Sermon preached by The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The First Sunday of Advent
A woman went into a post office to buy some stamps for her Christmas cards. “What denomination do you want?” asked the lady at the counter. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Has it come to this? I suppose you’d better give me 20 Catholic and 20 Presbyterian stamps, then.”
As we all begin to make preparations for Christmas, with gift purchasing, and the sending of cards, and some of us even beginning to decorate for Christmas—yes, I know and have actually seen some of our parishioners’ homes that are decked out as if Advent were Christmas!—here we are in the church being very counter-culture in a very visible way. You don’t see any Christmas trees or wreaths; no festive lights. The color is purple, suggesting penitence. The flowers are beautiful, but stark, reminding us perhaps of the wilderness. And the only added decoration is the trindle—a plain circle with four candles, only one of which is lit today. For throughout the Church this is not the Christmas season. It is the season of Advent, a season of preparation, of waiting.
And Advent is not just a season of preparation to celebrate the birthday of our Lord. It is a season that focuses, first and foremost, on preparation to receive him when he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. It is a season devoted to contemplation of last things, the traditional themes being death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Advent is a time for examination of our lives and confession, for resetting our priorities, and for special acts of devotion and self-denial. It is as if to say that when we are prepared to meet the Lord when he comes again in glory, then we will also be prepared to celebrate rightly the annual observance of his first coming as the Babe in Bethlehem.
The readings appointed for the day, as well as the Collect of the Day, all point us in this direction, toward the Last Judgment. Isaiah foretells a time when the Lord will truly rule the lives of all people, when there will not be a war in Iraq and Afghanistan or anywhere else, and when the instruments of war will no longer be needed. “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
St. Paul, writing to the Romans, also looks toward the end. “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand.” And so the Apostle exhorts believers to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
In Matthew we have the clearest description of Judgment Day. Jesus tells the disciples always to be prepared for the coming of the Son of man. He gives them the frightening image of two men in the field, one being taken with the Son of man, the other left; and of two women grinding at the mill, one being taken, the other left.
The earliest Christians truly believed that Jesus might come again at any moment; in fact, they expected him to come at any moment. Early in his ministry St. Paul clearly believed that Jesus would come again before Paul died. Every day was Advent in the early Church.
It took some 40 years after the resurrection for the first account of the Gospel to be written. Have you ever wondered why there weren’t disciples cranking out best sellers immediately after the resurrection? They believed there was no need for a written record, probably that there wouldn’t be enough time to get one written, before the Second Coming; and time would be better spent in getting out the word. And so they had no problem living each day as if it would be their last opportunity to get their lives in order and to proclaim the message of salvation.
Some 2000 years have passed. The Son of man still has not returned, yet the readings in this season remind us that the promise has been made. Jesus shall indeed come again. That coming may still be a thousand years away or it may be today. And that coming will be a time of final judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.
The idea of judgment is based on the presupposition that there is such a thing as right and wrong, that there is such a thing as sin, that God intends for his people to have a certain standard of life, and that there is a way to break out of the cycle of sin. That “way” is Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. Is there any doubt that the world is just as much in need of a Savior now as it was 2000 years ago? Take a look at any newspaper on any given day and you will find many examples of our world’s need of the Savior. They are filled with examples of war, violent crime, reports of divorces, stories of neglected and abused children. William Bennett, in an article published several years ago titled “Redeeming our Time,” stated that “there are other signs of social decay (than the ones I have mentioned) that do not so easily lend themselves to quantitative analysis….For there is a coarseness, a callousness, a cynicism, a banality, and a vulgarity to our time.”
There is a sense in our time that there is no such thing as sin, and if there is a God, he doesn’t much care about how we live our lives and we certainly are not going to be held accountable.
Advent, all four weeks of it, reminds us that the world still needs the Savior. It reminds us that our thoughts, words, and deeds do have eternal significance, and we will be held accountable. It calls us to get our priorities straight and to be the sign to the world of all of these things. Yet our preparation for the Second Coming, as well as our preparation for Christmas, is a joyful preparation, in a quiet sort of way, for we know the Savior and we want to make him known. There is a solution to the problems that face us as individuals and as a society, and that solution is the One whose birth will be celebrated this Christmas Eve.
I invite you, during this beautiful season of Advent, truly to make it a time of preparation—to examine your lives and make your confession, to reset your priorities, and to make special acts of devotion and self-denial, all to the end that when our Lord Jesus comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.