Is it that time already?
“Lovely grandchildren!”
I blinked at the woman behind the till. I’d popped into a convenience store to grab a drink can, as I sped from Manchester Piccadilly to Northern College for a Stepwise meeting, and suddenly this stranger was paying me an entirely mystifying compliment.
“I’m sorry?”
“Lovely grandchildren you’ve got.” She nodded toward my chest.
Comprehension dawned: poking from my breast pocket was my mobile, inside whose transparent case I’d stuck an old miniature of my children in their Primary School uniforms.
Well, this year the eldest started university, the second sixth form college. Both were gratifyingly horrified when I came upon this photographic relic and began toting it about in public.
The point is, I’m a long way off grandparent status. A long, long way. In my head, I’d say I’m somewhere in my 20s. But the chummy shop assistant had spotted the snapshot, clocked my expansive forehead and grizzled chops, and blithely skipped to a reasonable conclusion.
I reeled out of the shop, blindsided by the march of time. How could I be taken for a Grandad? What a sobering intimation of mortality! (Serves me right, said the kids.)*
Every time Advent Sunday comes round, it has a similar effect. Here comes Christmas already, hurtling towards us like a runaway sleigh. Where has the year gone?
For lo! The days are hastening on, as we sing in one of my favourite Christmas carols.
There’s something about this season that confronts us with Time like no other – and not just because it’s running out. It’s a heady mix of anticipation and nostalgia, looking forward and looking back.
Christmas Time twists and turns back on itself. Maybe it’s why timey-wimey Doctor Who sits so well on Christmas Day. It’s certainly writ large in that other Christmas Carol – the one in which Dickens summons the very spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come to bring Scrooge face to face with his life-strangling avarice.
Even that time-honoured tradition, the John Lewis Christmas ad flits between past and present this year. It shows a shopper frantically seeking a gift for her sister: stumbling through a Narnia-style wardrobe into her own memory, she time-hops around key moments they’ve shared. Meanwhile, Tesco’s advert is unexpectedly downbeat, portraying the first Christmas without a beloved grandmother. Every little flashback helps remind us that for many folk, Yuletide will never quite match happy golden days of yore.
In church, as well, we’re hopping back and forth in time. At Advent, we reset our calendar and cycle back in time to the very start of the Christian story. In the birth of our saviour Jesus, God unfathomably takes on mortal flesh for love of you and me.
But on this first Sunday in Advent, the lectionary hurtles us back to the future. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus warns of the chaos that must come before the kingdom of God is fully established:
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-36, NRSV)
These alarming tidings gain an added frisson of foreboding when we see them echoed in our daily headlines. The year now speeding to a conclusion has seen untamed war and bloodshed; nations at odds in the fight over climate change; renewed rattling of nuclear sabres; the rise of despots and floodwaters both. Who can be sure the end is not nigh?
But then again, we’ve been there before. We relive the end this time every year.
I’ve a notion that the cyclical nature of the church year reflects the way we experience Time ourselves. Human minds don’t quite work in the measured, linear fashion of our clocks and calendars. Like Scrooge, like the John Lewis heroine, we’re time-travellers at heart. Even as we occupy the present we are creatures of the past, driven by our bygone experiences and relationships, triumphs and traumas. At the same time, we’re haunted by the future: what it may bring, what it must.
So too Advent, pitching us headlong toward the end only to walk us back to the beginning. Bethlehem is our meeting place for the hopes and fears of all the years.
Strip back all the trimmings, though, and Jesus’ origin story is shot through with the squalor and violence of our world. So ripe for redemption, then as now.
That’s why I like “It came upon the midnight clear” so much. Lamenting two thousand years of wrong, it reminds us that the Peace on Earth heralded by the angels is far from fully realised – but it will be.
As keepers of the Advent flame, it’s our job year on year to tell this weary world of the hope we carry within us, reborn every Christmas morning. (Expect more about talking faith in the year to come.)
Here is hope that transcends all the tinsel and excess, the “dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life” (Luke 21:34). Hope that, even as I visibly advance toward my own end, in my end is my beginning. Hope that a better world is on its way,
when with the ever-circling years
comes round the age of gold.
So let’s turn back time this Advent. And if you can, enjoy yourself. (It’s later than you think.)
* In case you’re wondering, I removed the old school photo from my phone case quick-smart. Which, for my teenagers, is Christmas come early.