Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent, November 29, 2009
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C: Zechariah 14:4-9; Psalm 50:1-6;1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-31

Today as we begin to prepare to celebrate Christmas, the Church has placed us nowhere near Bethlehem or Nazareth. We’re in Jerusalem. Jesus is giving his last teaching in the Temple on one of the days before the Passover.

He’s speaking about a terrible time that is coming. The Temple itself will be destroyed. Life will be hard and cruel. This will happen soon. It will be a sign that time itself is ending. The “Son of man [will be] coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”[1] As he speaks about this terrible time, Jesus says something his hearers don’t expect. He says, when these events come, it is a sign that the kingdom of God is near.

In Luke, the disciples already are expecting the kingdom of God to come – Luke uses the word – “immediately.”[2] Jesus has been preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God whenever he is preaching and healing.

Luke’s gospel actually begins in a sense with the proclamation of the kingdom of God. The angel tells Mary that her son “will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.”[3]"

When Jesus sends his twelve disciples out to heal the sick, they are also told to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come.[4] Jesus lets his critics know that the kingdom of God has come upon them because it is “by the finger of God” that Jesus casts “out demons.”[5]

But the twist one can hear in today’s gospel lesson, about how we are to understand the meaning presence of evil, suggests to me that Luke and others were beginning to struggle with what were becoming two really big problems for Christian preaching and teaching – first, what we call the problem of evil and, second, the problem that the world didn’t end on schedule.

Even before Luke wrote around 80 AD, Paul was confronting this second issue in his writings. Jesus had said the world was coming to an end soon.[6] Paul had urged people not to marry because the appointed time was short.[7]

I think it’s fair to say that by the time the New Testament is put together, for the most part in the second century, these expectations for the end were too well-known, too much a part of the Christian gospel to be forgotten. But they have already receded into the background of Christian preaching. They reappear with regularity in fringe groups even in our own day; but they are not central to the Christian gospel.

But, what about evil – and specifically, Jesus’ observation that the presence of evil is a sign that the kingdom of God is near.

Raymond Brown’s observed in his work on the four accounts of Jesus’ death that in Luke “only acts of grace will follow the death of Jesus.”[8] It’s a way of seeing what John Taylor will call the “Christlike God”[9] – the God who enters into our suffering by entering into our humanity and dying there so that everything can change. But for me, the problem of evil remains a very hard one, not a deal breaker, but beyond my understanding.

Now just a little about Advent, before I wrap this up. It turns out that of all the Church seasons, Advent has a more complicated history than all of the others. Sometime in the fifth century, in some parts of the Mediterranean world, Christmas Day begins to get something of the same kind of before and after that Easter Day had already gotten in the second century. What we come to know as Advent was in origin mostly about preparation for Christmas.

In the Middle Ages, Advent becomes a kind of second Lent – purple vestments, no flowers, fasting, penance. The German liturgical scholar Adolf Adam in his still really useful 1981 book, The Liturgical Year, wrote that missionaries from Ireland had managed to turn it into a season of judgment and penance. [10]  (This is part of the Celtic spiritual tradition that one doesn't hear much about from the folks who have fallen in love with its gentler side.)

Eventually, with the help of the civic chaos of the Middle Ages, the plague, Germanic conquests of Rome, this penitential Advent spreads across Western Europe.  There are still echoes of the early practice even today – when I suspect Advent was a time for people not unlike it really is today – getting ready for the feast. “Alleluia” is sung before the gospel in Advent. Parishes often have two different sets of purple vestments, a penitential purple for Lent and one not unlike the ones we use that are quite deliberately in the tradition of royal, imperial purple.

I think it’s fair to say the reform of the calendar in the middle of the last century didn’t get far enough to fix Advent. Only on the Sunday just before Christmas Day, do we ever get any of the material that Matthew and Luke used to prepare their readers for their accounts of Jesus’ birth. Instead, on the first Sunday, it’s the end of time – a win for the Celtic tradition. On the second and third Sundays we get the preaching of John the Baptist, which Matthew and Luke use to prepare for Jesus’ adult life – not the account of John’s birth that Luke uses to prepare us for Jesus. Another win for a certain part of Irish spiritual tradition.

Many parishes today will be singing something that I haven’t figured out how to do well at Saint Mary’s – a processional prayer called “The Great Litany.” It’s great. Father Smith and I were talking about not so long ago when we could do it without overwhelming our community with one more service – or overwhelming any given service with another thing. We’re still thinking about it.

If you don’t know the Great Litany, you can find it in the Prayer Book – it’s listed in the table of contents. Today, I would draw your attention to two of its many petitions:

From all lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; Good Lord, deliver us.

From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.[11]

In the face of sickness, cruelty, uncertainty, evil, death, we believe the kingdom of God is near. This is the great proclamation that is at the heart of the Easter mystery. And this is why you and I can journey in Christ with faith – not because judgment is coming, not because angels and shepherds are singing, but because Easter happens whenever anyone dies, so that all may be with God.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 

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