Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
Behold, I send my messenger … which shall prepare thy way before thee
Advent is the season of penitential preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Repentance and rejoicing go hand in hand. Both these tonal qualities of spiritual life belong to the theme of preparation signalled so directly in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for this day and heralded so profoundly in the second Exhortation which you heard this morning. Advent celebrates the motion of God’s Word coming to us in judicio, in judgement, in mente, in mind, and, ultimately, in carne, in the flesh. That motion is all God towards us; all grace, we might say. The important point of Advent is that grace can never be taken for granted. It requires our attention, our loving attention upon the motions of God’s Word coming to usand being with us. It requires preparation on our part to receive that Word in its glory and truth. Only so is it grace to us.
The preparation is all grace, to be sure, but it concerns our mindfulness of that grace. That is the point of the Exhortation, so rarely read and heard. We are in Advent and yet always “in the mean season”, always in anticipation and expectation of things which remain to be more fully realized in us. As such we are bidden “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery”, the Sacrament of the Altar, “and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof.” Devout preparation. It belongs to “the ministers and stewards of [those] mysteries” to “prepare and make ready thy way”, the way of God, in all our hearts “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just”. Such is repentance. It is about our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away. It is simply about our complete surrender of ourselves to God’s will for our humanity. Thus the witness of John the Baptist about repentance is wonderfully complemented by witness of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose ‘yes’ to God belongs so completely to the mystery of the Incarnation.
Today’s Gospel calls our attention to the ministry of John the Baptist even as this week also reminds us of the Annunciation to Mary as an essential part of the Advent. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, is Mary’s mantra and the mantra of the Church universal in all times and seasons but especially in this season of the coming of God Incarnate, itself the crystallization of all of the motions of God’s Word coming to us. The preparation is about our mindfulness. It means, as the Exhortation suggests, a certain kind of self-examination, a matter of the inward spirit, a matter of conscience and soul-searching to the intent of the quieting of all our doubts and fears, of all our anxieties and worries, by recalling us to trust in God. The second Exhortationis very precise about what such examination means in terms of seeking reconciliation with one another as belonging to the “full purpose of amendment of life.”
