Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

admin | 24 November 2024

“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

The traditional Gospel for this day, read for centuries upon centuries, and only changed in our modern Canadian Prayer Book, was the story of Christ feeding the multitude in the wilderness and “the gathering up of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”. That is explicitly about the wilderness as transformed into paradise. Yet in the Gospel reading as we have it, there are the signs of paradise too. “Behold the lamb of God”, John the Baptist says about Jesus Christ, the one “who takes away the sin of the world”, as our liturgy emphasizes. John’s disciples then follow after Jesus who in a wonderful image, “turned and saw them following”. There is, we might say, their turning and Jesus’s turning, the turning of God to us upon which all our turning ultimately depends. This is shown in Jesus’s question, “What seek ye?” What is it that belongs to the truth of human desire and human life, to our highest end, we might say?

The disciples of John reply with the question, “Master, where dwellest thou?” It is the desire for paradise, for our life in the goodness of God, the life from which in sin we have turned away and find ourselves in the wilderness. “Come and see”, Jesus says. Our coming and seeing is the condition of our abiding in the infinite love of God. The wilderness is not outside the Providence of God; in the journey of the year from Advent to Pentecost, we learn about the love of God in Christ’s work for our justification. To learn that is also our sanctification, our learning about our abiding in his love. As John puts it “he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him”. God is love and that idea becomes the foundational and formative principle for our journeying in the interim between wilderness and paradise. Paradise is always there; we can neither make it nor unmake it, as Fr. Crouse observes, for it is the fundamental reality of things, abiding in the word and will of God. It is we who have exiled ourselves from it. We are the wilderness but the wilderness as being transformed into paradise. “Come and see” is the invitation to learn about the radical truth of our abiding in the love of God. As invitation, it affirms our liberty which belongs to God’s goodness in our creation. This too is fundamental to the project of conversion.

“One of the two who heard John speak” about Jesus as the Lamb of God was Andrew. His feast day is November 30th; in a way he marks the transition from endings to beginnings. He finds his brother Simon and tells him that “we have found the Messiah”, meaning the Christ, the anointed one of God and the hope of Israel. One thing leads to another, to finding Philip and Nathaniel, the calling together of the beginning of the Apostolic band. Philip will tell Nathaniel that “we have found him whom Moses in the law and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Wonderful and yet not a full or complete statement about who Jesus is, at least in the Christian understanding and as already indicated in John’s Prologue. But here following the Prologue about Christ as “the Word made flesh” and as the exegete of God himself who makes God known, “very God of very God”, as we say in the Creed, is the beginning of a journey in the wilderness to learn more fully who Jesus is, true God and true Man.

Advent is all about that turning of God to us in Jesus which is the redemption and perfection of our desires for what is ultimate and true. It is found in the paradise of God not just as beginning but as our end. It means our turning, too, in the constant conversion of our souls, that constant circling around and into the mystery of God. Such is the quest for paradise signaled in the question of the disciples: