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Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on
the armour of light”

Advent signals the coming of God towards us. But what is our response? Are we watching and waiting? Are we aware of humanity’s need for the coming of the one who alone can redeem? Are we looking for something more beyond the dull, dark empty loneliness of our anxious and troubled lives? In short, are we prepared for the Advent of Christ to us? That is the challenge of the readings on this day.

So often we think of Advent as simply the season of preparation for Christmas. To be sure, it is, but it is also something more. It is a season and a doctrine which has a real meaning and significance in and of itself. For Advent is the coming. Are we prepared for it or not? The coming is about the challenging presence of God. There is the constant coming of God’s Word to us in proclamation and celebration.

In the great gospel for this day, Christ comes to Jerusalem. He enters the city triumphantly. It is a royal procession. The King has come to his own city. All is light and grace and glory, it seems. “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest,” “the multitudes that went before, and that followed” cry, both those who went before, them, and those that followed, us. But will we not shortly hear at Christmas that “he came unto his own and his own received him not”? The whole city was moved to say in wondering ignorance and in perplexity, “Who is this?” We know the story. The King – God’s own Word and Son – will be rejected. All that is light and life ends in darkness and death, it seems; the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the darkness of the cross and the grave.

And yet, this will be the real triumph, the entry of the King into the things of his own. He will reign from the tree. Through the darkness of our sin and death, through the darkness of our rejection and denial of him, through the darkness of the “far spent night”, the darkness of our despair named in him – “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” – comes the greater light of salvation. There is forgiveness and resurrection.

Advent not only reminds us of his coming. It would deepen our understanding of its meaning. It intends that we might come to know more fully and more truly the one who has come to us. His coming names our darkness in the greater light of his love. Advent is our wake-up call. It means to look again towards him who comes knowing our darkness, the darkness of our refusal and rejection of him.

He wants us to know the darkness of the “far spent night” in the light of his grace, the grace of his coming towards us.  He has embraced our darkness in his love. He has made a path of light for us through the darkness. He comes that we might know and receive him even through the darkness of our refusals to receive him. He comes “unto his own” in the greater power of his light and grace, making a way to him even through the patterns of our sin-twisted lives. His coming calls us to repentance; this is the royal way of Advent. “The night is far spent,” to be sure, but “the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” The light of Christ awaits us.

To put on that “armour of light” is to enter into the preparations which God himself makes for his coming among us. Such things are our quiet attentiveness in prayer and study to the purpose of his coming. He comes to restore and redeem, to lighten and cheer.

And our response? The Gospel story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem ends with the account of the cleansing of the temple from corruption and misuse. What is the misuse that excites such holy wrath on the part of Jesus? Is it not our constant attempt to domesticate divinity, to turn the things of God to our own ends and purposes, to turn the sanctuaries of spiritual intent into the marketplace of material gain. The buying and the selling signal our attempt to manipulate God, to reduce the infinite exchange between God and man to a matter of finite calculation. It is as if God were a market commodity and salvation a consumer product. Rather than the things of this world serving our end with God, we endeavour to make God serve our worldly ends and aims.

That is the perversion which excites the extraordinary wrath of Christ. God is in the midst of his people and we turn him into a commodity. We are not alive to the dynamic of his life-giving presence. We are dead to him even in the places that are consecrated to the reality of his living truth. And are we not ourselves temples that are in need of cleansing within?

Paul expands the range of this misuse. There is dishonesty and there is our easy indulgence in the sensual, as if the only truth were to “eat, drink and be merry”. Paul, like Jesus in the Gospel, can be very sharp-tongued precisely because he is alive to the transcending reality of the divine life.  Advent would awaken us to the grace that is greater than our sinfulness, but first we need to have the despairing nature of our sinfulness pointed out to us, especially the sin of our self-indulgence, the sin of our neglect of others, and the sin of our despair of God.

Advent signals the redemption of desire; it does not mean the despising of the flesh but it does signify the simple refusal to reduce our humanity to the sensual. We are more, but not less, than our bodies. The works of darkness are our blind refusal to enter into the path of maturing love. They are about our indulgence in the lie of our material, sensual selves as if that were the sum total and meaning of our humanity. It isn’t and yet the temptations are always there in each and every age.

Advent awakens us to something more, to the light of God which already names the darkness and which comes to restore and to redeem. It means to cast off but only so as to put on – to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light.

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on
the armour of light”

Fr. David Curry,
Advent I, 2010