by CCW | 4 December 2016 15:00
Why we need Hell might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not so as to have a place for those who annoy us nor is it to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries; the idea that life is Hell. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the possibility of the redemption of our desires.
The poet/theologian Dante clearly teaches that 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 what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept the word” and have not repented. They have not learned what in fact was written for our learning. Hell, too, Dante suggests, or at least in terms of the virtuous pagans whom he locates in Limbo, a kind of melancholy suburb of Hell, is the condition of those who have no hope meaning that they do not look for anything more than what belongs to the horizons of the world.
But the Word which comes is, unavoidably, a word of judgment as the Gospel reading from St. Luke reminds us in its litany of apocalyptic images. This is an undeniable feature of Advent. The Word calls us to account. The Word convicts and convinces our hearts about the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, inescapably, found wanting. 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 very point where human desires discover their limitation, there something more is opened out to us. We want something more.
That something more is conveyed in the pageant of Scripture. St. Paul teaches us that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” He signals the purpose of the Scriptures. By Scripture he has primarily in mind the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures since it will only be later that the New Testament comes into being as Scripture including a good deal of the writings of St. Paul. They, too, are written for our learning. Learning what? Among a number of essential things that are ultimately concentrated in the Creeds, there is learning about hope. The Scriptures are read that we might have hope. Hope is a strong feature of the Advent. In judgment there is the prospect of hope.
Advent marks the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming is threefold: first, a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; secondly, a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, present and future, because it is now and always; and thirdly, a coming in mente, in our souls to shape and order our desires. These three ‘comings’ are all God’s Word coming to us. Advent is altogether about the pageant of God’s Word coming to us.
Word. There is no getting around the word-centered nature of the Christian Faith. And certainly, in our day, that word-centered reality offers the greatest challenge to the image-fixated character of contemporary culture. We are constantly bombarded by an array of images overwhelming in the allure of their sensual immediacy. While they awaken desire they offer no real hope. They are the stuff of the moment. They are the illusions of our wants and desires, sensual and immediate. In a way, they are Hell. They are about what we think we want. Paradoxically, it will be through thinking about them that we may 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 themselves. 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 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.
The Advent and Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols this afternoon here at Christ Church and at the School Chapel this evening are strong reminders of the coming of God’s Word conveying grace and hope to a weary and despairing world. The service of Nine Lessons and Carols began in 1918 at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. Think about the power and the symbolism of the Scripture readings in that service which stand in such contrast to the brutal violence and catastrophic destruction of the War. They convey hope indeed to a weary and war-devastated world, a world which sadly is still with us, a world which is a kind of Hell. All the more necessary to think about the pageant of God’s Word and the hope that it awakens.
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 something more of the grace of God. There is hope for us precisely at the point where we have despaired of the things of this world because at that point we are 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. Our ‘this-world 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 at the same time as it opens us out to the grace of God. God’s grace is in the advent of his Word to us.
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. It means to “look up and lift up your heads” to see “your redemption draw[ing] nigh”. 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 wickedness 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 that is to take hold of the objective standard of truth by which we find ourselves wanting. We will the judgment of the One whose justice is mercy and in whose good will for us lies all our hope.
We awaken to hope by repenting. For then we are open to the truth of God which must ever be the measure of our lives. Only by “patience and comfort of God’s Holy Word” may we “embrace the blessed hope of everlasting life”.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Advent II, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/12/04/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-in-advent-8/
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