by CCW | 20 December 2009 20:44
We have come full circle, it may seem. Today’s Gospel ends with where we began on The Sunday Next Before Advent. In a way, Advent captures the whole of our lives in faith.
It signals the coming of God towards us. That is the first note. It signals as well the heightened awareness on our part about the coming of God towards us. That is the second note. Advent is simply and entirely holy waiting and holy watching – our watching and our waiting upon God, upon the God who comes to us with grace and salvation, with healing and forgiveness. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” John the Baptist says in today’s Gospel.
Such is our beginning and our ending to which this week of the darkest night would bring us. It would bring us to Christ, the Lamb of God, the Word and Son of the Father who comes to us as the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world whose birth marks the beginning of the way of sacrificial love. He is the light of the world in every sense.
We can only watch and wait. It is the hardest thing for us, I fear, and yet, as always, the hardest things are the things most worth doing. We watch and wait upon God. There is our heightened awareness, our heightened expectancy – all of which are concentrated for us on this day.
But what makes this watching and waiting so hard? Because it is a watching and a waiting upon God. Without that all our advent preparations for Christmas are but tinsel and wrap, sounding brass and clanging cymbal, empty show and vain illusion. We so easily get lost in the busyness of our Christmas preparations. We are, I am afraid, simply too much with ourselves and not enough with God.
There is nothing quite so hard as our watching and waiting upon God. It is an activity of the highest order. It is anything but passivity, as if we were merely accidents waiting to happen. No. The challenge of Advent is a peculiarly modern challenge – the challenge not to be defined by “what has happened to me. The challenge is to rise above the comfortable but ultimately demeaning climate of victimhood. The challenge is to put aside the endless whine of ‘what about me?’
There is no joy in our self-absorptions and no advent because we will not watch and wait upon God, upon what ennobles and dignifies our humanity, upon what raises up and restores; in short, upon what occasions rejoicing. And yet that is all the note of this day.
This day of watching and waiting upon God signals, in a nutshell, the whole of our lives in faith. We wait upon God. We come to him for light. That is the highest activity of our souls. We can do no more and yet it is all his doing in us in prayer and praise, in watching and waiting upon God, in short, by “rejoicing in the Lord,” as the Epistle so wonderfully reminds us.
In this watching and waiting, there is another related activity of the highest order. It is questioning; in short, asking questions. Advent is the season, we might say, of holy questioning, a questioning without which there can be no learning, a questioning which gives us, at the very least, a framework of understanding about the one who comes.
Tomorrow is the feast of St. Thomas, the Apostle. He is for us one of the Advent saints and yet the gospel story about St. Thomas is a Resurrection story. His feast day falls on what is the darkest and the longest night of all. The Gospel for his feast day is about his questioning the reality of the Risen Christ. As another Thomas puts it, Thomas Aquinas, his doubting brings us the greatest certainty, “for the more confirmation of the faith,” as the Prayer Book collect says. Thomas simply wants to know the truth of the God made man, to know for himself that the one who has come and whom he has followed throughout the dust of ancient Palestine, the one who has said “I am the truth and the life,” is indeed the living truth who has overcome the darkness of death. His questioning is not the doubting of our comfortable, arrogant and false skepticisms, the doubting which rests in the denial of the possibility of knowing anything at all. No. His questioning opens him and us to the wonder of it all, the wonder of, as he says, “My Lord, and My God.”
“Be not faithless but believing,” Jesus says to him. The questions of Advent open us out to the light of the one who comes, if only we will watch and wait, watching and waiting in holy questioning so that we can come and behold the Babe of Bethlehem and say with Thomas’ words, “My Lord, and My God.” That is the mystery of Christmas.
The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on this day in the barrage of questions which belong to “the record of John.” “Who are thou?” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask John the Baptist in a kind of genuine puzzlement. He turns their questions about himself into a witness to the one who comes. For he has learned through questioning, too. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” he asked in the darkness of Herod’s prison. Jesus’ response provides a way of understanding about prophecy fulfilled and about the nature of true human desiring. In the logic of Advent, we have come full circle. We come to him whom John points out, “Behold the lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” the one who comes to us. In him is all our rejoicing.
Fr. David Curry,
Advent IV, 2009
8:00am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/12/20/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-advent-800am-service/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.