Advent Meditation and Sermon for the Eve of the Feast of St. Andrew
What saith the Scripture?
St. Andrew is the first saint of the Church year, the Advent saint, really, since his feast day almost invariably falls within or near the season of Advent. The readings for The Feast of St. Andrew complement the advent theme of the coming of God towards us in Word and, ultimately, in the Word made flesh. The theme of revelation is a critical aspect of Advent. Scripture is the crucial vehicle of the revelation of God towards us as Paul’s vibrant passage from Romans makes so abundantly clear.
What do the Scriptures say? The question is in part rhetorical. Paul has in mind the grand pageant of the Torah, the Jewish Scriptures, at once in their limited sense and in a more expanded sense. In other words, the Torah refers both to the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch or five scrolls, but extends as well to the whole of the Hebrew writings, just as the word Gospel refers immediately to the writings of the four evangelists but extends its range of meaning to the New Testament and even to the whole of the Bible which for Christians means the Old and the New Testament, not to mention a host of other writings in between, as it were. But Paul’s question is more pertinent. What do the Scriptures say?
They reveal God to us and in turn they reveal things about the truth and untruth of our humanity. The concept of revelation especially in and through the witness of the things written about God and Jesus Christ is the critical theme and idea. It is altogether about what comes from God to us and not about the imaginations of our hearts. Revelation is mediation. God’s reveals his word and truth through human agency, of course, but the point of revelation is that the content is divine. We are made only too aware of concepts which require our thinking but which are not of our own making. That is the challenge to faith and to anti-faith; in short, to atheism in almost equal regard. The very idea of revelation is about what is mediated to us and this challenges our thinking and our living. Things long ago and far away and in vastly different contexts and circumstances somehow speak to our present; our experiences and those who have gone before us are gathered up into the eternity of God. We are bidden to attend to what is universal however much it is made known through what is particular and limited.