Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent
“Master, where dwellest thou?”
The Sunday Next Before Advent is a day of double prepositions. It signals at once an ending and a beginning in the Lesson from Jeremiah and in the Gospel from the end of the first Chapter from John. Yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel read on this day was from “the Bread of Life discourse” near the beginning of Chapter Six of John’s Gospel. It is the story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness also read on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, albeit with a different point of emphasis, namely, the idea of God’s provisions for his people in the wilderness. As read for centuries on this Sunday, the emphasis is more on the idea of the fullness of redemption, the gathering up of all of the broken fragments of our lives into the life of God; hence the sense of ending. “Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.”
The change to the Gospel which you heard this morning was one of the few changes made in the 1962 Canadian revision to the Prayer Book. It suggests the Advent theme of God’s turning to us, the Advent pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of our hearts and our world. But that doesn’t entirely eclipse the idea of an ending in the sense of meaning and purpose which is found in our dwelling with God and God with us. Thus the readings are complementary and belong to the transitions from one form of spiritual emphasis to another that are inescapably interrelated; the themes of justifying righteousness and sanctifying righteousness that belong to our incorporation into the life of Christ and to the hope of heaven, our end in glory.
“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. The constant struggle of our lives is about learning to live in and from that Word. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; a time of endings and beginnings. “In my beginning is my end” and “in my end is my beginning” (T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets).
God’s word coming to us is given as the principle of our abiding in the love of God. As George Herbert says, “the crosse taught all wood to resound his name” and that is very much signaled in the architecture wherein the wood of this Church resounds with the name of Christ so that his word may have its resonance in us.
