The Present Tense

Your holy hearsay is not evidence.
Give me the good news in the present tense.
What happened nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened. How am I to know? 

The living truth is what I long to see.
I cannot lean upon what used to be.
So shut your Bibles up and show me how,
The Christ you talk about Is living now.

The words of Sydney Carter—a British folk singer and poet—might already play in your mind if you’ve spent time in churches like ours. Lord of the Dance. When I Needed a Neighbour. Said Judas to Mary. These are songs I hum on the way home from worship, the ones that settle deep and familiar. But this particular song—the one about wanting Christ to show up here, now, and in the present tense— didn’t make it into the hymn books.

Sydney Carter was always a little too wild for the pews. He was a questioner, the kind of person who poked and prodded at the edges of faith to see where it gave way. He wasn’t the sort to let rules get in the way of mystery. And though he might’ve had one foot in the church, the other was planted firmly outside, restless. Searching. 

The religious establishment didn’t know what to make of him. He didn’t know what to make of them either. And so, they circled one another, fed off one another, and as so often happens, in that tension, art was created.

But who among us hasn’t looked at the broken pieces of this world and wondered how it’s all supposed to fit together? Who hasn’t looked at Scripture and asked, “How is this still alive? How does it still matter?”

And we’ll get back to that. 

But first…Luke.

We’ve just spent a whole year with Mark, the gospel that races through the life of Jesus like he’s always late for supper. Mark barely lets you catch your breath before “immediately” and “suddenly” the story’s rushing onward. But Luke—Luke’s a different storyteller altogether. If Mark’s an action movie, Luke is a musical. Where Mary’s magnificat would have been performed on stage with the full mezzo soprano belt of Cynthia Erivo. Where angels show up as full choirs, singing their lungs out to shepherds in the night. The kind of show with sweeping orchestras and sets so grand you don’t quite know where the stage ends and the story begins.

Luke loves the drama, but he also loves the people in the shadows—the ones who don’t usually get a song written about them. The folks who don’t usually even make the chorus line. His is the gospel of the hungry, the hurting, the cast aside. If there’s a gospel that dares to speak up for the powerless, it’s Luke’s.

And so here we are, on this first Sunday of Advent, lighting a candle for hope. O Come, O Come Emmanuel!!  And what does Luke give us? Stars falling. Oceans roaring. Nations in anguish. It’s not exactly the warm and fuzzy feeling CHFI is trying to cultivate with its super saccharine, All-Christmas-All-the-Time playlist that’s playing across the city. 

In this reading, we’re not looking for Jesus in the Eaton Centre window displays. We’re waiting for Christ in the ashes.

Apocalyptic writing isn’t meant for people sitting comfortably at the top. It’s for the folks at the bottom, the ones the world’s already forgotten. Or perhaps, never noticed in the first place. It’s for the brokenhearted, the worn-down, the ones for whom hope feels like a cruel joke. As we lean into the story of A Christmas Carol this season, this kind of story is for the Bob Cratchits, or, perhaps even more so, the little match girl singing on the corner of a snowy London street. 

Apocalyptic literature is not about scaring folks into believing—it’s about saying that this mess of a world won’t last forever. That the inevitable result of a world whose functioning favours only a few is its complete dissolution.

And if the weight of the world’s already crushed you—then maybe that doesn’t sound so terrifying after all. Maybe it even sounds like liberation.

I think about friends who walk through the doors of Out of the Cold, or visit the Nourish food bank. Who came here as asylum seekers. Some of us don’t have time to hope for small changes or gradual progress. For governments to argue and squabble over the amount of a living wage, or whether the social service that is keeping us alive should even exist. Some of us are already living in a world that feels like it’s broken beyond repair, and know in the bones that what is needed isn’t just a fix—it’s a whole new beginning.

And even if on the surface everything seems okay, I wonder just how many of us are feeling the overwhelm of a world that is on fire crushing in. When we look at the news and see enslaved Myanmar children making the clothes that end up on Canadian shelves, wars dragging on in Ukraine, and violence that seems to have no end, it’s hard not to wonder if this world can be saved. 

The re-election of a convicted felon who has openly admitted to serial sexual assault.  The continued suffering and outrageous loss of life among Palestinians. The crushing effects of climate change. There’s so much brokenness…and we are a caring people! It’s paralyzing. It feels impossible to imagine how anything might ever get better. The temptation to look away, to turn inward, is strong. 

But as we’ll continue to learn as we move through Luke, the story and call of Jesus—Emmanuel, God with Us, in the flesh—doesn’t let us look away. That hope—Jesus’ hope—isn’t the soft kind that lets us hide from the pain. It’s not a paternalistic pat on the knee that says, “Don’t worry, it’ll all work out, but please don’t make a fuss.” 

It’s a hope forged in the hard places, the places where everything seems lost. 

It’s the hope of a poor Jewish girl in an occupied land, who says yes to the impossible. 

The kind of hope that chooses vulnerability over power, love over control, truth over comfort. 

It’s the hope of shepherds who run through the night to witness the miraculous. 

It’s the hope of a God who chooses to become a child born through the rawness and the messiness of labour—an entire world moving through the birthpangs—and who grew up to turn everything upside down.

And maybe that’s what Sydney Carter was asking for in his song. He didn’t want hope that lives only in the past or the pages of Scripture. He wanted it to live here, now, in the choices we make, in the way we love, in what we might be willing to give up, the risks we might be willing to take…

…in the way we dare to see beyond the chaos to something new.

Last week, some of you might remember (and if you don’t, that’s fine because a lot has happened in the past seven days) I asked us to consider what a relationship with Jesus in the present tense looks like. Not only a hypothetical. Not imagining some sort of time travelling scenario, but a relationship with the divine, enfleshed, walking among us in the here and now. 

Because I feel like I see Jesus calling for the world to change over and over again. In the faces of those I hang out with who live in the encampments. Who desperately need the services of safe consumption sites. Who are forced to stay in a place where hands are used to hurt, or risk not being able to feed their children. This is where Jesus lives. This is who Jesus is. This is the one we are waiting for…the paradox of the one with nothing left to lose being the one who offers everything we have to hope for. 

Because if salvation is a communal act, if my fate is inextricably tied to the fate of my neighbour, then I, too, am waiting for the stars to fall, the earth to shake and the oceans to rise. I am waiting for this new world order too. Everything falling apart might just be hopeful, and that falling apart is also for my benefit.

When we live that kind of hope, we begin to embody the upside-down kingdom and kindom that Jesus came to bring: where the last are first, where the lowly are lifted, and where hope is not just a wish but a way of life. That’s the kind of hope that changes things. That’s the kind of hope we are called to this Advent season. 

How do we live into that hope? Well, this is only the first Sunday in Advent. We have three more to go and I promise we’ll get there…

But as we light candles and sing hymns and prepare for the birth of Christ, I’m hopeful we can remember Sydney Carter’s challenge to experience this very old story in the present tense and in very real way, embodying the radical, here-and-now hope of Christ that turns the world—and our hearts—inside out.

Amen.