The Sunday Next Before Advent (Stir-Up Sunday)

“He said to them, ‘Come and see.’” 

What a marvellous, simple, and important question that is asked by Jesus in the Gospel reading today, “What are you looking for?”

It is a question that we ought to ask ourselves always – we who are often drifting from the path,  pulled in every which way by our restless hearts and their desires – but it is a question that we must especially ask ourselves over the next month, “What are you looking for?”

As far as our church calendar goes, today is the last Sunday of the Christian year, for a new year begins next Sunday – as it always does – on the First Sunday in Advent and we begin the cycle all over again starting with the prophecies of the coming of Jesus, his birth, all the way through his ministry, death, resurrection, to his ascension and the sending of the spirit before we spend months (as we just have) learning about how to live this Christian life.

Today, the last Sunday of the year, is known as The Sunday Next Before Advent or, drawing from the first words of the Collect appointed for today, Stir-Up Sunday.

The season of Advent - those weeks prior to Christmas - is a season of preparation, a time of patience and attentiveness. The world around us, forgetful as it is, wants us to think that our Christmas celebrations begin when our pumpkins go into the compost bin, and end when that last guest shuffles out of the house after Supper on Christmas Day as we prepare ourselves to pack it all up on the 26th or 27th.

How utterly backwards.

Properly, our celebrations begin on the evening of the 24th and continue for weeks afterwards. Advent is not the celebration before the celebration, but rather the quiet moment of reflection and prayer that we sometimes take before other major events in our lives, a time to prepare, to get ourselves ready, to still ourselves so we can hear our own thoughts.

When we fill the time before Christmas with Christmas not only do we lose a sense of what’s supposed to follow, but we lose the gift of Advent – the gift of quiet, of darkness, of contemplation of what is about to come into the world. It’s a time like Lent in which we should restrain ourselves a bit and hold back our decorating, our eating, our mirth so that it’s all the sweeter when He comes into this world.

But that’s what’s to come, what begins next week, and this week we are called by our readings and by the collect to get ourselves ready for getting ready. Traditionally, today – and perhaps you’ll have a chance at the end of the service – was the day when families would go home and stir their Christmas fruitcake batter, making a wish as they did, to remind themselves of what our Collect prays today – that we…our wills…might be stirred up, roused from the lazy slumber they’re often in, brought to life so that we can look with anticipation and longing towards the coming into the world of our Saviour. Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.

In the Gospel today we hear of John the Baptist standing with some of his disciples who see Jesus going by, “Look! Here is the lamb of God,” says John, whereupon the disciples begin to follow him, curious, perhaps sensing his power and his glory. “What are you looking for?” asks Jesus.

Do these two even themselves know what they want?

Do we know what we want or what we’re looking for?

You can hear in their response a kind of desperate desire to stay near to something that they sense is so good and so righteous. It’s like when we see an old friend after a long time apart, or those first hours we spend with someone with whom we’re falling in love – the time we spend with them is so unlike our time without them, so edifying and fulfilling, so new and uplifting, we feel taken to new heights of joy and happiness that there’s a kind of desperation to extend our time with them, we feel we need to cling to it or else it will slip through our fingers and be gone forever.

“Where are you staying?” they ask.

What kind of question is that to be asking the Son of God? It’s not a practical question; they don’t care about the inn or the tent or the location, their hearts are already being converted and they must, they feel, go to where he is. Why?

Because they know already that he is the Son of God.

We know from our own lives and faith that God is not simply some set of logical or theological principles to which we assent in our minds as if we were doing our multiplication table; we know God in our lives by knowing God-in-our-lives. What makes Christmas – the incarnation of Jesus – most remarkable, is not that His birth reminds us of God’s presence with us, but Jesus is himself GOD WITH US. What person then, such as these disciples of John who are surely distractible and as likely to stray off the path as we are, would not want to know where he is staying? They want to know because they want to be with him; they want to be near to him, in his presence, at his feet, taught by him.

And so should we.

The great St. Augustine, a Bishop of the early Church (4th & 5th century) said of this passage, “What a blessed day they spent, what a blessed night! Who can make known to us those things which they heard from the Lord? Let us also build in our heart, and make a house into which He may come and teach us, and have converse with us.”

And this, in some way, is precisely what the coming season of Advent and our preparations for Christmas are all about – making a house of our hearts into which the coming Lord might enter, talk, teach, and be with us. This is why jumping to Christmas joy and skipping advent is such a loss; if you knew the King was coming next week for tea you wouldn’t start setting out the biscuits and boiling the kettle now, you’d take great care to get the house in order, to be made an offering and place meet and fit and worthy for the visit of Royalty.

Jesus’ own birth into the humblest of places and circumstances reminds us that it is even into hearts such as ours: unkempt, untidy, maybe a bit musty from lack of use, that he deigns to come, and even there makes a home.

Jesus’ response to John’s disciples’ inquiring about where he is staying, his response to our own desperate longing to be nearer to him in this life and in the life to come, our desire to learn from him and follow him all the days of our life is – “Come and see.”

His response is an open invitation, “Come and see”, or to reduce it even further, “Follow me.”

And that is exactly what we will strive to do in the coming weeks as we journey through the darkness of advent to the light of his birth: follow him more faithfully and with greater attention seek to ready our hearts as mangers themselves where he may dwell and cast his light.

“He said to them, ‘Come and see.’”