Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

admin | 29 November 2020

Link to the audio file for the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the First Sunday in Advent

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light”

“The real desire of our soul is for what is greater than herself,” the pagan philosopher, Plotinus tells us. Augustine, in a similar vein, begins his Confessions with the observation that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee”. Confession is really about conversion, our turning to God, our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away.

Advent is our awakening to the Word and truth of God at once ever present and yet always coming to us. It is the awakening to what is always prior and always greater than us. Such an awakening is the movement of God coming to us and our coming to God. This twofold movement is really one. We can only turn to God because of God’s turning to us. Such is the awakening to what is greater than ourselves.

Advent awakens us to hope even in the face of darkness and despair, of hope against hope, we might say. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” begins T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, the day which marks the beginning of the penitential season of Lent. It explores from the side of the negative the necessity of our being turned illustrated from the side of the positive in the gradual psalm for today. “Turn us, O God our Saviour,/ and let thine anger cease from us” and with greater intensity, “wilt thou not turn again and quicken us,/ that thy people may rejoice?” The psalm complements both the Epistle and the Gospel. God’s turning to us means both a casting off and a casting out, casting off “the works of darkness” and casting out of “all them that sold and bought in the temple,” a misuse of the things of God. The casting off and casting out reveal what is prior and positive, the nature of the Good that is God which ignorance and sin deny.

God’s Word is light and freedom. This is shown in the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle recalls us to the pageant of God’s Word as Law which enlightens and frees just as Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem marks the beginning of the pageant of human redemption in his Passion. There is an awakening to the desire of our souls in the question “Who is this?” at the same time as there is the awakening to the awareness of our misuse of the things of God. We are being called to account but this is our freedom and real dignity.

The Advent season is really a great pageant of questions awakening us to the real desire of our souls for what is greater than ourselves. That means the purgation of our souls, a cleansing of what is false and incomplete in order to embark upon the clarification of our desires for what is good and absolute. In the light of God’s Word coming in Law and in judgement, we are being freed from “the devices and desires of our own hearts”. Such is the casting off and the casting out which utterly depends upon what is prior and absolute, namely, God’s Word as truth ever present and yet always coming to us.

Advent awakens us to the desire for what is most truly to be desired. As such it signals the redemption of desire. Eliot’s poem hints at this. “Because I do not hope to turn/ desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” This references Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29 (When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes) which also deals with despair and desire and the awakening to what is most to be desired and sought. We are in despair if we are constantly “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,” as Shakespeare puts it. Eliot changed art to gift, emphasising, I think, the idea of God’s grace as the active principle at work in human lives. In comparing ourselves to one another we despair of God’s grace for us and for one another. Love does no harm. We have forgotten what the sonnet bids us to recall as the antidote to our despair and disgrace, namely, “thy sweet love remembered.” Some will protest that the sonnet is simply a romantic love poem but that overlooks the deeper traditions of amor that remind us that God’s love is the true basis of all love.

Love, Paul tells us, is the fulfilling of the Law. God’s Word as Law is light and freedom as the Ten Commandments remind us. We neglect them at our peril. They are the universal moral code for our humanity and have their echoes and counterparts in the ethical teachings of the philosophies and religions of the world. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” it begins, recalling the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush. The commandments are about our liberation from slavery, at once external and internal, as the comprehensive and complete nature of the commandments show us.

Because God is God, there is no other God, no other principle. God is absolute. Because God is God, God is not to be confused with any of the things of the created world. The ontological line between Creator and created is absolute. God is beyond our imagining. The proscription against images counters our attempts to make God in our image and thinking which betrays the truth of our being made in the image of God. Because God is God, God reveals himself as “I am who I am”, his holy name which is not to be taken in vain. As Hegel notes, it is “God’s nature to reveal himself, to be manifest”. Those who take the idea of God seriously he says, like Plato and Aristotle, know that “God is not jealous to the point of not communicating himself” since he loses nothing of himself in making himself known. Hegel reminds us that the ancient Athenians regarded it as a capital crime for someone not to share the light of their lamp. Light shared is not light diminished. It is a nice analogy. God is neither more nor less of himself in making himself known to us. To take his name in vain means collapsing God into our agendas and purposes. Such is the nature of the profane over and against the sacred. Profanum literally refers to that which is outside the temple, the holy place, to the idea of the desecration and denial of the holy, thus of God himself and of all that belongs to our worship of God. Christ cleanses the temple from its profane misuse.

Because God is God, “thou shalt remember the Sabbath”. This explicitly recalls us to the mystery and wonder of creation as God’s world which exists for God and in God. This and the next commandment about honouring father and mother contradict the common misconception of the commandments as being negative. These commandments bring out the inherently positive nature of the Ten Commandments. To remember the Sabbath recalls us to our being within the created order and to God’s purpose and will for creation and to his delight in that which he has made. To remember the Sabbath is about our delight, too, in what God has made and thus requires us to honour his creation in our use of it, not our misuse.

Because God is God, “thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother”. This recalls us to our natural derivations, our natural origins over which we have no control. We are all in one way or another children of a mother and a father regardless of how we might feel about our parents. Our freedom lies in simply honouring the fact of our origins. This goes a long way towards freeing us from the psychological prisons of our resentments, hatreds and animosities that so often bedevil families.

Because God is God, “thou shalt do no murder”. God is the author of all life. As with all of the commandments, we are called to account by way of the forms of self-contradiction. This commandment underscores the principle that is at work in the story of Cain and Abel, the first murder. “Where is your brother?” God asks Cain, who replies with the lie, “I do not know”, and then with the rhetorical challenge, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God replies, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” We are one with another and have no right to claim the life of another for in so doing we deny our own being and the nature of our mutual obligations towards one another.

Because God is God, “thou shalt not commit adultery”. We are sexual beings, to be sure, but sexuality too belongs to our relationship with God and with one another. Marriage is the basis of the family and is to be honoured and respected. It is true that one of the early English versions of the Bible was published with an alarming misprint, omitting the negative, thus reading: “Thou shalt commit adultery”! The adulterer’s bible, as it came to be known, certainly has its attraction for some, perhaps as more than just a collector’s item.

Because God is God, “thou shalt not steal”. Theft is a violation of what belongs to another and as such it is a violation of the person. Jesus in cleansing the temple says that the money-changers and those that bought and sold therein have made it “a den of thieves”, suggesting that something is being wrongly taken away from the proper use of the Temple as a house of prayer, the idea of stealing from God, as it were. Because God is God, “thou shalt not bear false witness”. A lie has no power apart from the truth upon which it utterly depends. We have tongues in our heads to speak the truth not lies.

Because God is God, “thou shalt not covet”, either things or people. This last commandment brings us full circle for this is something inward and invisible. It is about our very hearts and our desires. To covet is to want for oneself what another has and at the expense of them not having it. It is a betrayal of our true desire for God upon which all other desires in their truth depend. Because God is God, “thou shalt have none other gods but me”.

Such is the pageant of God’s Word as Law coming to us. It awakens us to the love of the Law for such is the love of the absolute Good. God’s Word as Law enlightens us and frees us towards the soul’s real desire for what is greater than herself just as Christ’s cleansing of the Temple is the necessary condition for our abiding in the truth of that which is greater than ourselves. The casting off and the putting on are really one and the same motion, the motion of God coming to us and our coming to God.