2 mins

Time to pause

The Rev Roddy Hamilton urges readers to find space to consider every aspect of the Advent story anew.

IT starts with the prophets, this season of Advent. It has to. Ancient words tangled up with the world and sense of a promise being fulfilled; a movement of the divine, shifting things; a realisation that the world’s words are not all there are.

How might we shape a space for what is ancient, to settle, and invite us to hear these words again?

When we read God’s time-worn prophets, maybe we need to take the time to place them in our worship that we give ourselves the time to hear them.

That is perhaps hearing them read slowly, with silence between each phrase, and repeated. What might it do to us to sit with them, hear them read and repeated, over the length of time of a normal sermon? What if we paused between them, lit a candle, offered a spoken or sung response, offered some symbols or projected some art, and refused to hurry it all so that the entire reflection for the day was simply God’s Word without commentary or adding any more theology? Might that return some of the original drama of the original hearing and let it speak into today, anew?

There is something in presbyterian tradition that insists the Word needs more words, and, of course, that is often true. Insight, experience, wisdom are all part of our encounter with the Word and how we engage with it. But there are times when our own insights are not so necessary and the Word itself is powerful enough to intrigue us, hold us, confuse us and fill us. Like poetry, not every word is for explaining.

Like poetry the Word cannot always be reduced down to lesser words. Like poetry, we are invited to live the mystery, sit with the wonder and ponder the questions.

So, power-down the sermon and let the Word take the focus on its own in Advent.

But these words are only the prologue to the story of God finding space among us. Yet even here, we need to stop and find silence, for the story is not what anyone expects. Every twist and turn of the action is meant to disarm us. From imagined donkeys to the wonder of sliding stars, from the sign of foreign wise ones to the focus on an animal’s manger, each is there, like a crash barrier to stop us and proclaim: “What!?”, “Wait a minute?!”, “You can’t be serious?!”

A version of the nativity that stops us and, as with the prophets, makes us consider how ridiculous this is for God to engage with humanity in such a way might redeem the overly familiar. A nativity retold by adults could make space for the harder questions we need to ask about the weirdness of it all, because we are meant to ask; it is not a story to be taken for granted. There is no other birth story like this! Everything is there for a reason, that opens up another story and contradicts everything we think about divinity and godliness and faith. Giving ourselves the time to pause with it before we quickly move on to the next peculiar moment might be a lifeline in a season where, for many of us, too much goes on and we don’t have time to find ourselves let alone God in the season.