Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 3
“Art thou he that should come?”
“How shall this be?” Mary asks the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Advent, too, is all annunciation, we might say. “Art thou he that should come?” John the Baptist in prison asks Jesus by way of two of his disciples. Jesus in turn asks the multitudes with repeated intensity about John the Baptist, “what went ye out for to see?” The questions of Advent call us to account because they call us into the presence of God at once always present and yet always coming to us. The question the city asks in the Gospel for Advent 1, namely, “Who is this?”, is really the question about ’who is God?’ and ‘who is God with us?’
At issue is our awareness of God, the divine light enlightening the darkness of our minds again and again in the ways of our coming to God. The questions illuminate an important feature of our humanity. They signal the desire to know, the eros, the passionate desire to know, as Plato teaches. We are created to know ‘each in accord with the capacity of the beholder to behold’. Man desires and delights to praise God, Augustine teaches (“laudare te vult homo… ut laudare te delectet”). It belongs to our nature to know, Aristotle says. That in turn presupposes that there is something to be learned, something to be known. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our hearts are restless – inquietum – until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine, Confessions 1.1).
This goes a long way towards countering several different modern dilemmas about whether education is in any way possible. The question that John the Baptist has his disciples ask Jesus informs the wonderful and beautiful Matin Responsory of Palestrina, sometimes sung at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, quoting the Gospel directly, “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”
The great readings of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols are all prefaced by introductory phrases that give the service a clearly Christian context and meaning. The two readings from Genesis, the three readings from Isaiah, and the reading from Micah all locate certain themes in terms of their fulfillment in Christ signalled in the readings from Luke, Matthew, and John. The whole sequence forms a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the radical meaning of redemption in the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration, as it were, but all through a kind of meditation on the meaning of God with us, Emmanuel. But that idea of the Word made flesh coming to us through the pageant of the Word written and proclaimed belongs to a larger consideration about the nature of education and about our lives in faith. In other words, though the service is explicitly Christian, it is not exclusively so since it touches upon the logos-centric nature of God as Word, as intellectual-principle, as it were, summed up in the 9th Lesson from John’s Prologue, itself the great Gospel of Christmas.
