“In our end is our beginning” writes T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets…. perhaps a fine distillation of the truth at the heart of the universe…things end and things begin, a cosmic cycle of reiteration, of event and decision and circumstance, all moving to the music and rhythm of end and beginning…death and life…yin and yang…the polarities of beauty.
We are moving toward the end of the church year marked by gathering dark and cold. In just a couple of Sundays we will celebrate such an end by celebrating the feast of Christ the King…the hope of God’s kingdom come in earth…beginning now, but not yet…another paradoxical truth of the matter…the same old polarity…We see signs of this so-called kingdom all around us…not a kingdom as the world sees its kingdoms of might making right…but we see this kingdom in acts of compassion and mercy…in acts of love that bear dignity and justice to our world…and yet we see the resistance to such a way, this way of the kingdom that is gracious commonweal of collaboration and mutual respect and imaginative practice…we see the resistance all around us all too well…out in the dark and the cold, a rough beast straining against the good.
Hope is born in the dark. That is something as people of faith we are duty bound to remember…We begin our church year in the year’s darkest days. Yet the year begins in hope…hope for ourselves and hope for our world… hope for a new beginning of God’s ways in earth…God’s Advent among us to name that which abides in darkness…and hope for the courage to enact the light of God’s love that God has for God’s world….we, God’s people, the potential for God’s love in earth…we the hope…we the Incarnation…Love in the flesh….remember.
God’s Advent is our Advent….our beginning to live for our world and not for ourselves…an end of self interest and the beginning of abundant sacrifice…sacrifice: the hosting of a feast for someone you love…the best metaphor I can think of…God’s world begins at each moment of sacrifice…at a meal shared…at each healing touch….at each moment of respecting the dignity of the other…in our peacemaking.
Let us get prepared to begin again…the time come round again at last…God’s Advent of the light of hope and courage to be born…a beginning again in all that cold and all that dark.
