Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent
Link to the audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-communion for Advent 4
“And he confessed, I am not the Christ.”
There is a certain wonder, a sense of excitement and intensity, in the readings for The Fourth Sunday after Advent. “The Lord is at hand’, Paul tells us, near at hand. “I am not the Christ”, John tells us while pointing us to the one “who cometh after me” who is greater than me “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. The questions all seem to circle around the idea of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, upon whom the hopes of Israel all depend especially in the context of Roman oppression and persecution, but also taking on a more eschatological tone. Such things are seen through the lens of scriptural prophecy such as in Daniel and Ezra about the vindication of Israel by God. Yet the witness or record of John explicates those things through another register. “Behold the Lamb of God”, John says, upon seeing “Jesus coming unto him”, “which taketh away the sin of the world”, something more universal.
This ending phrase takes us back to the Gospel for The Sunday Next Before Advent, at least in our modern Canadian Prayer Book, where it is the opening or beginning phrase. We have come full circle. Yet that is the point of Advent and Christmas; it is all about our circling around and into the mystery of God and of the mystery of God with us. John’s witness is his confession of Christ as the expected Messiah albeit in a new and deeper register of meaning with the idea of sacrifice in the one who bears in himself all of the sins of our humanity and world. “Behold, the Lamb of God”, John says.
But what are we looking for? Advent is about the awakening to the desire for what is absolute, for God, without which all our other desires turn to conflict and animosity, to division and enmity. Nothing is more clear in the climate of endless division and self-certainty that defines our post-Christian secular culture. John is pointing us to something very different and yet universally significant. He identifies the one who comes as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Can we really delude ourselves about the sin of the world? Can we really imagine that the sin of the world is everybody else except us? In a way, this is our modern dualistic dilemma. We demonize the other in order to assert ourselves and in so doing deny God. What you have done unto the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me, Jesus says in Matthew’s Apocalyptic vision. This is the contradiction of our age. The autonomous self confronts every other autonomous self. To put it simply, we are not self-complete but interdependent and dependent upon God.
