Year: 2016

“And she was troubled at this saying”

The Ember days punctuate the changing seasons of nature’s year with a spiritual reminder of the centrality of the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of the Church’s life. Historically, Embertide provided occasions for ordinations to the diaconate and the priesthood and so there is a focus on the purpose and meaning of the ministry: in Lent, in Whitsuntide, in the Fall, and in Advent. Along with that overarching ministerial concern there is a specific focus of intention for each Ember season. For Advent the spiritual theme is ‘Peace in the World’ and the specific Advent Embertide service appoints a reading from Micah as the lesson and the story of the Annunciation from Luke for the Gospel.

The lesson from Micah highlights the very powerful and some familiar concept of “beat[ing] swords into plowshares” and “spears into pruning hooks”, images of the transformation of the city at war into the city of peace, at peace in the cultivating of the land but as well the cultivation of the soul. That peace is ultimately found in our “go[ing] up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob” where “he shall teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” These are all images that belong to the redemption of our humanity, to our being restored to fellowship with God. It is very much about our learning the ways of God in whom alone we may find peace and joy.

It cannot be found simply in ourselves. We need these spiritual reminders precisely in the face of such catastrophes and tragedies such as what we confront in war-torn Aleppo in Syria, a great city that was once at the centre of the world’s trade routes, a city with a remarkable history and incredibly diverse forms of architecture representative of many of the finest elements in human culture. And now? A place of rubble and despair, a humanitarian disaster area and an indictment on all our protestations to world peace. Aleppo is but one sober and sombre reminder of the complex and confusing forms of human sin and wickedness. Yet such things may awaken us to the message of Pentecost, namely, that the human community and city has no unity in itself. Its peace and unity can only be found in God and in God with us.

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“Behold I send my messenger before thy face,
Which shall prepare thy way before thee”

In the deepening darkness of nature’s year – not to mention the deep coldness of December! – we await the light of God coming to us. Such is the Advent of Christ. Our waiting is not something passive and static. Advent is about our being prepared for the one who comes. How? By way of “ministers and stewards of the mysteries of God” who are likened to “thy messenger”, the one sent to prepare the way of Christ before him. That messenger is John the Baptist and he is one of the two major figures of the Advent landscape of faith especially on The Third Sunday of Advent. The other is Mary. They both belong to the preparations for Christ’s coming.

John is vox clamatis in deserto, “a voice crying in the wilderness”, in Isaiah’s rich imaginary. Yet, here in Matthew’s gospel we are made aware of another kind of darkness, another kind of wilderness. It is neither the darkness nor the wilderness of nature; it is the darkness and the wilderness of human sin. Here John cries out from prison, a victim or victor, too, we might say, of those who speak truth to power. Matthew does not tell us right away why John is in prison but later reveals that it was because he denounced Herod for marrying his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. This leads to the infamous scene of the daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod on his birthday who “promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask.” “Prompted by her mother,” Matthew tells us, “she said, ‘Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter’”. And so it was done. We know “the daughter of Herodias” as Salome only from the first century Jewish historian Josephus. She is unnamed in the Gospels.

Knowing the fuller story of John the Baptist only adds to the poignancy of the Gospel. John is the great prophet; indeed, Jesus says “more than a prophet” precisely because everything in his life points to the coming of Christ, both his wondrous nativity and his death under persecution. Here Jesus points us to John the Baptist, pointing us to the ministry of preparation, awakening us to the meaning of the one who comes. How? Through the back and forth, the to and fro of questions. “Art thou he that should come,” John asks from prison through his disciples, “or do we look for another?” The question is not rhetorical; it is genuine. There are always uncertainties and confusions. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” Mary asks the Angel of the Annunciation. The questions are pertinent. They belong to our active waiting upon the coming of God’s Word, then and now. The task of “the ministers of Christ and the stewards of the mysteries of God” is to point us faithfully to God’s judgment. He alone “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then shall every man have praise of God.”

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“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Advent is the season of watching and waiting. In our Advent meditations we are watching and waiting upon the meaning of Revelation as the counter to Gnosticism which underlies two of the earliest heresies – false teachings – of the early Church, Docetism and Marcionism. Last week we considered Docetism which is an explicit denial of the Incarnation because of its gnostic dualism which regards the material and physical world as something intrinsically evil as opposed to and distinct from the spiritual which is good. Thus redemption can only be a flight from the physical and the material. All of the accounts of Christ’s birth and crucifixion are subsequently regarded as fiction, as mere appearance, a kind of seeming, hence the word, docetism, from the Greek meaning to seem to be or appear.

The most explicit counter to Docetism in the New Testament is found in the Gospel of St. John in the idea of “the Word was made flesh” which is the great Christmas Gospel and in his first Epistle in such things as “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” which echoes and affirms the Christmas Gospel and which is read in the Christmas holy days on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (Dec. 27^th). This suggests something of the importance of the writings of John in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, the coming to be of the collection of gospels, letters, and other writings such as Acts and Revelation that comprise the Christian Scriptures but always, interestingly enough, in tandem with the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures.

Paradoxically, Mariconism is actually the first canon of Scripture, the first attempt to say what Scriptures should be included and read and which ones should not. This is where our attention turns to the idea of Revelation and to the necessity of thinking about what we read and how we read. Marcion was a figure from the second century, c. 144 AD, who looked at the writings of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, as well as at many of the writings of what would come to be part of the New Testament. Some things he liked, other things he didn’t. What he didn’t like he simply threw out. What he liked he kept in. Upon what basis? That is the interesting question, an important question.

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“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

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.

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