by CCW | 11 December 2011 13:44
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. His cry is the mantra of Advent: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 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.
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 about “our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time [meaning always] most grievously have committed, By thought, word and deed.” In short, 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,
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, but most profoundly spiritually. At issue is our hearing or not hearing, our seeing or not seeing. It is about our spiritual attentiveness.
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.
Our looking to the light is about hearing and seeing and about being with what we hear and see. It 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 and to the motions of that Word taking flesh in us in lives of prayer and service.
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, attending to what Jesus speaks to us about our healing and our wholeness, in short, our salvation.
Fr. David Curry,
Advent III, 2011
8:00pm
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/12/11/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-advent-800am-service/
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