SERMON FOR FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT 2019

Preached at the Church of St. John the Baptist, Eltham

at Parish Mass on December 1st, 2019

 ‘Salvation is nearer to us now

than when we became believers.’

X

INTRODUCTION

So, once again, we begin the Season of Advent – four weeks of waiting and preparing to celebrate the enfleshment – the in-breaking of God – into our world.  Each year we return to this theme, and those of us who’ve celebrated this event many times may wonder at the way it all comes round again so quickly.  Is there anything more one can say or anything more to experience?

Well, yes, of course there is.  Until we welcome Jesus when he returns; until we see him face to face; until we know him and greet him as our saviour; until we realise him in everyone we encounter; until our hearts have become His home we need these weeks to reflect on how we will respond to his coming.

This year it’s Matthew whose writings announce this new Year of Grace; whose Gospel will open to us the mysteries of Christ throughout Ordinary Time.  The writer may have been that tax collector whom Jesus called, but we cannot know for sure.  Many see in his writings the hand of a thinker aware of the debates within Judaism in the period when he wrote – possibly between AD 80 and 100 – who wanted to present the person of Jesus as the fulfilment of His religion.  Jesus is the one in whom the Reign of God reveals itself – the one whom the prophet Isaiah spoke about: O house of Jacob come; let us walk in the light of the Lord! (Is.2:5)  Certainly, his gospel gives us far more of the words of Jesus than any of the others and someone called Papias (c.60 - 163 AD), one of the earliest Church historians, records that "Matthew collected the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew tongue."  What, then, of today’s gospel reading as we begin this new year? 

THE COMING OF MESSIAH

Well, firstly it recounts the way Jesus reflected on the end of the old world with the coming of the Messiah, the anointed one, who would herald a new order.   Reading through this passage takes me back to walking on the Mt. of Olives in Jerusalem and looking out over the Dome of the Rock and the Old City. 

It’s a remarkable sight made the more startling by the fact that the best view is from the vast Jewish cemetery on the eastern slopes of the Kidron Valley, facing an equally enormous Muslim cemetery on the other side.  And the reason why these cemeteries exist is because both Jews and Muslims share the same faith – the faith that we, Christians, also proclaim – that the Messiah will return to Jerusalem to begin this new world order.  It’s something we affirm each time we recite the Creed – the ‘official’ statement of our Christian Faith: ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.’

Now I realise how the question of our being judged can raise problems.  Most of us don’t like being judged, and some (often the same people) are quick to judge others.  Yet the great religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all affirm that there will be a judgement at the end of time.  And whilst it may be uncomfortable to have to include this as a statement of Faith, it’s nonetheless a corrective to that thinking which speaks of rights and not responsibilities; where many feel they can ‘get away’ with lying, misrepresentation and wrong-doing without recognising that there’s a price that will have to be paid.  When, in what is being called a ‘Post-truth’ society, some believe they have a right to stir up fear and hatred without bothering with the consequences which often means suffering for others.  In the end it’s only Satan, the master of deceit, who benefits.  So, at this time of discerning for whom we should elect to parliament, the honesty, truthfulness and integrity of candidates must inform our choice.

THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD

Now one of the great traditions of Advent is to consider what are known as the ‘Four last Things’ – Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell - as we prepare for the coming of the Christ.  Whilst for many this pre-Christmas season is about the fripperies of it all – chocolate Advent calendars, putting up the decorations and buying the presents – the Church asks us to consider the real consequence of the advent of God among us.  These four weeks are meant to be a kind of ‘wake-up’ call; a time when we take stock of our lives and consider how we would respond when we meet God face to face.  How, as we encounter a new day, we might cloth ourselves in the garments of Christ.  And then how we would react to having our lives laid out before him. 

And none of us have lived blameless lives.  None.  So Advent, like Lent, is a season for repentance (which is why the colour of the season is purple) and why we are urged to make our Confession as we prepare to welcome Christ.  I mentioned that last week because the Sacrament of Confession is one many Anglicans ignore but which is a real means of deepening our relationship with God – and offers a corrective to the way we can ignore our sinfulness – it is a means of cleansing our lives and starting again each time we seek absolution.

THE JUSTICE OF GOD

But lest we consider the One before whom we kneel for forgiveness is a stern, condemning judge we need to remember that His nature is to be merciful and compassionate.  I ‘ve come to realise that this matter of judgement is for my good – that God wants me to see myself as I truly am so I can face up to the truth of myself.  And, in so doing, seek to be remade and re-clothed in those garments which will help me to live in the light of Christ – the armour of light, as S. Paul says.  That’s something which makes Christianity unattractive for some, for the coming of God in human form is to enable us to be remade in His image and likeness.  ‘O God, you search me out and know me’ wrote the psalmist.  God searches us out to ‘find’ us – help us become the real person we are being created to become.

I have always been saddened by the knowledge that not everyone wants to grow up.  Growth, as we all know, means change, yet some have stopped growing.  They have become trapped – and that applies to Christians as well.  Too many of us have settled for less than God wants for us.  So to all of us Paul says those words: ‘now is the moment for you to wake out of sleep.  For salvation is nearer to (you) now than when you first became (a) believer.’ 

But salvation, of course, depends on our realising that we need to be saved – saved from our past and present errors, saved from settling for less than we can be; saved from our tendencies to turn from light and life.  Saved from sin, our turning from God.  Salvation is what God offers us through the coming of the babe of Bethlehem, who is also our Judge.  As a priest I once knew said in a sermon:

“Judgement is not so much something that happens in the future, but rather something that happens all the time.  In S. John’s Gospel Jesus says: ‘this is judgement, that he light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.So, in our heart of hearts, we know we judge ourselves daily by the choices we make;   one way or another we all choose between light and darkness, good and evil, love and selfishness.  Day by day these may well seem very small choices of no great significance, but by these choices we build up our personal histories and we choose which side was shall take at the end of the day.  Ultimately we are built up or diminished by these apparently insignificant choices.”  

Soon we will be attending to the message of your heavenly Patron who, recognising that God’s coming was close, cried: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!’  The message is the same; we need to turn around and face the light of God, our merciful judge, that is constantly shining upon us.  Need to turn around – repent - and confess our sins to the One who is all-merciful.  And then to wrap ourselves up in the clothing of Christ so that we can say, with S. Paul:

‘it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.’ (Gal.2:19f)

For at the end of this year, as the leaves fall and the frost creeps over the land, we're invited to awaken to the coming of Christ.

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

– Bp. Rowan Williams, An Advent Meditation

Personal Notes taken from: THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD - Theology as a Way of Life

Heythrop College, January 11^th 2014

__________________________________________________

WORDS AND PRACTICES – The Rt. Rev. Prof. Rowan Williams

Theology as “The representing and exploring of the meaning of the word of God.”  Theology is narrative received in the lives of people.  It begins as people wish to know themselves.  As a way of life it becomes a way in which I understand my-self, my embodiment.  These are the areas were meanings are to be understood.  Meanings are experienced in that narrative; reflecting on the truth of who I am.  How do I educate my-self about who I am?  The theologian must have an ear on the wider culture – new meanings are being created – as they sit before God.  Theology is a way of patience that allows us to sit with the things that resist being said quickly; with my own and others inarticulacy.  It requires self-reflection; patience; questioning.  The Church needs to be a learning community.

The two basic moments in the Christian revelation are:

i)  Exodus;

ii) adoption

and both spring us from the controlled experience to freedom.  Adoption establishes us in a new identity.

So we look for a language that risks its own freedom.  But what might lead us back to un-freedom and what gestures us towards the contemplation of the Son-becoming?  For the self to become where the Son happens?  We need a language that gestures us towards that.  Theology must edge us towards that theme.  What does a Christian life look like when Christ is ordering it?  The theological way-of-life is about adoption becoming aware of itself. 

For a Christian there is no theology which is not Trinitarian.  Theology is a growth in the adoption process, an awareness of Christ being present.  A growth towards being a son of God.  Theology is not alien to either silence or joy; where chatter and anxiety are present, theology needs to re-assert itself.

THE RETURN OF CONTEMPLATION TO THEOLOGY – Martin Laird OSA

Theology is a way of life rooted in the stillness of life for the well-being of others.  S. Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzen) observed that theology needs a proper ground of formation.  In his Oration he says that heterodox theologians delight in inarticulate and elaborate verbiage, disordered desires and a desire to ‘know about’ God.  As a result they have become obsessed with conundrums, with “boring nonsense”.  They talk too much and fuel competition and violence.  Who, then, is the right person to be a theologian?  One who has undergone purification of body and mind; who has de-cluttered the faculty of the mind, of wandering images, and is still (Ps 46:10).  Who is the proper audience?  Those who have, or are, undergoing a similar experience and do not regard it as yet another “precious amusement”.  There is a certain way of living in the practice of theology involving hospitality, brotherly love, caritas and fasting.  Such bodily practices draw us deeper into the life of stillness.  “Inner chatter” fuels the disordered tongue leading us to compete with others.  Without this de-cluttering of the mind we cannot truly look at ourselves.

When is the right occasion to practice theology?  When we have a vast stillness – the stillness of the ocean – involving purification of the body; de-cluttering of the mind; the practice of contemplation.  Evagrius observes that practicos reveals how much we need to be free from practices that prevent us knowing who we are and knowing God.  Pathos hooks us into something else – those afflictive thoughts which do battle with us.  The ‘demons’ offer the ‘sticky side’ to attract those thoughts which rivet attachment to obsessive patterns thus keeping us ignorant of the inner life of Christ.  The antidote is to develop an internal practice of vigilance; the ability to interrupt as soon as possible our ‘inner videos’, the stories ‘about’ …  We need to get out of the story that we become hooked into and connect to the story of Love.

There are two sources of ‘knowing’.  Discursive/conceptual thinking and ‘nous’ – a non-conceptual, intuitive encounter with that beyond images – the “eye of the heart” (Augustine).  A proper theological perspective requires the liberation of the mind.  Discursive knowledge is necessary but exists beneath theology.  When you close my eyes I began to forget my-self … when I awoke … I saw … with the eye of the heart. (Augustine – paraphrase).  Theresa of Avila says this is like rain descending from the sky into a pool so it’s impossible to separate the sky from the pool.  This is not the collapse of created identity but its flowering; the illusion of separation is dropped.  The self is like a sea-sponge which looks within and without and sees nothing but ocean – that in which it exists.  ‘The Lord’s breast is the sponge of the heart’ (Gregory of Nyssa: Commentary on the Song of Songs). 

The practice of theology becomes a way of life when contemplation practices break through the illusions of the cluttered mind, integrating the mind in the ocean of the Father’s love, whose “margins are our margins”

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence we call God...

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins; that call us out over our

own fathoms. (R.S.Thomas)

AUGUSTINE ON THE PRATICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD – Prof. Margaret Miles

Augustine insists that when people encounter beauty with a particular question – Tell me about God – that beauty reveals its answers and shows the ‘perfect safety of the Universe’.  A person functions differently when either fear or love determines that behaviour: we need to be aware of the weight of fear we carry.

THE LITURGY, ICONS AND PRAYER OF THE HEART – The Rev. Prof. Andrew Louth

Orthodox theology begins and returns with the Liturgy.  When we speak of the ‘practice of the presence of God’, what do we mean by God?  The Divine Liturgy begins with the censing of the iconostasis – this simple censing includes all things into that circular movement symbolising God’s love going out and embracing all things into itself.  The cycles of prayer are endless – this constant movement catches us up into itself.  The presence of God is not static but dynamic.  The static Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction are absent in Orthodoxy where the altar, icons and cross are venerated but not the Sacrament.  But the Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified Gifts involves the veneration of the Gifts as they are brought to the altar in silence.  They are venerated as they move, not when they are still, as Christ comes to His people.  It is the One who is coming that we venerate.

At the Marriage (and Ordination) services there is a ‘dance’ around the Holy Table (the Dance of Isaiah - http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10066/5924/Riak_33_1-2.pdf?sequence=1), a circular movement that indicates the beginning of an endless movement into the world (see also Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (Romiosyni) by Juliet Du Boulay).  These circular movements reflect the circular movement in village dances which, in themselves, reflect something of the dance of life.

The practice of the presence of God is about movement and encounter – from liturgy to life.  Presence is to be understood as encounter inviting a response to Christ and His saints.  Icons are about encounter and invite a response.  The invocation of the Name of Jesus makes present the Divine Gift and anywhere we are we can be in His Presence through invoking of the Name – no longer only in the Temple, but anywhere.

THE GUIDANCE OF S. EPHREM: A VISION TO LIVE BY – Sebastian Brock

Ephrem believed that the vast gulf between Creator and creature could only be bridged by the design of the Creator; otherwise the creature would know nothing of the Creator.

He did not believe one could define God; instead he uses paradoxes and rasa (symbolic mysteries) which give some aspect of Divine reality.  For him, symbols are everywhere present – in nature and in the Book.  They are latent in Creation but are beheld through the ‘luminous eye’ of the heart.  To start functioning, the eye begins to see with a minimum of faith that there is meaning in life.  As it is opened one begins to see the interconnectedness (synergy) of all things.  Our free-will allows the operation of this interior eye.  The eye must be unclouded by sin, have right-belief (orthodoxy) in the Trinity and love – reciprocal love between God and creature “Truth and love are wings that cannot be separated” (Ephrem).  Everything has the potential to become a sacrament: Ephrem has a love of the metaphor of ‘clothing’ and much of the language we/scripture employs to describe God’s attributes are reflections of what we see. ‘God gave what belonged to Him, and took what belonged to us’ – S. Ephrem on the Incarnation

Mary serves for the locus of every Christian and the Eucharist is the rasa par excellence for in both it is the descent of the Holy Spirit that is central. 

Ephrem teaches us how to find meaning in life: he shows the underlying interdependence of all things; the right and just use of free-will, and the necessity of approaching the biblical text with orthodox belief, love and an unclouded eye.

THE TRINITY AS OUR ASCETIC PROGRAMME – Fr. Nicholaï Sakharov

Above the Icon of the Trinity which hangs in the Monastery of S. John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights (Maldon, Essex) is inscribed: Let us make Man in Our Image and Likeness.

S. Sergius of Radonezh (1314 – 1392) made an appeal to the Russian people to the unity "in image of a Holy Trinity".  S. Basil realised the Trinity as our social/ascetic project rooted in ‘amo ergo sum’ – I love, therefore I am.  The Trinity is the universal principle of unity. 

The image of God in man is not static but dynamic – a unity of Persons; the distance between the prototype – God – and the image – Man – is not so great.  The ‘I’ needs ‘Thou’ to become ‘I’, but ‘Thou’ needs He or She to become We.  Therefore Sobornost/Catholicity is within all persons – I/Thou/We.  The image of God does not belong to the individual human being but to all humankind.  The Trinity manifests itself everywhere – ‘consubstantial’ (same substance), rather than ‘synagogical’ (bringing together): we are in the image of God.  We are united to love God with

one heart and mind.  Fr. Sophrony (Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), also Elder Sophrony, a disciple and biographer of St Silouan the Athonite and compiler of St Silouan's works, was the founder of the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights 1896-1993) emphasised theology required gestalt (wholeness), the Church, dogma and ascetic practice.  The history of salvation is to restore this relationship of Unity through Covenant – from that with Noah (singular) to the whole of Creation.

Obedience, submission and authority.  Obedience is not a submission to external authority but to Love until Love becomes the Commandment by which we live.  Anything imposed on free persons has o spiritual value.  We do not submit to authority but to Love – ‘Thy will be done’.  In Christian obedience we exercise ‘submission’ to love.  In Orthodox monasticism one gives obedience not to a Rule but to a person: there are no ‘Orders’ in Orthodoxy, “only dis-order!”  “Wherever there is a disintegration of human community there is a place to practice the Trinity.”

THE THREAT OF DEATH AS A TEST FOR AUTHENTICITY IN THEOLOGICAL ACTIVITY – Fr. Luigi Gioia OSB (http://www.luigigioia.com)

‘“Is life worth living?” “What did you expect!”’ (Stoner: A Novel – John Williams)

Death(s) are the inevitable moments when we cannot avoid the questions that lie deep within us.  We must be observant/suspicious of those questions (cf. The Rule of S. Benedict: Prologue 1) rather than ignorant of them.  We must be open to the possibility of meaninglessness in life and to the non-evidence of God.  The threat of death is a test of the authenticity of our theology.  We must not overlook these questions if we are to live authentically. 

God’s Self-revelation only comes to us through a fallen world.  Even the humanity of Christ is not Self-revelatory as such; a Christian only seeks to follow the Word of God in darkness.  We are not set apart from the rest of humanity in finding meaning, but by grace we come to faith by hearing what God says.  The fides qua cokes from a natural, living relationship with God, yet we remain vulnerable to our doubts.  Authenticity is to be open to our vulnerability.  We must beware of that truth which simply appeals to what-I-like and what supports me.  The non-evidence of God and the tendency to idolatry condition our approach to Truth.  We have been born unto a culture of nihilism, yet even this can be the means of keeping us awake to God.  “Fulfilment does not belong to life … (we are called to) faithfulness to what it means to be human.”