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Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

For centuries upon centuries the Gospel read on this Sunday, known by the intriguing name of The Sunday Next Before Advent, was from ‘the Bread of Life discourse’ in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is the Johannine account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness with its distinctive sacramental emphasis. It is familiar to you as the Gospel read on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. In 1959, the revisors of the Canadian Prayer Book changed the reading to what you heard this morning about the disciples of John coming to Jesus and Jesus turning to them and asking them, “what do you seek?” and inviting them to “come and see” and to “follow”.

Both are wonderful readings for this transitional Sunday in the ordered pattern of the Church year. We have come to an end and so to a beginning, a beginning again of the long pageant of redemption in the story of Christ’s Advent and its unfolding through the Incarnation, the Epiphany, his Passion and Death, Resurrection and Ascension, the sending of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, and the culmination of that whole story in the Feast of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. In a way, it is nothing less than running through the Creed, through what we might call the substantial and doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. That in turn becomes the basis for the second half of the Church Year by way of the Trinity season which concerns how the Creed runs through us and incorporates us more fully into the life of God revealed in Christ. In short, there are two movements: one, the motion of justifying grace in the story of Christ’s life, the other, the motions of sanctifying grace in us. This Sunday marks the juxtaposition of both moments.

There is another movement as well in the festivals of the Saints which are about the glorifying righteousness of God realised in the lives of the Saints. They are those who in one way or another have lost their wills and found them again in Christ; his grace is the perfection of their humanity. That pageant of glorifying grace punctuates the other two movements and reaches its climax in the great November feast of All Saints’. Like the harvest, it is about a gathering together of all things into unity, a unity in which we find the real truth and dignity of the diversity of our humanity and of creation itself.

Our Gospel reading this morning points us more towards Advent, towards the beginning again of the pageant of justifying grace and righteousness in the invitation to “come and see,” to “find the Messiah” and to “follow him”. That seeks or intends a change in us, a transformation into what we see in Christ, as suggested in the renaming of Simon, son of John, as “Cephas” meaning “a stone”; that is to say, Peter.

Occasionally in the readings for the Holy Eucharist, a lesson takes the place of an epistle reading. Today’s lesson is the only time that a passage from the prophet Jeremiah is read. It focuses on the theme of the justifying righteousness of God by way of reference to the pageant of redemption in the Hebrew Scriptures, first, in terms of the Exodus, bringing up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; and, secondly, in terms of the return from the later exile in Babylon. That in turn locates the Christian story of Christ as “The Lord our Righteousness” who goes into the greater wilderness of human sin and evil to deliver us and to gather us to the truth of ourselves as found in God.

The power of this Gospel story rests in the dialectic of question and answer. It speaks to our seeking to know and be known in the love of God. Such is Advent, the season not so much of answers as questions that open us out to grace and to our recognition of the need for grace because of the darkness of sin and evil in us and our world. The older Gospel story, on the other hand, looks back to the pageant of sanctifying grace in us and bids us consider what we have learned, if anything, about ourselves as transformed by grace. It is about the gathering up of the fragments of our broken lives into something more whole and complete and which provides sustenance for us in the journey of our souls to God. You may recall that twelve baskets are filled from the fragments of the five barley-loaves; one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, on the one hand, and for each of the twelve apostles of the Church, on the other hand. In short, what is gathered up sustains the Church in pilgrimage down throughout the ages and belongs to the pageant of our being gathered into the grace of God which justifies, sanctifies and glorifies our humanity.

The introit and gradual psalm for today is Psalm 85 in its entirety. It wonderfully complements these readings, both the lesson from Jeremiah and either Gospel story. The introit highlights our desire for God’s turning towards us both “let[ting] thine anger cease from us” and that we may be “quickened” and “rejoice in thee”. The gradual part of the Psalm emphasizes the theme of righteousness understood as the meeting together of “mercy and truth”, of “righteousness and peace”, and the union of heaven and earth. Thus, it teaches us about what we seek and desire as what is ultimately found in God, the Lord who “shall give what is good”.

These are, I think, important spiritual lessons. What have we gathered or learned in the long pageant of the Trinity season? Perhaps, just perhaps, we have begun to realise just how counter-culture the Christian faith is because it speaks so directly to us as spiritual creatures, firmly insisting on the totality of our being as soul and body, and upholding the essential goodness of creation at once material and spiritual. It is about our being freed to God and to creation as good and holy.

The intellectual gathering that belongs to the pageant of the church year in its three complementary movements is expressed most wonderfully in our text. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”. This is more than T.S. Eliot’s rather plaintive cry at the end of The Waste Land: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” and yet complements final words of his poem, words which mark the formal end of the Upanishads of Hindu spirituality, “shantih shantih shantih”. As Eliot notes, those words are equivalent to “the Peace which passeth understanding” in Christian thought. In other words, instead of division and separation there is a deeper union, a gathering together of all the broken fragments of human lives into the wholeness that is found in Christ and our lives in Christ.

The pageant of the Trinity season has been about that gathering and now in Advent God turns to us and turns us to him in the movement of his grace recalling us to light and life. This, too, is all part of the gathering of our humanity to its truth in God. We can only give thanks for the graces of the year past and for the beginning again of another year of grace, praying for its increase in us. For such is the peace of our souls in the face of division and persecution, the very things that the pageant of Advent highlights. God’s Word and Son comes as light and life to our darkness. We are gathered as always to Christ.

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

Fr. David Curry
The Sunday Next Before Advent, 2022