Advent Sunday 2020

 Advent Sunday 2020

https://open.spotify.com/track/497DNjrgkIdoFVKrLtN9Ys

I am cheating for this piece of music was not written for Advent Sunday, neither is it a cantata but a motet almost certainly written for a funeral and moreover is Bach’s only motet without a Biblical text. It is a setting of a poem which expresses the yearning for the end. 

“Come Jesus come, my body is weary, my strength is fading  more and more, I long for your peace. The bitter path becomes too difficult for me.” and on this Advent Sunday we are surely yearning for an end to our own exile. 

I am writing this at the beginning of week two of lockdown two and as I read the words of second Isaiah writing to the desperate by the rivers of Babylon the poignancy of our present situation helps us feel their longing. 

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” or maybe even better the King James version “ that thou wouldst rend the heavens and that thou wouldst come down”

This is  a prayer for help, but a prayer for and from people on the edge who are weary of waiting. 

I suppose that the first ever known exile was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden beautifully expressed by John Milton in Paradise Lost:

………        the hastening angel caught

Our lingering parents and to the eastern gate

Led them direct and down the cliff as fast

To the subjected plain; then disappeared 

They looking back, all the eastern side beheld 

Of Paradise so late their happy seat.

Exile has been practised ever since ,expulsion was a common punishment for ancient tribes, it is very prevalent in Shakespeare’s plots, there have been penal colonies established in many places including Australia and Siberia  there are still governments in exile and today we are painfully aware of the people of Syria camping by the million on the borders and only yesterday in Nagorno-Karabakh the Armenians were packing up their homes on lorries to leave while the Azerbaijanis were preparing to come home. 

So there are plenty of people praying to come home: 

“Do not remember iniquity forever - now consider we are all your people.”

Isaiah remains a prophet of hope and he sees the coming of God as sudden, explosive and immediately effective. “As when fire kindles brushwood” and extraordinarily powerful “the mountains might flow down at your presence.” 

The homeland we are missing for most of us is not far away but is none the less as palpably distant as the Temple and mount Zion for the Israelites. This morning as we begin this season of Advent, we are conscious of being exiled from our own free use of time: unable to meet family and friends, browse a shop in the village, go to the library, cinema, theatre or sit in a tea shop with an unexpectedly met friend. So it is with the longing of Bach’s motet that we pray for imminent release.

Amen