by CCW | 6 December 2015 15:00
‘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.
Word. There is no getting around the word-centered nature of the Christian Faith, words “written for our learning,” Paul says, in reference to the Hebrew Scriptures but by extension including what will be his words and the words of others collected together in the New Testament. That word-centered reality challenges the visual and image fixated character of contemporary culture. We are constantly bombarded by an array of images overwhelming in the allure of their sensual immediacy. And as such they offer no hope. They are the stuff of the moment. They are the illusion of our wants and desires, sensual, immediate and ephemeral. In a way, they are hell. They reflect what we think we want. Only in thinking about them might we discover their superficiality, their insubstantiality, their futility. We are offered only the images of the things of passing worth, themselves mere images of greater realities. If such things are of passing worth how much more of passing worth are the visual images themselves, the pictures of the pictures of such things?
We need the Word of God to redeem both ourselves and the images. We need the Word of God coming in judgment to awaken us to truth. In that awakening to truth we find mercy and hope. Why? Precisely because the Word is what comes to us and not what comes from us. This is the great insight of ancient Israel and it governs Christianity and Islam as well. In that coming of the Word in Law and Prophecy, in story and song, we are awakened to the absolute and objective goodness of God.
Hope is about our orientation and longing for what comes from God to us. That is always more and not less than what we can desire or deserve. Hell is about being left to ourselves. The Word proclaimed opens us out to something more, to the grace of God. There is hope for us precisely when we have despaired of the things of this world because only at that point are we open to the greater reality of God and his will for us. There is redemption through hope. It changes how we deal with everything in the present of our lives. The hope is precisely not-of-this-world. Such hopes, we might say, are hopeless in comparison with the greater hope of the Gospel which proclaims the redemption of our desires by bringing them before the objective measure of God’s Word.
The pageant of God’s Word is the Scripture written and proclaimed. It is a judgment upon our lives considered in themselves.
To discover the hell of our own desires is to be awakened to the hope of heaven. It means discovering what God wants for us. To want what he wants is the redemption of our desires – they are brought into an ordered relation to the objective measure and truth of God. The pageant of the Scriptures is judgment upon the confusion of our souls and the emptiness of our lives; but only so is there hope, the hope that is always more and never less than what we either deserve or desire. The Word coming in judgment is the Word conveying hope. We take hold of what we have received – the Word written and proclaimed.
We keep it by continual repenting. But why repentance? Because repentence is a kind of redire ad principe, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back to Truth. The words Teshuwah in the Hebrew for Judaism, tawba in Arabic for Islam, and metanoia in Greek for Christians are usually translated as repentance; a returning of our minds to truth. Such is repentance. It means reclaiming the objective standard of truth from which we have separated ourselves. We can only will the judgment of the One whose justice is mercy and in whose good will for us lies all our hope. It means attending to God’s Word coming to us as light and love. Such is the hope of Advent!
We awaken to hope by repenting. Therein lies the paradox. The awareness of the hell of our lives leads us to hope in God and his will for us. The truth of God must ever be the measure of our lives. Only by “patience and comfort of God’s Holy Word” in the words of the Collect drawn from the Scripture may we “embrace the blessed hope of everlasting life”. It requires our constant attention to his Word written and proclaimed.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 2, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/12/06/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-in-advent-7/
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