Advent Sunday Sermon – 27th November 2011
“But now Lord, thou art our father, we are the clay, thou the potter, and all of us are thy handiwork”
Isaiah 64: 8
There is a wonderful humility and insight in that sentiment from the prophet Isaiah. We are not the
craftsman. We may be creative people but we were formed from the dust of the earth. We are all
dust, stardust maybe, but dust none the less, for we belong to the earth. We are, along with the rest
of the creation products of the craftsman supreme, shaped by a creative hand. There are times
when we need to remind ourselves of this, for example when we think that we can manage the
earth as though somehow we are above nature. Our essence and even the best of our creativity are
born of the clay of the earth.
Let me add a little bit of ancient wisdom to that metaphor. It comes from the Chinese Taoist
tradition, “Thirty spokes share the wheel – but it is the centre-hole that makes it useful. Shape clay
into a vessel, but it is the space within that makes it useful”. Michael Mayne – Learning to Dance. p
33.
It is the space within that makes the vessel useful – so what is within you? What is inside the earthen
vessel of your body? No doubt a cacophony of competing voices, random thoughts and emotions,
an unruly jumble of clutter. There! I have just described the contents of my own mind!
If your interior life is anything like mine, do you ever long for useful silence, for a real stillness at the
core of your being? St Augustine once wrote that “our whole business in life is to restore health to
the eye of the heart, whereby God might be seen”. His insight all those centuries ago captures
exactly the thought of Indian mysticism which gives expression to the eye of the heart by the “bindi”
the painting of a simple dot representing the inner eye of the spirit in the centre of the forehead.
Painting the Bindi on Jesus – Benet Haughton
As we enter this season of Advent, this time of waiting, now is a good time to focus on what is inside
us. Is there within our hearts a discipline of patient waiting, a spiritual poise that is open to the
prompting and imagination of the spirit in this season ripe with meaning and purpose, or, is our
inner mind more like a playground of unruly children running off in all directions unable to listen and
pay attention?
I am very conscious of what happens in our schools just now. Kate, my wife, is a teacher very
involved with children who are struggling in school for one reason or another. Our youngest son Tom
is in the midst of preparing for his most important examinations and I attend regular meetings at
George Heriot’s School just over the Flodden Wall from here where I sit on the Board of Governors.
School is a busy place. There are pressures to fill every moment with activity, information and
stimulation. In order to maintain a position in the national league tables, time is jealously guarded,
measured and timetabled. Time for silence, for meditation, for doing nothing would therefore seem
to be an act of frivolity, a dereliction of our duty to cram as much information, knowledge and
qualifications into our children that the short time of education allows.
It therefore came as a real surprise and delight to read an article by the Master of Wellington
College, Antony Seldon the other day who has suggested that every school should encourage
stillness. He suggests a minutes’ silence before each lesson to de-clutter the mind from whatever has
preceded that particular lesson, a time for stillness in assemblies and before school lunch. As such a
novel approach is introduced, he suggests, people might sneer and snigger, muck around, poke each
other with sticks, nod off to sleep, but soon, he argues, the stillness helps people to find themselves,
to grow in confidence and to become more comfortable with their own silence. He suggests that this
discipline of meditation can readily become a life skill that will stay with you all your life helping us
to develop an ordered and more stable mind than the random disordered clutter that is the lot of
most of us. It helps us to discover who we are and to focus on what truly matters.
Early morning calm on Lake Bunyoni, Uganda, July 2011
Henry Thoreau, the great American thinker who took himself off to the Woods and lived alone in a
hut on Walden Pond in Massachusetts wrote, “I like a wide margin to my life” for he felt that this
space apart helped in the formation of a self. It was Thoreau who wrote those famous words that
“the mass of people live lives of quiet desperation”. (After preaching this sermon, American
members of my congregation told me that Thoreau’s mum used to bring him his lunch in the hut
each day! Ah well.)
It is not our outward achievements that matter as the inward disposition of our hearts. It is the
space within and how rich, deep and poised those inward parts become that will ultimately make us
useful to others and to the world or not. Just like the pot, it is the space within that makes us useful.
“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness”, so wrote Meister Eckhart. It is such a rare
commodity in this world of information overload. Insight and wisdom are rare commodities in an
age that enthrones data and information, stating that information is power and that the knowledge
economy is the highest form of life thus seeming to overlook those higher forms of knowledge.
There is a risk of overlooking understanding and wisdom, two of the noblest forms of knowledge
that are surely the key to peace, understanding and a tolerable life for all. These higher forms of life
can only be attained by being still and slowing down. It is our frantic pursuit of lower case knowledge
and all the trivial compensations of materialism that go with that which prevents us from seeing the
harm we do to each other and to the planet.
So, in this month when the pace of life quickens, the information and advertising builds up to a
crescendo in advance of Christmas, let’s not lose sight of Advent as a season of waiting, discipline
and readiness. As we stand together around the Holy Table in the quietness of this sanctuary and
minister to one another by passing bread and wine, as we wait in silence for the day of Christ’s
coming that “no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the son, only the Father”, let us
trust that in the quietness and in the waiting, the meaning of these events we celebrate in this
season will come to us more intensely.
Amen.