“My words shall not pass away.”
Here are words “written for our learning” but only through our sitting and listening. Here are words “written for our learning” about hope and comfort in times of darkness, danger, and despair. Here are words audible and written, yes, but also words made visible. “He hath instituted and ordained holy mysteries, as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death, to our great and endless comfort,” as the Exhortation so rarely heard so wonderfully puts it (BCP, pp. 88-89). Words written for our learning.
The Exhortation speaks to the character of this Sunday which is sometimes known as Bible Sunday because of the Collect composed by Cranmer. It calls attention to the reason and purpose of the Scriptures. The Sacraments, too, belong to that understanding of the purposes of God for our humanity. If you read the Proper Preface used for Passiontide, for Passion Sunday right through to Maundy Thursday (BCP, p. 80), you will find that the Exhortation draws directly upon it. We give thanks “for the redemption of the world by the death and passion of our Saviour Christ, both God and Man; who did humble himself, even to the death upon the Cross, for us sinners, who lay in darkness and the shadow of death; that he might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life.” The Exhortation adds only one word, miserable, “miserable sinners.” Sinners in misery because sin is misery.
Yet here is our comfort: “the patience and comfort of thy holy Word,” and the “great and endless comfort” of “the holy mysteries,” the Sacraments which “he hath instituted and ordained as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death, to our great and endless comfort.” Word and Sacrament conveying hope and comfort.
The two Exhortations appended to the Communion service underscore an important reformation ideal. Both Cranmer and Calvin sought to increase the frequency of Communion and especially the reception of the Sacrament over and against the practice of Mass in the late Medieval world largely as a spectator event: seeing the host elevated, even through a squint (literally a hole in the wall!), but receiving the Sacrament very infrequently. The insight of the reformers was essentially a Scriptural insight into the purpose of the Sacraments as revealed in the witness of the Scriptures: “Take eat … Drink ye all, of this … in remembrance of me.” Such is “the memorial which he hath commanded,” (BCP, p. 83). It is about taking seriously the things which have been written. It is about words “hear[d], read, mark[ed], learn[ed], and inwardly digest[ed]” as Cranmer so famously and memorably puts it. Such words are the clarion call and challenge to the recovery of deep reading over and against the superficiality of our digital compulsions, the ephemerality of flickering images.
This morning’s Epistle and Gospel complement one another. That may strike you as rather strange. What comfort and hope is there in the thundering words of the Gospel about “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars, and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity”? Sounds too much like the evening news or fake news, alt news, whatever, of our modern discontents and unease! “The sea and the waves roaring,” oh no, another climate change disaster story! “Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth,”more negativity and anxiety! Where is the good in that? What comfort? What hope?
“For the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” Now there is a reason to pause and think. It implies a connection between our earthly lives and heaven. The idea that heaven itself is troubled and shaken by the things on earth that trouble us and make us fearful is itself troubling and yet terribly instructive about how we read the Scriptures.
It is really only a way of speaking to make us more thoughtful, more attentive, a way of speaking that recalls us to Creation and Providence. What happens in our lives does matter and has altogether to do with God and our lives with God. That is the real point and the real comfort and the real hope for the whole world, for Jew and Gentile alike, as Paul states. Our comfort and our hope are found in “the God of hope” who comes to us out of the pageant of the Hebrew Scriptures, out of the “things [which] were written aforetime,” as Paul suggests, to teach us things for our good. The “things written aforetime [which] were written for our learning” will come to include Paul’s own words as well. The Scriptures, ultimately, are the words of the one whose “words shall not pass away” even as “heaven and earth shall pass away” because God’s Word written and proclaimed, God’s Word celebrated and received, is eternal. It is really all about God’s engagement with us and with our world. We are being recalled to God and to the world in God. That is the good news and the hope of the Gospel. It is conveyed to us through things “written for our learning” about what is everlasting.
In a way, this Sunday presents a strong counter argument to the forms of anti-religious anti-intellectualism in our culture and church. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are inescapably and necessarily logocentric, word-centered. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism are also religions that place a high value on the wisdom of sacred texts. So, too, the great philosophical traditions are shaped by intertextual dialogue and discourse about high matters of mind and spirit. On the other hand, the forms of secular humanism regnant in our world and day are morally and ethically bankrupt precisely through the turn towards the legal and the material, including “a denial of human evil”, points which Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard Address made very clearly. “We turned our backs on the Spirit,” he notes in his critique of the West, and are experiencing “the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness” in which we deprive ourselves of “our most precious possession – our spiritual life.” He argues that “hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century,” seen most notably in the Press. Advent is a wake-up call to who we are in the sight of God and to the necessity of deep reading; in short, to contemplation.
As such it means hearing these thundering words of judgement about the darkness and the fears that inhabit a world in which we are left to ourselves and to the narrowness of our material pursuits, a world in which we cling to things which by their very nature “pass away” and ignore the words of Christ that “shall not pass away.” It means contemplation, that truest form of leisure, that active attention to the things of God which can only come to us. We can’t make them; we can only attend to them. Advent is our waiting and watching upon the words of God coming to us “in clouds descending” as one of our hymns puts it.
That is Paul’s point about things “written for our learning,” things given for us to think. Such is the wonderous pageant of Advent. “We ought, so far as in us lies,” Aristotle says, “to put on immortality, and do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is in us.” Such is the activity of contemplation to which our liturgy constantly calls us. Did we not hear last week to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”? To do so is to attend to something divine within us which is given by God to us. That will be to discover our true self, our true individuality. “The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect, since the intellect is in the fullest sense the man” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10. vii). In short, it concerns the whole of our humanity, the fullest sense of ourselves.
We are bidden to attend to the things “written for our learning,” the words of Christ which “shall not pass away.” Such things are constantly before us. Our liturgy is about the eternal presence of God in the midst of the changing, passing affairs of the world. Such is the Word made flesh given to nourish and feed us in the holy mysteries of Word and Sacrament. Here is light and grace for all of us “miserable sinners who lay in darkness and the shadow of death.” Here is everlasting life for which “we are most bounden” to give him “continual thanks.” Such is our hope and comfort.
“My words shall not pass away.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 2, 2018