Christ Church

The Lord is at hand

Advent reaches a high note of expectancy just as the questions of the Advent season come to a kind of crescendo on this The Fourth Sunday in Advent. Both Epistle and Gospel open us out to the “bountiful grace and mercy” of God coming to us in the quiet waiting and watching of Advent.

“The Lord is at hand”, Paul proclaims in his Letter to the Philippians and there is in this a wonderful sense of joy. “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice.” God is the Lord and as God he is always at hand, always present, always near. Such is the truth of God. Such, we might say, is the simple “givenness of things”, as the novelist and modern reformed theologian, Marilynne Robinson, so wisely notes. The simple “givenness of things” is about the truth of God in whom all things have their being and their meaning. To be open to that realization is our joy which contrasts completely with the despairing nihilism which sees reality as something into which we are simply thrown, “the thrownness of being”, you might say. As if life and human experience were but an empty nothingness, altogether meaningless and without purpose or understanding. Such a view is utterly dogmatic and narrow. We need the questions of Advent to awaken us out of our various dogmatic slumbers, to awaken us to the divine gift of a world given for thought and delight.

The questions of Advent are more about us, about our understanding of God whose truth and majesty is eternal and as such is always with us. It is you and me who absent ourselves from the idea and the presence of God.

Advent prepares us for the radical Christian understanding of God being at hand, always near and always coming to us. That Christian understanding focuses primarily upon the coming of Christ and as such upon the meaning of God with us in the great defining term, “Emmanuel”, which means God with us. This morning we will sing the greatest of the Advent carols, the Veni Emmanuel, a 12th century medieval carol which enlarges in rich and wonderful scriptural terms the meaning of Christ as Emmanuel, God with us.

(more…)

Print this entry

My Lord, and my God

‘From darkness and doubt, Good Lord, deliver us.’ It could be a paraphrase of the Litany. We have heard, too, in the Exhortations to Communion about confession, even private confession, as belonging to our coming to Communion, “with a full trust in God’s mercy, and with a quiet conscience,” including “the avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness” (BCP, p. 91). There is a wonderful paradox that we commemorate Thomas, the one who is known as ‘doubting Thomas’  for through his doubt, our faith is confirmed all the more.

In the time of the longest night in the darkness of nature’s year, we look to the Light of Christ coming in the darkness when we will hear that “the darkness overcame it not.” Likewise with the matters of doubt and uncertainty in our souls. Advent is the season of watching and waiting in the darkness. What do we mean by darkness? Is it simply the absence of light? Are we bereft and left simply with our doubts and fears?

St. Thomas is the saint of the Advent even more so than St. Andrew whose feast usually but not always falls within the Advent season. The Feast of St. Thomas always falls just four days before Christmas; the only variable is whether if falls within the week of the Third or the Fourth Sunday in Advent, or when the 21st of December is the Fourth Sunday in Advent, it gets transferred to the following Tuesday (Dec. 23rd.) In any event, it is always in Advent.

It is significant that the Gospel reading is the Easter story about Thomas’ doubting the witness of the other disciples to the Resurrection of Jesus. “Except I shall see,” he says, except I touch, “put[ting] my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust[ing] my hand into his side, I will not believe.” It is a powerful moment. But behind the closed doors of the Upper Room, Christ appears again to the disciples and, most importantly, to Thomas. “Thomas,” he says, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.” It is a marvellous moment of truth and of our awakening to truth in the ways that belong to each of our forms of knowing.

(more…)

Print this entry

Behold, I send my messenger … which shall prepare thy way before thee

Advent is the season of penitential preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Repentance and rejoicing go hand in hand. Both these tonal qualities of spiritual life belong to the theme of preparation signalled so directly in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for this day and heralded so profoundly in the second Exhortation which you heard this morning. Advent celebrates the motion of God’s Word coming to us in judicio,  in judgement, in mente, in mind, and, ultimately, in carne, in the flesh. That motion is all God towards us; all grace, we might say. The important point of Advent is that grace can never be taken for granted. It requires our attention, our loving attention upon the motions of God’s Word coming to usand being with us. It requires preparation on our part to receive that Word in its glory and truth. Only so is it grace to us.

The preparation is all grace, to be sure, but it concerns our mindfulness of that grace. That is the point of the Exhortation, so rarely read and heard. We are in Advent and yet always “in the mean season”, always in anticipation and expectation of things which remain to be more fully realized in us. As such we are bidden “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery”, the Sacrament of the Altar, “and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof.” Devout preparation. It belongs to “the ministers and stewards of [those] mysteries” to “prepare and make ready thy way”, the way of God, in all our hearts “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just”. Such is repentance. It is about our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away. It is simply about our complete surrender of ourselves to God’s will for our humanity. Thus the witness of John the Baptist about repentance is wonderfully complemented by witness of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose ‘yes’ to God belongs so completely to the mystery of the Incarnation.

Today’s Gospel calls our attention to the ministry of John the Baptist even as this week also reminds us of the Annunciation to Mary as an essential part of the Advent. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, is Mary’s mantra and the mantra of the Church universal in all times and seasons but especially in this season of the coming of God Incarnate, itself the crystallization of all of the motions of God’s Word coming to us. The preparation is about our mindfulness. It means, as the Exhortation suggests, a certain kind of self-examination, a matter of the inward spirit, a matter of conscience and soul-searching to the intent of the quieting of all our doubts and fears, of all our anxieties and worries, by recalling us to trust in God. The second Exhortationis very precise about what such examination means in terms of seeking reconciliation with one another as belonging to the “full purpose of amendment of life.”

(more…)

Print this entry