Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent
“All the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”
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.”
