Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”
‘Why we need hell?’ might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us nor to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, Hell is about getting exactly what you want, only as it truly is, which is not the same thing as what we think we want. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” and have not repented.
But the Word which comes to us is, inescapably and necessarily, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word convicting and convincing our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, invariably, found wanting. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” All our motives are tainted by self-love. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitation, something more is opened out to us. We seek something more. And so does God.
That something more is conveyed wondrously in the pageant of Scripture. Advent reminds us of the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming is threefold: a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, future and yet ever present, because it is now and always; and, a coming in mente, in our minds to shape and order our desires. And these three ‘comings’ are all comings of God in and through his Word.
