Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent
“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs (1.7) reminds us. It is a recurring feature of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding. At first glance, it may seem a troubling phrase and yet it complements Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins with wonder. The fear of the Lord is really our awe and wonder at the majesty and truth of God, the God, to be sure, who as Truth calls us to account. Others in our contemporary world, such as Simon Critchley, have argued that philosophy begins with disappointment but, perhaps, such a view can be redeemed and turned to wonder if we realize that our disappointments have entirely to do with our own nihilisms and the ways in which we close ourselves off from God and from one another. Advent, in that sense, should be a welcome wake-up call for our souls, for our churches, and even for our world.
We live in apocalyptic times, times of fears and anxieties about impending doom. There is the fear of nuclear holocaust as the result of decades of arrogant indifference to the ambitions of North Korea. There is the fear of catastrophic changes to the climate and the environment resulting in the deaths of millions through famine and flood. There are the on-going spectacles of genocide and war and the recurring acts of terrorism throughout our world and day. The doomsday preachers are the secularists; even the optimists among them can only naively advocate the notion that technology, especially AI, artificial intelligence, might save us even as, at the same time, they deny any reality to our humanity and to human personality. In Yuval Noah Harari’s view we are only organic algorithms. There is no you. That, too, is a feature of the secular apocalyptic in its essential nihilism. There is really only despair; a kind of emptiness. The night is more than far spent. It’s gone and we’re done for.
In complete contrast to these secular forms of Apocalypticism, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all life, human and natural, there is the long, long tradition of reflection on the last things, known as eschatology, in our religious traditions. Advent is apocalyptic.
