Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 8:00am service

admin | 27 November 2011

“The night is far spent”

For a millennium or more the Gospel story on the First Sunday in Advent was a reading from the 21^st chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel ending with “this is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.” In the 16^th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the principle architect of The Book of Common Prayer, added to the reading the scene that follows in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ’s cleansing of the Temple. It makes for a most compelling beginning to the Advent season.

We are presented with a wonderful contrast between the joy and delight of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and the disturbing encounter with what he finds in the heart of the holy city, in the Temple. The spiritual lesson is very clear. It is about light and darkness, the light of Christ’s coming, on the one hand, the darkness of our hearts and souls, on the other hand. We are called to be the temples of the God’s Holy Spirit; instead we are the thieves of his grace and mercy, preoccupied in our own affairs and neglectful of the things and places of God. Christ comes as the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness overcame it not. In other words, the light is greater than the darkness, the power of the good greater than the folly of evil.

This does not lessen the reality of sin and evil. Christ’s advent is divine judgment. His coming is the grace that restores us to what we are called to be. It means that the darkness within each of us, the darkness of sin and evil, has to be named and overcome, just like the “over[throwing] of the tables of the money-changers and the seats of them that sold doves.”

The story of the cleansing of the Temple brings out the deeper dynamic and truth of the Advent season. God turns to us to turn us to himself, to be sure, but that turning is both judgment and mercy. Christ comes as Judge and Redeemer, as Son and Word. His coming is in every way a wake-up call. There is a sense of urgency. “The night is far spent,” Paul tells us. “Therefore cast off the works of darkness … and put on the armour of light,” he urges; images captured in the wonderful Collect for the Advent season.

In difficult times, economically, socially, politically and personally, it is tempting to fall into a kind of despair, a kind of fatalism about our world and day. The spirit of ‘endism’ abounds, the sense of impending doom and gathering gloom. Certainly there is much to ponder about the assumptions of contemporary culture and the contemporary Church; the assumptions of a secular world and its progressivist myths no longer have any persuasive power in a world and culture which finds itself bankrupt morally and intellectually, economically and politically, and, of course, spiritually.

Whether we are or are not at the end of an age, depending on what pundits and commentators you read, Advent always reminds us of darkness and light, of judgment and mercy. It is not primarily a social and political commentary about a particular time and place, a particular culture, as it were. No. It is about something profoundly spiritual. There is the sense that it is always the time of the far spent night, that there is always the need to awaken and take note of God’s Word coming to us both individually and collectively.

Such is Advent. It is about the revelation of God to us and about God’s revelation of ourselves to us, too. He comes. The question is whether we are awake to his coming. What hangs in the balance is life and death, spiritually speaking. What matters always is whether we are alive to his Word and Light or dead to his coming and being with us. The Advent message comes always to the world of the far spent night and comes always in this double sense of joy and judgment. It is the message of hope, the hope in the great something more that is God’s turning to us and being with us.

Advent signals the radical meaning of Christ’s coming. He comes as Lord and Saviour. We can make little sense of that without a heart-felt and honest awareness of our need for God. Without God we are radically incomplete. This, it seems to me, is increasingly what is at least sensed and felt in our contemporary culture. There is, perhaps, just perhaps, the real possibility of an awakening and turning back to the God who has turned to us. The grace of redemption is carried to us on the wings of revelation.

Advent season begins with the story of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. That is, of course, a Passover story, the story of Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week. Christmas is about the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. Yet, the point of this advent beginning is to help us think about the meaning of the one who comes, about who he is. For we know the events of holy week, the events of Good Friday and Easter. We know the story. We know that it is the story of death and resurrection. Advent is about our being with the one who comes to our broken world with healing and grace. We turn to him who turns to us in whom we find our health and salvation. “The night is far spent,” to be sure, but in the mercies of Christ, “the day is at hand,” and always.