From an illustrated sermon preached on Advent Sunday 2010 by Ray Anglesea at Denewell Avenue United Reformed Church, Gateshead.
It is probably the most famous sentence in the world this year. Six words and one number have been replicated on T-shirts, flags and mugs, texted and e-mailed around the world. It has been presented to presidents, prime ministers and even the Queen. It was the sentence written on a scrap of paper, put in a plastic bag and attached to a drill that – 17 days after they went missing –– reached the miners trapped half a mile beneath northern Chile’s Atacama desert. “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33” it read. We are well in the refuge – the 33.” So wrote Jose Ricardo Ojeda Vidal, the miner who scribbled the message in big red letters, the tidings that brought great joy to Chile. One Chilean television commentator compared the message to the first words in the Bible – “it is a beautiful, perfect sentence,” he said.
The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners is an irresistible subject for an Advent preacher. Being drawn up steadily through a long tube from the depths of the earth....... from the dark and the heat, the hunger and isolation....... into the light...... the freedom and the relief...... and the embraces of loving families and friends...... and the frenzy of excited news teams.......... are a simple illustration of what we mean by salvation. The Chilean miners were carried from what looked like hell to a condition as near to heaven as can be seen on earth. They were saved by the exercise of wisdom, that is, the skill of the technicians, the patience of the drillers and compassion of the medical workers. They were saved by grace alone. They were hardly able to do anything for themselves except endure long enough for the rescuing probe to break through to them. They were sustained in their entombment by faith and hope, by the practice of their religion, by their reciting of morning and evening prayer with the 33 bibles that would later reach them in their chamber-like dungeons, and the unbroken resilience of their own souls. Whether they will have stories to tell that are of interest, we shall no doubt see as their memories of the ordeal are pumped by the press. The first of several books – Under the Earth: The 33 Miners that Moved the World – is about to be published. The first television re-enactment will be broadcast in December. It was recently revealed that Brad Pitt’s Hollywood company is currently in talks to buy the film rights to the story. The smooth transition from miner to global superstar may soon be realised.
(Talking about smooth transitions and miners, superstars ands as an aside, it was surprising to discover that the future Queen of England, Prince William’s fiancé, Katherine’s great grandfather was a Geordie miner working in the pits in Hetton le Hole, mines owned by the Queen Mother’s family. From Pit to Palace: what an astonishing journey for the Middleton family!)
The end of the Chilean news-story is palatable and neat, yet the near tragedy in Chile and the tragic loss of New Zealand miners is food for more sober Advent thoughts. Like the Chilean miners we wait in silence in the subterranean vaults and entombment of our lives for the liberating light of Christ to bring us salvation, to bring us hope, to bring us truth, to bring us joy in believing, to make us human. The Christian story of Christ’s freeing and emancipating activity is foretold, I would like to think, in big red letters by our ancestral fathers and mothers of the faith, the advent prophets, the patriarchs and matriarchs and those elusive and enigmatic angels. The long expected Christ child will bring hope, justice and peace – our first Advent candle was blessed this morning as a symbol of hope. What that hope must feel like is something akin to what the Burmese people must be feeling and experiencing right now with the release of the heroic Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, surely a beacon of hope, a source of inspiration, a liberating saviour?
The 1st Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the church year, the coming liturgical journey that explores through Matthew’s gospel the surprising ancient story and meaning of salvation. Advent has the longest night of the year and the darkest days: Advent with its traditional heavy, sombre themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell is about the coming of that light, the coming of the Lord to his people, the coming of a loved one with all the joy and excitement that that coming brings. But while we wait for that light in the middle of the darkest night of the year we wait in stillness; a time to discover God’s presence in darkness. As my favourite Welsh poet, the priest R S Thomas said in one of his poems entitled “Kneeling” I read earlier this morning – “the meaning is in the waiting.” To wait patiently and positively like some of the Biblical characters who had to wait upon God is something alien to our culture of immediacy. But waiting is an essential part of our journey with God. Waiting is often vital for the proper unfolding of God’s plan for our lives. Advent is that time of the year when we can wait, often in darkness. It is a time of quiet reflection, a time of stillness, a time to stay awake, to watch and wait for that free gift, for a new experience of God’s grace, for that light of Christ.
There is a story told of a man who bought a special gift for his wife. It was a musical box that played a tune when you opened it, but it was different because it also glowed in the dark. It was meant to be seen when the days were dark and dull. As it was a present, he kept it the box hidden away and wrapped up. At last he produced it one dark evening and his wife unwrapped it with great excitement. They turned the light off, but then it could not be seen. It did not glow in the dark, and they were disappointed. Perhaps it was broken. They put the lights back on and discovered a label inside the box that said, “If you want me to shine all night, keep me in the sun all day.” There was nothing wrong with the box, and once they had left it in the sunlight, it glowed in the dark. In the same way if we are to be the lights in the world, we must spend each day absorbing the light of Christ.
So as we wait in the darkness of the season for that light to come, we notice the darkness of the world, the darkness of the church, as we open our hearts to that darkness. We remember in prayer the families of the Catholic victims indiscriminately slaughtered in the Church in Baghdad on All Saints Day, we remember the loss of military and civilian life in Afghanistan, the flood victims in Pakistan, the unemployed in our region. In the early morning darkness I light cathedral candles to remember those who are sick and who need God’s loving healing touch. As a Christian I feel more and more a stranger in my own land, in a dark and turbulent culture. Once it was considered that some of the greatest achievements and ambitions of human social history, such as the abolition of slavery and the provision of universal education or free health care had their origins in a religious Christian impulse. Ian Hislop salutes the visionary heroes of those who fixed broken Victorian Britain in a new BBC part television programme entitled “The age of the Do-Gooders.” Yet sadly this is not the image of “do-good” religion that many recognise in this past century or even this past decade. As Lord Blair of Boughton, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police stated in the 2010 Theos annual lecture in central London last week, “Many secular voices now argue and think that all religions are a force of evil in today’s world.” We are, it would seem, part of a relentless undertow of what poet Matthew Arnold famously called the sea of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” We in the church this Advent Sunday are strangers to our contemporaries, who neither understand nor care what Christian faith has to say to the world. We are indeed people in a strange land. We are exiles.
As well as the darkness in our world and in the church we notice the darkness in our own lives and personal struggles and wait as that Old Testament Hebrew prophet Malachi put it for “The son of man to come with healing in its wings,” I saw that quote in a beautiful stained glass window in St Oswin’s Church, Wylam last week when my colleague and I took a frosty river footpath walk up the Tyne valley. Yet we know that in the darkness, in all those places of darkness, God is still present, already present. From our stories, from tradition, from liturgy – that, as the psalmist says, “Even the darkness is not dark to you, for the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Even at a close friend’s father’s humanist funeral last week which I attended I can’t believe the deceased was lovingly released into a darkness and nothingness, a place without God. And so in the darkness we wait for the coming of the Light of the world to again accompany us on our journey. He will bring his strength to our weakness, he will dispel our fears with his presence, he will open our closed-circuit mind, we will rest in his presence. God is ever with us.
In his diary for 1922 Shackleton writes of his Antarctic expedition: “When I look back on those days, with all their anxiety and peril, I cannot doubt that our party was divinely guided both over snowfield and across storm-swept sea......I know that during that long racking march of thirty-six hours over unnamed mountains and glaciers of Southern Georgia it seemed to me we were not three but four. I said nothing to my companions on the point but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling in the march that there was another person with us.”
But there are wider implications of this heart-warming story of the Chilean miners. All this happened to poor people, in a horrible industry, typical of the labourers in so many parts of the globe who carry out in awful conditions the gigantic pillage and often waste of the earth’s resources, century by century, enabling the wealthy, sophisticated and elaborate world in which we, who are probably more fortunate, to live. But theirs is a dangerous career as we remember this week those miners who have lost their lives in New Zealand. They illustrate for us that the world we are caught up in from childhood to grave is sustained by great suffering, is often cruel and heartless, and is usually far less merciful to the afflicted than it was to those Chilean miners we have watched these last months. We like stories with such neat happy endings, because we want to believe the world is not as cruel and indifferent as we fear. The decision not to give in to despair at the cruelty of the world is a serious one. Too often it is a sentimental decision, a preference to pretend that things are not as bad as they look, or an escapist fantasy about all things being for the best. Our Christian response to the real pain and frustration of the world is that the world is as we find it – for whatever reason you may wish to put forward. But it is not a world without God, even if at times it may seem we live as exiles, like the exodus people “in a strange land”. The Lord is here, down the mine with us, already near to us: “in him we live and move and have our being”. In whatever hole we are in, even at the verge of death – even in death itself – he is there. Nothing can separate us from him except our own blindness and hardness.
And later next month we shall discover that into one of the poorest occupied communities of 1st century Palestine, a child is born, to an unlikely young virgin and a faithful loving forgotten hero-of-a-husband, in the town of their great King, in a borrowed shed, where the child is laid in fresh straw amongst the poverty of the dirt and mess of a cowshed- cum- cave, a draughty stable with an open door. The world for that couple was as they found it, hard, difficult, occupied..... they were later to become migrants in another country..... their family story did not have, at least in human terms, a happy ending. But nestling in Mary’s arms was a baby that was destined to transform the world.
The Good news we preach this Advent-tide is that because of this birth we are right not to yield to the darkness, the despair and the cruelty of the world, to the economic and political injustices, to ceaseless news of war and bloodshed. We are right to hope and trust, as the miners hoped and trusted in that dark underground tomb that they would be delivered somehow. But we dare to go further. With the tragic deaths of the 29 New Zealand miners fresh in our minds this week we would also want to say that even if the Chilean miners had not been saved; even if they had died far underground, either through the indifference of the authorities, or the failure of the project, they would have been right to hope and trust. But where, as so often happens, humanity fails, God is present. And God hears and is faithful, even where according to human reasoning, there is no salvation.
Into the darkness of our world, our church and our lives this Advent-tide we invite Jesus Christ, the Light of the world. We ask him to renew our faith, to be present in our darkness, in our waiting, as we prepare our hearts again to celebrate the good news of his coming amongst us.
Amen
Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in local church partnerships across the Northern Synod
