Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 2
“My words shall not pass away”
Today’s strong and rather disturbing words seem to complement the apocalyptic nature of our current times. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring”. They seem to speak to our fears and worries, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, to our anxieties on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. How, we might ask, is this comforting? How is this good news if even “the powers of heaven shall be shaken”? Such things must surely unsettle us. They seem to convey the opposite of hyggelig, the Danish word for coziness and material comfort, the cuddle and huddle of the sentimental and the sensual that seems to define our age.
There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present. Yet these disturbing warnings about judgement are intended to provide us with patience and comfort and, even more, with hope. Such is the burden of Cranmer’s Collect which derives from the Epistle and from Jesus’s claim in the Gospel that “my words shall not pass away”.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logos-centric. They are all quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions which place a high value on the Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Quran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture means that which is written. What is revealed is for thought, for serious philosophical reflection.
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime”, St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” He is referring to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and not what will come to be the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, the greatest number of which will paradoxically come from him. He states an important principle about revealed religion. It is something written down for our learning. This grants a priority to reading, especially reading out loud such as in our liturgy because God, as Cranmer puts it, “has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning”.
