Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent
The Lord is at hand
Advent reaches a high note of expectancy just as the questions of the Advent season come to a kind of crescendo on this The Fourth Sunday in Advent. Both Epistle and Gospel open us out to the “bountiful grace and mercy” of God coming to us in the quiet waiting and watching of Advent.
“The Lord is at hand”, Paul proclaims in his Letter to the Philippians and there is in this a wonderful sense of joy. “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice.” God is the Lord and as God he is always at hand, always present, always near. Such is the truth of God. Such, we might say, is the simple “givenness of things”, as the novelist and modern reformed theologian, Marilynne Robinson, so wisely notes. The simple “givenness of things” is about the truth of God in whom all things have their being and their meaning. To be open to that realization is our joy which contrasts completely with the despairing nihilism which sees reality as something into which we are simply thrown, “the thrownness of being”, you might say. As if life and human experience were but an empty nothingness, altogether meaningless and without purpose or understanding. Such a view is utterly dogmatic and narrow. We need the questions of Advent to awaken us out of our various dogmatic slumbers, to awaken us to the divine gift of a world given for thought and delight.
The questions of Advent are more about us, about our understanding of God whose truth and majesty is eternal and as such is always with us. It is you and me who absent ourselves from the idea and the presence of God.
Advent prepares us for the radical Christian understanding of God being at hand, always near and always coming to us. That Christian understanding focuses primarily upon the coming of Christ and as such upon the meaning of God with us in the great defining term, “Emmanuel”, which means God with us. This morning we will sing the greatest of the Advent carols, the Veni Emmanuel, a 12th century medieval carol which enlarges in rich and wonderful scriptural terms the meaning of Christ as Emmanuel, God with us.
