by CCW | 14 December 2014 18:00
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 and especially so on The Third Sunday in Advent which focuses on the ministry of repentance of John the Baptist and on the theme of gaudate, rejoicing, imaged in the rose candle of the Advent Wreath, reminding us of Mary’s role in salvation. 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.
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 that John the Baptist calls us to is not about a guilt trip – more beating up on ourselves or feeling sorry for ourselves. It is, instead, an honest recognition of the mystery of sin and the honest recognition of ourselves as sinners. It is captured in our confession of sin 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”. Who isn’t caught up in this net of understanding? 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 loving mercy and truth. In John’s call to repentance, there is the recognition that out of the wasteland of our lives – a wasteland environmentally, politically, economically, socially, psychologically, spiritually – there is a waiting upon God, a waiting upon the motions of his restoring grace. We wait for what is greater than the darkness. We wait as Isaiah puts it in our first lesson[1] “in the path of thy judgments.”
Ultimately, that spirit of active waiting is signaled 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 our waiting joyously and expectantly upon the mystery of God’s Word in motion towards us.
Our second lesson[2], too, from 1st Timothy (1.12-2.8) recalls us to the good news theme of judgment in Paul’s allusion to his own conversion from being a persecutor of Christ to being a servant of Christ. in words that are familiar to us from the comfortable words of the Communion Service: He says that “this is a true saying and worthy of all to be received that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” He himself is testimony to this saying. “I am” he say, “the foremost of sinners” and yet receives the great and saving mercy of Christ. “A true saying and worthy to be received,” he says, because we are recalled to Christ’s redemption of our humanity, to the good will and purpose of God towards us in Jesus Christ.
God alone is able to make something good out of our evil and that surely is cause for rejoicing, especially our rejoicing with her who is the mother of God, the Theotokos who bears God into the world to bear our sins.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2014
Choral Evensong
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/12/14/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-advent-400pm-choral-evensong-2/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.