by CCW | 3 December 2023 10:00
Advent is the season of questions, questions that awaken us to the radical meaning of God’s Word coming to us in law and prophecy, in mind and in flesh. Without the questions of Advent, Christmas is only tinsel and wrap that conceal the illusions of our hearts and leave us in the darkness, desolate and in despair. The great questions of Advent illuminate the Word of God as the Light which overcomes the darkness of disillusion and despair.
The questions are at once our questions in all of their confusion and uncertainty and the questions of God that redeem our desires. Our questions are really about the deeper desires of our hearts and minds for wholeness, for what is absolute and true, however misguided we may be in what we think we want. God’s questions belong to the redemption of our desires; in short, to the redemption of our humanity. But how? By confronting us with the wilderness and the darkness of our hearts and world.
The great Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent is about Christ’s coming to Jerusalem in triumph but also in judgement. The triumphal entry of Christ, in images that fulfill the prophetic expectation of the Messiah, is full of the sense of joy and delight in the one who comes. HIs royal procession is greeted with branches of palms strewn in the way and with the exultant cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.” We know this from Palm Sunday. There is the sense of joyous expectancy, of hope, that speaks directly and clearly to the world of darkness and uncertainty both then and now; to our world, to be sure. It is a moving spectacle. “All the city was moved,” Matthew tells us, “saying, Who is this?” At once named as the Son of David, referring to the Messiah and to the hopes for justice and peace, and yet unknown, it seems. The first question of Advent is about our unknowing, about the darkness of our minds and hearts. We know and do not know in equal measure.
And so we must begin again to attend to the radical pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness. We “know in part,” as Paul puts it, “in a glass darkly,” but we long to know and to be known more fully, more completely. That can only happen by confronting the darkness. We learn from the darkness about the light which is greater than all the forms of suffering and evil that belong to the darkness of the world and our hearts. Without that we can really make no sense of the one who comes and who will be called Emmanuel, which by interpretation, as Matthew tells us, is “God with us.”
It was the wisdom of Thomas Cranmer, the chief architect of the Book of Common Prayer in the sixteenth century, to add to the classical reading from Matthew on the First Sunday in Advent the story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple which immediately follows his entry into Jerusalem. For it points us to the reason of Advent. He comes to redeem us from the follies and preoccupations of ourselves that result in the misuse and abuse of the things of God and of one another. The sacred is profaned and made the place of our worldly interests. To use the things of God as the means to our own ends is to act as if we were God. We put ourselves in the place of God and pervert what is holy and good for other ends.
“My house,” Jesus says in strong words accompanied by strong actions, “shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” It is a telling indictment and a strong judgement upon us that serves to awaken us to the vision of God. Our churches are not bureaucratic entities that serve the agendas of our day; they are to be the places of our seeking and desiring the City of God. We “have here no continuing city” but seek “a better country, that is an heavenly,” as Hebrews reminds us. Advent awakens us to the true nature of our seeking; our desire for God in his goodness and mercy. There is at once our desiring but there is the divine mercy that redeems our desires by gathering us into God’s light and truth.
Our desires by themselves are incomplete if not utterly destructive. At best they are about partial goods that ultimately find their meaning in God. The truth of our seeking to know and love is about wanting to know the reasons and causes of things for that is an essential aspect of our humanity, hence the genuine importance of this first Advent question, “Who is this?” But even more it is about the truth of God in which and by which we alone can know the truth of all things. In other words, our desires, our seeking, our prayers, however incomplete, ultimately belong and participate in God. Advent would draw our prayers more fully into the light of God’s grace and mercy. Here already is the light which enlightens us, the light which names our darkness and as such overcomes it. God makes a way for us to him even through the darkness of our hearts and world.
It is in this sense that Paul says that “love is the fulfilling of the Law.” The fulfilling of the Law, not the negation of the Law. So, too, in Christ’s cleansing of the Temple. What seems to be the anger or the wrath of Jesus is really the deep love of God for his righteousness and justice. It is an image of redemption in the restoration of the Temple and, by extension, the restoration of all creation to its proper purpose and place as God-created.
Christ’s coming to Jerusalem as King, yet humble and “meek… sitting upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass”, images that look back to the prophet Isaiah (62.11) and especially to Zechariah (9.9), belongs to the redemption that we seek even in our unknowing. The pageant of Advent signals the redemption of our desires through the one who comes, the one in whom our desires find their truth and meaning. Just as last Sunday we prayed for God to stir up our hearts so today we pray for God to “give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness” even as Christ “casts out all them that sold and bought in the temple.” For only so can we “put upon us the armour of light, now in this mortal life.” It can only happen through the motions of God’s Word coming as light in the one who redeems our desires, the one who comes in great humility. Our hearts are to be moved and turned to God by God’s turning to us. Such are the deeper motions of divine love that belong to the Advent of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/12/03/sermon-for-the-first-sunday-in-advent-14/
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