BBC Radio 4 - Sunday Worship, Advent Authors: Jane Austen

From its very first note I am there: transported to a world of drawing rooms and dances, of eligible bachelors with five thousand a year and genteel young women determined to marry for love. A world where respectability and pride about rank and position or prejudice about manners can prevent people from seeing the truth that they are made for each another. Andrew Davies' 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is justifiably a classic and its success, captured in that brilliant theme music we've just heard, surely rekindled the modern obsession with All Things Austen.

I'm standing at the end of a long, elegant drive, catching a first view of PEMBERLEY....well it's not quite Pemberley but it is a "large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills"...It's the Pemberley of that BBC production, Lyme Park in Cheshire.

This 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen's birth has provided a wonderful opportunity to revisit not only her lasting legacy as one of the world's greatest and funniest writers, but to reflect on her life in all its richness and to examine what she means for us today.

One area of her life that, sadly, has been relatively neglected is her Christian faith. It is easy to forget that, behind the modern obsession with Jane Austen - an obsession that has produced an industry through which you can buy everything from Austen themed soap to jigsaws - that Jane was a faithful Christian, a daughter and sister of clergy. This special Sunday Worship during Advent celebrates not only the religious light and hope found in her work but also imagines what her experience of a Georgian Advent and Christmas might have been.

Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address thee with our Hearts, as with out lips. Thou are everywhere present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this, teach us to fix our Thoughts on Thee, with Reverence and Devotion that we pray not in vain. Amen.

A prayer that, according to her sister Cassandra, was written by Jane, and throughout this service we shall using other prayers attributed to her (read by actor Amanda Root, who played Anne Elliot in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Persuasion). Jane wrote of her home life, 'In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home' [Jane Austen, Letters, Oct. 24-25, 1808].

But her's was no grim puritan upbringing. Alongside these important religious practices, Jane adored plays and playfulness, and the Austens loved going to the theatre. Indeed, her profound gift for identifying and skewering the foibles of human nature were honed by her love of watching others perform both on the stage, at home, and among friends.

Equally, we might imagine that our Georgian forebears were better at keeping the season of Advent than ourselves. That they took those weeks for sober and righteous reflection, quietly preparing for Jesus's return at the end of time and on Christmas Day. However, for someone like Jane Austen, as for most middle- and upper-class Anglicans, the arrival of Advent signalled the start of a great run of socialising: parties, balls and dances, with a focus on people enjoying time together. Alongside the dancing, there would also have been singing.

Be thou merciful, oh Heavenly Father! ... we bless thee for every comfort of our past and present existence, for our health of body and of mind and for every other source of happiness which thou hast bountifully bestowed on us. Amen.

We must be careful not to overlay modern ideas of Christmas and Advent onto Jane's experience. Contemporary traditions emerged during the Victorian era and our love of putting up and decorating trees or giving gifts were not part of a Georgian Christmas. Nor was there a great focus on children. The Austen family, like countless other families of her day, were much more interested in the social elements of the season.

Jane Austen was not impressed by what might be called 'religious enthusiasm'. She was suspicious of those evangelical clergy who she felt made great displays of their religiosity. Jane's faith was of a quieter, more discreet kind. She was as anti-slavery as someone like William Wilberforce, but her picture of religion and of the ideal cleric were shaped around her belief that a good Anglican resisted showy displays of devotion. Rather, one demonstrated one's faith by being committed to moral duty and virtuous behaviour within one's community. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, part of which we've just heard, models those Christian virtues of peace, mercy, grace and love of which Jane approved.

Austen adores characters who grow in virtue and good sense like Lizzie Bennet and Mr Darcy or those who, like Fanny Price, show a virtuous resilience in the face of those who would pull her off course. If one were to dare suggest, on behalf of Jane Austen, a fresh beatitude to add to Jesus' wonderful and challenging list it might be 'Blessed are those who embody virtue for they shall know Love.'

We're now in the grounds of Lyme Park...and it's not difficult to see how gardens like this could have caused Lizzie Bennet to answer her sister's "very serious" enquiry as to how long she had loved Darcy with the less than serious... "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley."

If I were to ask a person on the street what popped into their head when they heard the name Jane Austen, I suspect most would be likely to say marriage and romance. And in many ways, they would be correct. However, it is not quite so simple. My imagination as much as anyone else's is populated with visions of Mr Darcy’s glistening chest full of romantic ardour for Lizzie as he leaves the pond at Pemberley (the very pond I’m looking out on right now) or of other Austen heroines and heroes catching a glimpse of one another across a crowded dance floor. But the famous Darcy moment from the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is no more in the book than the double wedding which ends that adaptation.

Indeed one of the fascinating things about Austen’s novels is how little focus they give to marriage itself. Yes, Lizzie gets Darcy, Anne Eliot her Wentworth, and so on.

Jane Austen is interested in so many other things than romantic ideas of love or sentimental pictures of marriage. The marriage between Fanny and Edmund in Mansfield Park is no heated romance a la Bridgerton; it brings healing to the social and family order damaged by the corruption of money made by Edmund’s family off the back of slaves.

Should we be worried that we’ve misunderstood Austen? I don’t think so. We need to remember that it is a token of her genius that we remake and reinterpret her for our present age. Like Shakespeare we can see almost what we want in her writing. She can also be interpreted as required by the needs of each era. We see new things as her novels are interpreted by our time ...

Ultimately, while Austen is interested in love and flourishing relationships and marriages, at a deep level she is fascinated by hard-won happiness, full of wisdom, experience and love tested across time. This is not romantic love served up on a plate through two young people in the first flushes of mutual fascination. It is a Christian love shaped around self-sacrifice, deep mutual respect, and constancy even in the face of pain and trouble.

For me, it is the relationship between Persuasion’s Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth which represents Austen’s most considered view on love. Anne and Wentworth have been tested by life and each other. They fell in love when Anne was nineteen but then she rejects him, persuaded by her family that he is unworthy of her exalted family. When Wentworth comes back into Anne’s life years later, she is tired and has lost her way. He is a seasoned sea captain. It looks like they will never find their way back to each other, such is the level of disappointment each feels. Slowly, they bridge the vast gap between each other, recognising that their love, though tested to the limit, has remained constant. Finally, Wentworth writes this to Anne:

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it; eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman; that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been; weak and resentful I have been; but never inconstant ... For you alone; I think and plan."

'You pierce my soul.' It is such an extraordinary line. It is a reminder of love's abiding and decisive power: true love goes to the very heart of human identity; it can undo us and even pierce our very souls. This is not sentimental or merely romantic but an echo of the love God has for us in Jesus Christ; a love that means Jesus would lay down his life for his friends; a love that comes down at Christmas in which God comes to dwell among us as one us of ,a child born of Mary who is the saviour of the world.

I've scaled the hill at Lyme and I'm looking out at the most spectacular winter landscape - or as Lizzie Bennet might say...MAGNIFICENT.

As this service celebrating Jane Austen's legacy draws to a close, we shall sing O Come All Ye Faithful, a carol which captures so much of her faith in Jesus Christ, as well as her her focus as a novelist on the love that will not let us down. Two hundred and fifty years on from her birth, we rejoice that Jane’s gift for insight, humour and timeless characters continues to inspire. More than than that we give thanks for her faith in the one who more than two thousand years on from his birth in a stable, our Lord Jesus Christ, brings hope, love and the promise of peace to the world.