Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

admin | 25 November 2012

“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”

What?! Where did that come from? That wasn’t from today’s Gospel on this day distinguished with double prepositions, The Sunday Next Before Advent. And yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness (John 6.5-14) was read on this day. It was only in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer that there was a change to reading instead from the first chapter of John’s Gospel (John 1.35-45) that you heard this morning.

“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us in today’s Gospel. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. But throughout the year we have been struggling to live in and from that Word in our lives. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; it is a time of endings and beginnings. We might say with the poet, T.S. Eliot, that “in my beginning is my end” (The Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’).

Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, something which the architecture of Christ Church constantly reminds us. Look up! Lift up your heads! See the beams that support the building. They are shaped in the form of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the Alpha and the Omega. We are embraced in the pageant of God’s Word through the liturgy of the Church and in the very structure of the building. “The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,” as another poet, George Herbert, puts it and here, indeed, the wood of the Church resounds with the name of Christ. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all our lives.

What does this mean for us? It means that we are recalled to who we are in the sight of God. Last Sunday, at Holy Communion, we had the wonderful Gospel story of the double healing of the woman afflicted with an issue of blood twelve years and the raising of the ruler’s daughter. A scene within a scene, the woman was made whole, not simply by stealing a cure from Jesus unawares merely by touching “the hem of his garment,” but by “Jesus turn[ing] him[self] about” and looking at her face to face. Here in the Gospel reading from John, Jesus turns to face the disciples of John and to engage them in a dialogue, face to face. “Jesus turned.”

In a way, the whole of our lives in faith is about God’s turning to us and speaking to us face to face. I like to think that is what our liturgy is about week after week. God speaks to us face to face through his Word proclaimed and in his Sacraments celebrated. And that challenges us about the quality of his Word living in us. After all, the experiences of our lives are tinged and coloured by no end of struggle and hardship. Sorrow and joy are forever intermingled on earth. T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, makes this point explicitly: “it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason” and so, too, with respect to the experiences of our lives.

In this morning’s Gospel, the first form of direct speech by Jesus is a question, “What seek ye?” What do we want? In the culture of the market–state, the market presumes to tell us what we want and need, and, moreover, even that to which we think we are entitled! But the things the consumer market world offers do not and cannot satisfy the deep yearnings of our souls. Only God can satisfy our yearning for what is eternal and complete. It is found in God and in God’s turning to us.

The Gospel of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness also speaks to our yearnings especially in the face of all of the broken bits and pieces of our lives. Somehow in Christ there is the gathering up of all of the fragments of our lives into wholeness and completeness. The Lesson from Jeremiah, too, signals the gathering of the scattered seed of Israel by and to “the Lord our Righteousness.” In the Christian understanding, the gathering is found in Christ who turns to us and looks upon us with the eyes of compassion and speaks to us with the words of salvation and grace.

Yet, it takes the stirring up of our wills to want what God wants for us. That is part and parcel of the special grace of this day. It calls us to look back upon the year past and, at the same time, to look ahead to the beginnings of a new year. The past year is, no doubt, tinged with sorrow for our sins and failings but also coloured with joy in the knowledge of God’s Word. Just so we may begin again in the joy of Christ’s Advent, knowing full well the sorrows and the joys his Advent brings, and knowing, too, that God wills that “nothing be lost” but all be gathered to him in his mercy and truth, however much our lives, culture, and churches may seem to be in ruins.

The Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude signals the gathering up of the fragments of our lives into the banquet of heavenly love. Yet, more than “fragments … shored against [the] ruins” of our lives (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, ‘What the Thunder Said’), these are the fragments of love and grace that sustain us in the ruins. We live from the fragments of that banquet and in the divine intention “that nothing be lost.” Just so can we begin again, our wills stirred and awakened to the pageant of God’s love coming to us in the Advent of Christ.