Category: Sermons

“The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious”

Ready yet? Or are you still running madly about in circles in the mindless busyness that so often and so easily overtakes us? Perhaps we need this Sunday in Advent just like we need Advent more than we realise in order for Christmas to have any real meaning. “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is the Advent mantra. It comes to further expression today in the notes of expectancy and joy, of wonder and peace signalled in the readings. “The Lord is at hand,” Paul says in Philippians with a sense of rejoicing, a “rejoic[ing] in the Lord alway”, he says.

And in the gospel reading from St. John, too, we seem to be going in circles, indeed to have come full circle. The passage this morning ends where the gospel reading for The Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist says, pointing us to Jesus. There, on The Sunday Next Before Advent, it serves as a kind of transition between the ending of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent. Here on The Fourth Sunday in Advent it signals the meaning of the one whose coming we await, the one who is at hand always.

We are going in circles just not mindlessly but mindfully, I hope. At least that is the purpose of the Church’s proclamation in Advent. Perhaps it is only now in an increasingly post-Christian and post-secular world that we can begin to enter more fully and more mindfully into the mystery of God with us now and always without the social veneer and cultural patina so often mistaken for the real thing. Perhaps we can begin to see how the Christian Faith simply intensifies the great religious mystery of our being with God that belongs to philosophical religion more generally and which allows for a principled discourse with other religions and even our post-secular culture, particularly in its multicultural confusions.

Our advent wreath is about a circle of light. It challenges the rather linear nature of our thinking and our doing, as if time were all and everything, itself a kind of mindlessness in the endless parade of the contingent and the random. It reminds us instead of how our lives are embraced in the eternity of God and that time has no meaning apart from its being gathered into the fullness of God’s truth and light, into the eternal present of God.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

Jesus asks with threefold intensity, “what went ye out for to see?” He is speaking about John the Baptist, one of the outstanding figures of the landscape of Advent. About him Jesus says he is “more than a prophet.” He is the one sent “to prepare the way of the Lord.” Advent is all about the preparations for Christ’s coming.

Yet what a strange and a beguiling figure John the Baptist is! Angels and bells, culturally and certainly biblically, often signal messages and warnings. We had occasion this week past to bury Bert Galley, the long-standing and faithful bell-ringer of Christ Church for so many, many years. Yet, angels and bells, as it were, are here wrapped in “camel’s hair with a girdle of leather about his waist and eating locusts and wild honey”. For such is the rather forbidding picture which we are given of John the Baptist, the great prophet of the Advent of Christ. He is vox clamatis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, even more a voice crying from prison, “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Somehow the Advent message of John the Baptist has a powerful and poignant intensity at the point where he is questioning his own life and ministry.

What is that life and ministry? He came, as Mark tells us, “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” He came, as John tells us, teaching that “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” His whole ministry is a ministry of deference: “he must increase, but I must decrease”, he says about Christ and himself. He is not the Christ. He is not the forgiveness of sins. But he is the essential preparation for the coming of Christ whom he identifies to us as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” We are, it seems, totally caught up in the motions and the mystery of God coming to us, in part through the ministry of John the Baptist.

He is the counter to the soft indulgence and easy complacency of our world and day, a world defined by material comforts and sensual pleasures or at least a desire for such things. A figure of ascetic rigour, he is defined by a fierce and uncompromising commitment to the things of the spirit, a figure of the desert who challenges us about the meaning and direction of our human lives. What do we live for? For our creaturely comforts? Or for the righteousness of God which perfects and gives meaning to our human lives? There is little that is comforting, perhaps, about John the Baptist in our modern sense of comfort. There is everything that is strengthening for us, perhaps, in his message; the older sense of comfort as strengthening us in the things that really matter.

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“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”

‘Why we need hell?’ might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us nor to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, Hell is about getting exactly what you want, only as it truly is, which is not the same thing as what we think we want. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” and have not repented.

But the Word which comes to us is, inescapably and necessarily, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word convicting and convincing our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, invariably, found wanting. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” All our motives are tainted by self-love. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitation, something more is opened out to us. We seek something more. And so does God.

That something more is conveyed wondrously in the pageant of Scripture. Advent reminds us of the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming is threefold: a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, future and yet ever present, because it is now and always; and, a coming in mente, in our minds to shape and order our desires. And these three ‘comings’ are all comings of God in and through his Word.

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“Their sound went out into all the earth,/and their words unto
the end of the world.”

Andrew is the Advent saint. His feast day either immediately anticipates Advent or it falls within the first week of Advent, indeed immediately after the First Sunday in Advent. In either case,this feast inaugurates the cycle of the Church’s commemoration of the Saints throughout the course of the year. There is always, it seems to me, something rich and significant about beginnings.

Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland and, therefore, of New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as well, perhaps in both cases because of the connection to the sea. Yet, Scotland is a long ways from the land of the New Testament, a long ways from the setting of the story of the calling of the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, and the brothers Zebedee, James and John, a long ways from the sea of Galilee. How much further away is Nova Scotia. This reminds us of the missionary impulse of the Christian faith. This doesn’t mean that Andrew ever laid eyes on either Scotland or New Scotland!

Yet, the spiritual point is clear. Those who follow Jesus become the ones who proclaim Jesus and make him known even “unto the ends of the world.” For much of the first millennium or more, Scotland must often to have seemed to be the very end of the world. Perhaps, too, the same might be said even now of Nova Scotia. And yet, the word has gone forth on the wings of the saints and has been carried forward by their witness to Jesus Christ. Critical to that witness, as the readings on this feast day reminds us, is the Scripture. The Feast of Andrew belongs to that pageant of Word and Song which is part and parcel of the Advent of Christ.

The epistle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a kind of mini-treatise on what we might call ‘the theology of revelation’. It focuses on the significance of the Scriptures and upon preaching. The primary form of preaching is simply the proclamation of the Scriptures. Those that follow become those that are sent and those who are sent preach the good news of our salvation in Jesus Christ. There is an important emphasis upon the hearing of the Word of God through the preaching, meaning the proclamation of God’s word.

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“We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth.”

We beheld. Yet we can only behold what we are given to see. What we are given to see is something made. It is not the Word, but “the Word made flesh”. The shepherds say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened, this Word that is made. God is the poet of Christmas. In Greek, poet means maker.

But the poet not only makes, he also makes known. We can only see “this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us”. We can only see in the light of God himself. Where God is, there his light is also.

By the light of God we are caught up into a greater understanding. We are born anew “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; born from above into the company of the one whom we behold from above. His light perfects our light.

For by our own lights, we see but do not see. Our light is darkness. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Our seeing is without a beholding, without an embracing in faith and understanding what we are given to see. There is no receiving. But by this greater light – the light which accompanies the Word, the light of God as illuminating grace – our light is taken up into something more. We are received into what we receive. “We beheld his glory.” The greater light is the light of grace, the grace to behold what “the lord hath made known unto us”, “the Word made flesh”. The Word who wills to be made also wills to be made known.

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“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”

It is the great question of the Advent season, itself the great season of questions. It complements another great question, itself a biblical question, too, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?” These questions recall us to God’s great question to us, to Adam in the Garden after the Fall, “Where are you?” with the implied question, ‘and what have you done?’ Somehow the questions about God and man ultimately meet in questions about Jesus.

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This is the refrain or mantra, we might say, of the Advent season – the season of God’s coming to us. What does it mean that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Jesus takes up this refrain from John the Baptist and makes it his own. In him it has its fullest meaning. But what is that meaning?

For centuries upon centuries upon centuries, the great gospel story for this day has been the triumphal entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem. He comes as a king. His coming is greeted with eager enthusiasm and joyous expectation, it seems. He is hailed as king.

But is this not the gospel of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to the dark pain and agony of Good Friday, the somber silence of Holy Saturday, and then, only then, the paradoxical and overwhelming joy of Easter? To be sure. But “Christmas and Easter are but the evening and the morning of one and the self-same day” as the poet and preacher John Donne puts it. There is an inescapable connection between these two primary centers of Christian contemplation. Like an ellipse, our faith oscillates between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each are implicated in the other. Neither makes any sense without the other.

We know, of course, the further irony of this triumphal entry of a king to his city. The cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to the cries of “Crucify, Crucify!” And only so can we really begin to learn what it means for the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. “My kingdom”, Jesus will say, “is not of this world”. But that is precisely what we so often want to make it. That is precisely our darkness which the Light of Christ coming to us overcomes.

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“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”

What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even The Book, though it was not always a book exactly. Formerly, there were scrolls of parchment as the Bible itself shows us. Jesus, for example, takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads from it and proclaims the fulfillment of what he reads. But, at any rate, it has become a book, that is to say something enclosed between two covers. It is, moreover, a library of books, a book containing within itself a great number of books, a wide variety of literature, things written at different times and in different places. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now?

Because it speaks not only to particular cultures but beyond them. Something of the answer to the question ‘what is the Bible?’ is captured in this characteristic. What we call ‘the Bible’ bears witness to this phenomenon of speaking beyond the particular context and circumstance for which or about which a particular text was originally written. It also bears witness to the writing down in one context of what is remembered from another context. For example, the people of Israel wrote down and put together while in exile in Babylon what was remembered of God’s Word to them at the time of the Exodus from Egypt.

Somehow what is remembered and written down is received as being altogether definitive, as defining the fundamental identity of Israel in quite different political and cultural circumstances. Somehow what is written down cannot be constrained to just one context. It reaches beyond.

The point is captured best, perhaps, by St. Paul’s marvelous summary phrase: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” The Bible in all its varied literary array, is inescapably what is written. Hence, it is ‘Scripture’ – what is written. And yet what is written is simply what is remembered as Revelation. The Bible is the witness of God’s Revelation.

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