by CCW | 11 December 2011 13:51
Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.
John the Baptist calls us to repentance. He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world. Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.
The Word made flesh comes to birth through her because that Word now fully defines her being. It marks an ever deepening understanding of the Mystery to which she so completely gives herself. It is borne out of her faithful hearing, her constant attentiveness to the Word and Son of God.
These two figures recall us to the profounder principles of our spiritual identity. They challenge us about our engagement with the world, to be sure, but without being taken captive by either the rhetoric of an idealised future or the rhetoric of an idealised past. They recall us to God in the motions of his love towards us. Let him who has an ear “hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.” In a way, as Augustine remarks somewhere, “the Scriptures are like letters from home,” perhaps, even emails, we might say; they remind us of who we are essentially and spiritually.
Advent is the season of penitential adoration. We are reminded of the darkness and the light. There is the darkness of sin by which we are less than ourselves. There is the light in which we find ourselves. The truth of our humanity is to be found in the truth of God. We have to say no to the darkness in order to say yes to the light.
The repentance to which John the Baptist calls us is about an honest recognition of the mystery of sin and of ourselves as sinners. It is captured in the confession in its eloquent honesty that “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,” that “we have followed too much the devices and desires our own hearts,” that “we have offended against thy holy laws” in “thought” if not in “word and deed,” that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done,” that “we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” And who isn’t captured in that net? The conclusion is inescapably obvious that “there is no health in us.” We are not perfect and complete. It may be, as Shakespeare put it, that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark,” but, more importantly, there is something rotten in us, in you and me, I am bound to say.
Yet, strange to say, this is not bad news but good news, because we can only bear such an acknowledgement of ourselves as sinners in the greater knowledge of God’s mercy and truth. God’s word is proclaimed in the midst of the wasteland of our lives – a wasteland environmentally, politically, economically, socially, psychologically, spiritually. At issue is our hearing or not hearing. It is about our spiritual attentiveness.
This is signalled in the reading from Isaiah[1] which challenges us about the lies with which we cloak ourselves, making a covenant with death by refusing God’s teaching. “Whom will he teach knowledge,” the prophet asks, “and to whom will he explain the message?” And how will he teach? “By men of strange lips and with an alien tongue, the Lord will speak to this people… yet they would not hear.” The challenge is for us to hear and to hear faithfully.
The prophetic judgment of Isaiah is taken up with an even greater intensity by John the Baptist. He preaches a baptism of repentance. His cry is the refrain of Advent, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” But for both Isaiah and John that kingdom near and coming means more than something political and social. Such things, instead, are to be taken up into something much more complete. The hope of heaven is the corrective to our political and social ambitions; the counter to the idolatry of our hearts. It frees us to constructive and sacrificial labours of love in our world and day because it frees us from the tyranny and the vanity of thinking that we have the solutions for all the world’s problems. We don’t and when we think that we do, then, we are part of the problem.
John the Baptist reminds us of our hearts of darkness without which we cannot look to the greater light of God’s Word and Son. But even more, his message is about the hope in the judgment, the very thing that Jesus tells John’s disciples: “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” John’s quest for righteousness is about the healing and salvation of our wounded and broken humanity. It requires the naming of our darkness and brokenness, such things as being blind, lame, unclean, deaf, dead and poor; in short, all the forms of our incompleteness.
I was reminded of the power and the poignancy of this Advent message just the other day. A woman called me about her friend who was dying of cancer. Would I pray with her the Our Father for her friend? And so over the phone we prayed. I never learned her name, only the name of her friend about whom she was most concerned and concerned spiritually, that is to say, concerned for her in the entirety of her being, body and soul. “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see,” for such is the Good News of Christ’s holy Advent in the times of darkness in people’s lives.
Our looking to the light is equally about hearing what “the Spirit says to the Churches” as presented in the second lesson from Revelation[2]. To the one, the Church in Philadelphia, the Spirit says “you have kept my word of patient endurance,” thereby encouraging them to continue to persevere; to the other, the Church in Laodicea, the Spirit says, “because you are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth,” chastising them for their lukewarm, ultimately complacent, and indifferent love. Patient endurance versus complacency and indifference. Two contrasting letters about our relation to what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures, namely, to what has been opened to view and about the one who knocks at the door of our hearts. What is wanted is for us to hear, for “if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
This hearing and being with the one whom we hear is realized most fully in Mary, the Mother of our Lord. She embodies the highest potential of our humanity; without her, God is not with us as true God and true Man. The witness of Mary calls each of us to an attentiveness to God’s Word.
We are called to repentance. We are called to adoration. By the witness of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are called to penitential adoration, to hearing what the Spirit says to the Churches.
Fr. David Curry,
Advent III, MP 2011
10:30am, December 11th, 2011
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/12/11/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-advent-1030am-service/
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