postID: 7048; title: The First Sunday Of Advent
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The First Sunday Of Advent
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2014-11-30 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1146
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2014-11-30 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2014-11-30postID: 7009 (Saint Andrew)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7009; date_type: fixed; year: 2014
fixed_date_str: November 30
fixed_date_str (mod): November 30 2014
formattedFixedDateStr: 2014-11-30
=> check date_assignments.
dateAssigned: 2025-12-01 (2025)
yearAssigned (2025) does NOT match year (2014)
displayDates for postID: 7009/year: 2014
Array
(
[0] => 2014-11-30
)
postPriority: 999postID: 7048 (The First Sunday Of Advent)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7048; date_type: variable; year: 2014
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7048
displayDates for postID: 7048/year: 2014
Array
(
[0] => 2014-11-30
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2014-11-30 with ID: 7048 (The First Sunday Of Advent)
The First Sunday Of Advent
Array
(
[date] => 2014-11-30 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1146
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2014-11-30 11:00:00
)
2 post(s) found for dateStr : 2014-11-30postID: 7009 (Saint Andrew)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7009; date_type: fixed; year: 2014
fixed_date_str: November 30
fixed_date_str (mod): November 30 2014
formattedFixedDateStr: 2014-11-30
=> check date_assignments.
dateAssigned: 2025-12-01 (2025)
yearAssigned (2025) does NOT match year (2014)
displayDates for postID: 7009/year: 2014
Array
(
[0] => 2014-11-30
)
postPriority: 999postID: 7048 (The First Sunday Of Advent)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7048; date_type: variable; year: 2014
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7048
displayDates for postID: 7048/year: 2014
Array
(
[0] => 2014-11-30
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2014-11-30 with ID: 7048 (The First Sunday Of Advent)
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
✛
From a Distance...
The year I was ordained Julie Gold released a single called ‘From a distance’ – it was re-recorded by Bette Midler a couple of years ago as a Christmas release. It’s meant to be a song of hope:
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace,
it’s the voice of every man.
From a distance we all have enough,
and no one is in need.
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
no hungry mouths to feed.
And that’s true, I guess. From a distance it’s hard to actually make out what’s really going on at all.
But it’s when we get to the chorus that I really struggle with the lyrics for, we are told, God is also watching us…from a distance. But that simply is not what is at the heart of the Christian faith. We do not believe that God is watching us from a distance but in a God who entered into our world in a very physical way, in Jesus Christ – the Word made flesh. God, in Jesus, saw people close up – their joys and their pains; their love and their anger; their hopes and their resentments; their births and their deaths.
And as the Church, as a community of faith, celebrates the Advent hope God is attempting to break into a fragile world today just as he did 2000 years ago in the child born in a cave in a backstreet of Bethlehem. Bethlehem – still a place of tension where the story of no room at the inn takes on new meaning because of the wall that has been built near it and the check points that simply do not allow people to cross. Afghanistan – where young men risk their lives to attempt to bring peace and a future while other young men make improvised explosive devices. Korogocho – a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Nairobi where the poor have built a shantytown and nearly a quarter of a million people live in abject poverty with no sanitation, no clean water and no prospects. Korogocho in Swahili means “crowded shoulder to shoulder”
Even when we get to Christmas itself, the stories and the feasts of that time pointedly remind us that this is not a scene from some fairy-tale. The birth of Jesus is surrounded by danger and risk; the journey to Jerusalem forced because an occupying power wanted to have a census – a neat way of finding out if people had identity cards. The birth is marked by homelessness – a young pregnant woman not considered vulnerable by most of the people of Bethlehem; by gifts and prophecies that refer to death and sorrow; by the slaughter of the innocents; by the flight into Egypt when Jesus and his family become refugees. Even the day after Christmas Day, the church chooses to celebrate its first Martyr, St Stephen. And all these themes are still with us in our own time.
My friends, Advent is a time for the taking of risks – of opening our ears to the great judge who, rather than shouting for justice, is often whispering in our ears subversive ideas that might bring about change. And the noise of our worldly preparations for Christmas; the noise of our own agendas; the noise of our own understanding of how things should be often drowns out that whispering voice of God which is gently cajoling us and urging us to make even the smallest qualitative change in our lives.
Some words of Michael Ramsey: “Come to Bethlehem once again. See the stable, see the child. And knowing that he is God and Man, knowing that he who was rich has become poor for us, we can kneel in the darkness and the cold which is the symbol of our blind and chilly human race and say with a grasp we may never have had before the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever.’” (sermon preached at Canterbury Cathedral, Christmas Day 1973)
