We’re in the middle of a season
of getting ready right now, and if you’re taking your cues from the retail
industry, your mind has been on Christmas since before Remembrance Day. The
joys of Christmas are on everyone’s mind, of course: presents to buy, cards to
send, parties to arrange, visits to plan, food to prepare, turkeys to stuff and
so on. Personally, I love Advent and Christmas, so I’m a sucker for this time
of year.
However, if we’re taking our cues
from the scriptures and from our church calendar, there’s another type of
preparedness that should also be on our minds. It tends to get lost these days,
because the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier, and so we forget that
Advent is not the same as Christmas. Advent isn’t just about looking forward to
the manger at Bethlehem, and the shepherds and the wise men and the little
drummer boy. In Advent we’re not just putting ourselves back into the Old
Testament and looking forward to the coming of the Messiah; we’re looking
forward to our own future, too. The Creed says, ‘He will come again in glory to
judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end’. The Christian
church teaches us that if there’s a judgement coming, then it’s wise to spend
some time getting ready for it. And it’s wise not to put it off; usually it’s
not smart to start your studying for the final exam the night before!
This Advent, when I’m preaching,
I want to spend some time thinking with you about the prayers we pray each
Sunday. We call them ‘collects’, because they collect together the themes of
our scriptures into short little prayers that we can easily memorize. It used
to be the tradition in the Anglican Church that the Collect for the First
Sunday of Advent was repeated on every Sunday of the Advent season until
Christmas Eve, and so it was especially easy to memorize, as you heard it again
and again through the four weeks of Advent, year after year. I’m going to read
it to you again, but I’m going to use the version found in the old Book of
Common Prayer, which is slightly different from our B.A.S. version.
Almighty God,
give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the
armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus
Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall
come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we
may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee
and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.
(BCP)
This prayer helps us think about
two questions, and you might at first think they’re a little strange. The first
question is, ‘What time is it?’ We have to answer that one first, because the
second depends on it: ‘Okay, given the time, what should we be doing about it?’
The answer to the question ‘What
time is it?’ is ‘It’s in-between time’. In between what? In between two comings
of Jesus. The Collect describes them for us. There’s his first coming, which of
course is the theme of Christmas; the Collect refers to this as ‘the time of
this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great
humility’. Viewed chronologically, of course, that coming is behind us, in the
past. But there’s another coming, which is still ahead, on ‘the last day, when
he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the living and the
dead’, the time when ‘we may rise to the life immortal’. The Collect contrasts
these two comings: long ago, Jesus came to visit us ‘in great humility’, but
when he comes again, it will be ‘in glorious majesty’. Furthermore, at his
first coming, he entered ‘this mortal life’, but at his second coming we will
‘rise to the life immortal’.
What does the Collect teach us
about these two comings? One of the reasons I like the old prayer book version
is that it uses the word ‘visit’. The B.A.S. says ‘when your Son Jesus Christ
came to us in great humility’, but the prayer book has ‘in which thy Son Jesus
Christ came to visit us in great humility’.
Why is this important? Well, if
you read the Bible, especially in the King James Version, you’ll notice that a
visit from God is always a significant thing. He never shows up empty-handed;
he always brings something with him. It might be plague and suffering and
judgement, or it might be blessing and salvation. So in Jeremiah 9:9 the Lord
sees all the wickedness of his people and says, ‘Shall I not visit them for
these things, says the Lord? Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as
this?’ And in Ruth 1:6 old Naomi hears that the famine is over in Israel,
because the Lord has visited his people and given them bread.
So what’s this visit at Christmas
time all about? Well, in Luke 1:68 old Zechariah reflects on it; he says,
‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his
people’, or, in a modern version, ‘he has come to his people and set them
free’. This is definitely a visit to bring blessing. This is a wonderful visit!
But how did he come? The Collect says, ‘in which your Son Jesus Christ
came to visit us in great humility’. This
reminds me of what Paul has to say in the second chapter of his letter to the
Philippians:
‘Let this mind
be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did
not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in
human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even
death on a cross’ (vv.5-8).
This is what Christmas is about:
Jesus shares the divine nature – he is equal with God – but he lays aside all
his divine prerogatives. The one through whom all things were created humbles
himself to become part of his creation; the one who is immortal by nature puts
on mortality, and goes on to become obedient to the point of death on a cruel
cross. And he does all this out of love, to serve his creation, to show us what
God is like, to show us God’s will for our human life, and to deliver us from
sin and death.
So we stand in time after this first great event; we live on
what C.S. Lewis calls ‘the visited planet’. But we also look forward to a future event. The collect speaks of ‘the
last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the living
and the dead’.
This is a message of hope. We
live, as human beings have almost always lived, in a time when the power of
evil seems enormous. I’m not just talking about the fact that terrorists can
behead people or fly aircraft into tall buildings and kill thousands of people
in one go. I’m talking about the fact that the world economic system seems to
be set up in such a way as to provide cheap goods to the richest people on the
planet, while denying the poorest people on the planet the right to a fair
living wage. I’m talking about the fact that in the average multinational
corporation the highest paid individual in the company earns more than three
hundred times what the lowest paid individual earns. I’m talking about the fact
that the single most common category of websites on the Internet is
pornography.
These are just a few of the
symptoms of the power of evil in the world today. In the face of such great
evil, I’m always surprised when people tell me that they don’t like the message
of God’s judgement. Surely the message of God’s judgement brings hope! It tells
us that the day is going to come when God will bring this evil to an end. God cares!
He cares about the children who have been stolen from their homes and forced to
become child soldiers; he cares about the children who never had a chance
because they were born in refugee camps where there was never enough food to go
around; he cares about the people who spend their lives slaving away for
starvation wages growing cash crops for people who live thousands of miles
away.
God is not prepared for this
state of affairs to continue. As we heard in last Sunday’s gospel, the day will
come when the king will sit on his glorious throne and gather the nations
before him, and he will separate them into two groups as a shepherd separates
the sheep from the goats. On one side will be those who recognized Jesus in the
hungry and thirsty, in those who have no clothes to wear, in those who are sick
or are refugees or immigrants or prisoners; their conduct will be affirmed and
rewarded. On the other side will be those who had the opportunity to do good
for all these people and refused to do so; their conduct will be judged.
This is our Advent hope: that the
last word will not go to the forces of cruelty and hatred, selfishness and
prejudice. The last word will go to God, and Jesus would seem to indicate that the
vital evidence of our faith in him will be practical love. And so the Kingdom
of God which Jesus proclaimed will be the only reality in God’s creation, and
the prayer we have prayed for the last two thousand years will finally be fully
answered: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
So this is the in-between time we
live in. We look back on that first
coming, when God’s Son Jesus Christ ‘came to visit us in great humility’. And
we look forward to ‘the last day,
when he will come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and
the dead’. On that day, every one of us hopes to be among the number of the
saints who will ‘rise to the life immortal’, as the prayer says.
So as we look back on Christ’s
first coming and look forward to the day when ‘he will come again to judge the
living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end, what should we be
doing’? The prayer says, ‘Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and
put upon us the armour of light’. What’s that all about?
When Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote
this prayer for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, it was immediately
followed by an epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 13,
verses 8-14. Here it is in full:
Owe
no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has
fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall
not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other
commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’
Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the
law.
Besides
this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from
sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the
night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness
and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in
revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in
quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no
provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
So you can see where Cranmer got
the language about casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armour
of light. I like the way the New Living Translation puts it: ‘So remove your
dark deeds like dirty clothes, and put on the shining armour of right living’.
The dirty clothes are plain
enough: again, here they are in the New Living Translation: ‘Don’t participate
in the darkness of wild parties and drunkenness, or in sexual promiscuity and
immoral living, or in quarrelling and jealousy…Don’t let yourself think about
ways to indulge your evil desires’ (vv. 13b, 14b). But the armour turns out to
be a bit of a surprise. ‘Armour’ is a military image, so we might think of it as
being something like courage, or strength, or self-discipline. But once again,
what Paul actually focuses on is love. All the commandents, he says, ‘are
summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour
as yourself”. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the
fulfilling of the law’ (vv.9-10).
We’re back with
the sheep and the goats, aren’t we? As Bishop Jane reminded us last week, the
sheep are the ones who notice the suffering of others, and then do what they
can to help. Love isn’t just a warm fuzzy and it’s definitely not just words;
it’s being there for others, spending time with them, doing what we can to be a
blessing to them, whether we especially like them or not, whether we feel like
it or not. This is what God is like; the Old Testament talks about his chesed, a Hebrew word that our New
Revised Standard Version translates excellently as his ‘steadfast love’. I like
that word ‘steadfast’: love with muscles on it, love you can depend on, love
that’s unconditional, love that never gives up. That’s what we’re called to
imitate.
Shall we pray
this prayer through the Advent season? Shall we remember how God’s Son Jesus
Christ came to visit us in great humility? Shall we look forward to the day
when he will come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and
the dead? Shall we ask God to help us to cast away the works of darkness like
dirty old clothes, and put on the new life of steadfast love? Are you ready to pray that prayer, and to expect God to answer it?
Almighty God,
give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the
armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus
Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall
come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we
may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee
and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.
