Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, Choral Evensong
Fr. David Curry preached this sermon at Choral Evensong, Trinity Church, Saint John, New Brunswick, on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of The City of Saint John.
“The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”
First, let me begin by thanking your Rector, the Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls, for the great privilege of being here this evening and for the honour of speaking to you in the beauty of this Advent Sunday Service and upon the occasion of the celebration of the 225th anniversary of the Loyalist founding and incorporation of this great Maritime city, the City of Saint John.
“The night is far spent,” St. Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. Tonight he notes that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” We meet in the quiet darkness of Advent Sunday.
There is the darkness in which we either wait in hope for the light or die in despair. There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilisations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion – distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.
In one way or another, these darknesses are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.