essay observing that, “on street corners, people talk of the growing madness. They speak in a dialect that survives in the instincts of young and old, rich and poor, males and females . . . ‘The world has gone mad,’ they say. In tones of dismay, resignation and humour they confirm their suspicions to each other. It’s as if this a new kind of greeting or farewell.” Yet, as Leunig comments, “it is also their small way of grieving together about the tragic state of their world; about the destruction of meaning or the rise of hostility, ugliness and stupidity in an angry, exhausted culture.” This is hardly new as Leunig suggests, “Of course, this windswept conversation on street corners is ancient. With a twinkling smile my grandmother used to offer me the old refrain, ‘The whole world is mad except for you and me – and even you’re a little strange.’” There is, however, a new dimension to it all, according to Leunig. “There have never been so many people on the planet to lose their marbles and there have never been such powerful and precocious devices, machines and weapons to express and give form to insanity. Their looming presence has given rise to an unprecedented critical mass of fear and anger on the planet – enough to drive humanity into panic and over the edge.” Leunig is of the opinion that we seem to live in a time where there is a “surge of a compulsive new bitterness and hostility, an antisocial infection . . . it is the driver behind you, angrily blasting their horn because your acceleration at the green light is not fast enough. It is the righteous ugly clash of a televised political debate, the spiteful intensity and punishing fury of a gender equality discussion . . .”
People might lament about the state of the world. However, as Leunig observed, “they also yearn. Sanity may not prevail, but it lives on as a vision of love somewhere in the minds of ordinary people.” In other words, even in the face of our disappointments or disillusionments, we still want to trust. We know the toxicity of resentment become cynicism. We want something more for ourselves than this poison. We want to breath the fresh air of faith again – faith in ourselves, faith in others, faith in God. There is no future wrapped in fear. Fear closes us in, it encloses us into patterns of defensiveness and protection, it paralyses us, renders us inert, closes us down. It is like the smoke we have been enduring these last weeks. It all leaves us in some kind of murky fog in which we struggle to breathe. We yearn to be able to breathe fresh, clean air again. If only we could believe.
We speak today of our society as not being particularly religious. I notice just the other day the statistic that now 8 out of 10 weddings, for example, are performed by civil celebrants.[3] But this does not mean that people don’t want to believe. I think people do want to believe, even if people’s belief and trust can so easily be frustrated, re-emerging then in strange esoteric, occult ways or in the many addictions that mask the desire for trust.
Perhaps Christmas remains important in the world at large because it is one of those narratives that at least implies trust even if cannot be realised in the way people wish, especially the trust that goes hand in hand with innocence. We want to know that we are loved, that nature is not entirely arbitrary, that something is possible. The story of Christmas somehow speaks to us that this is true. This is why we keep telling it year after year, without ever tiring of it. We keep wanting it to be true. We want to trust. We want to believe that life is ultimately good.
And so, as we prepare for Christmas, we light a candle for faith alongside our candle for hope. The light of the candle is fragile, but it is unmistakable. Like the light of every candle it does not do away completely with the shadows, but it creates a circle of clarity for us. In lighting this candle, we say, “I believe.” We say, “there is so much smoke in my life, so much that leaves me in a kind of fog; so many are the shadows that creep around me. And yet, I dare to believe that Someone has come into the world with a message of a different voice than the instinctive and ordinary patterns of responding, with a pathway of genuine freedom. His name is Jesus. Help me never to forget this.”
For if we keep faith in what we have been given in Jesus, if our belief in him deepens through all that challenges it, our lives themselves will become more trusting – not in a way that is naïve or sentimental – but in a way that simply doesn’t require the same level of pretence or defence – and therefore in a way that can move out to others beyond all the self-protective barriers – because in Jesus we know that we are loved eternally, we know that there is always a future for us – and not only for us, but for all. Trusting lives are ones that are open and free, more gracious and more hospitable.
Therefore, let us believe once more. Let us have faith. Let us trust. Let us be free.
[1] Bernard Salt, The Australian, 30 March 2019.
[2] Michael Leunig, “In the Midst of Madness,” Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, 30-31 July 2016, 8-9.
[3] In 1902, 97% of all marriages in Australia were performed by ministers of religion. By 2017, 78% of marriages were performed by civil celebrants. See Marriage Rates in Australia, Australian Institute of Family Studies, https://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/marriage-rates-australia
