Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

It’s been a while since I’ve introduced you to a Greek or Latin word in a sermon, so it’s time to make up for that oversight. The word for today is fiat, and I think it may be one of God’s own favorite words. I do not mean to say that God prefers Italian cars or the printing of bank notes. The fiat to which I refer might only be familiar to those who had to struggle, as I did, through high school Latin. It is, those poor souls will know, the third person, singular, present subjunctive of the irregular verb fio, fieri—to become—and it means “let it be”.

I say that it is perhaps God’s favorite word, because this is the word by which God’s will is accomplished in this old world. It is by this word of apparent passivity that men and women are brought into the active work of God’s plan of salvation. It is a word that to utter implies that its speaker must realize his own fallibility and imperfection and God’s own infallibity and perfection. It is a word by which the Christian places her trust in God’s overwhelming providence rather than human ingenuity. It is, in short, the word by which the world is saved.

And it is one particular utterance of the word fiat by which a seminal and singular event in human history came to take place. St. Luke tells us that an angel appeared to Mary and said “behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name ‘Jesus’. He shall be great , and be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God, shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” Our Lady responded by saying fiat. “Behold the handmaid (or servant girl) of the Lord; be it unto me according to word.”

It is through Our Lady’s free choice that Our Lord was given the chance to live a life of submission himself, a life and death given wholly not to his own will, but that of the Father. This the writer of Hebrews knew well when he wrote that Jesus had said “See, I have come to do your will,” And then explains “[Christ] abolishes the first [covenant] in order to establish the second. And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

So must we all respond to the call of God. Just so must we—like Mary and like her Son—say fiat to God. So must we pray “thy will be done” and mean it. So must we put aside our pride and pettiness that we, like Mary, may say “he that is mighty hath magnified me; and holy is his name.” It is only through humble submission, by saying fiat, “let it be, O God”, that we come to greatness and to glory. We cannot magnify ourselves, we can only fool ourselves into thinking we have done. God, however, has promised to “exalt the humble and meek.”

And so, as we prepare once again to celebrate the birth of the Christ child, let us go even unto Bethlehem with a spirit of humility and contrition. Let us like Mary sing the wonders that were done, knowing that salvation is not of our own making, is not wrought by the strength of our own will, but by the will of Him to whom we bow and obey. For we know that God’s power is made most perfect in weakness, and his glory revealed through the humility.

And let us pray.

O Divine redeemer Jesus Christ, prostrate before thy crib, we believe that thou art the God of infinite majesty, even though we see thee there as a helpless babe. Humbly we adore and thank thee for having so humbled thyself for our salvation as to will to be born in a stable. Would that we could show thee that tenderness which thy Virgin Mother had toward thee, and love thee as she loved thee. Would that we could praise thee with the joy of the angels,; that we could kneel before thee with the faith of Saint Joseph; the simplicity of the shepherds. Uniting ourselves with these first worshippers at the crib, we offer thee the homage of our hearts, and we beg that thou wouldest be born spiritually in our souls. And, O Holy Mary, as we here adore thy Divine Son, pray for all little children and for those not yet born, that they may be protected from all harm and danger, and that they may grow in grace and in favour with God and man. All these things we pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

It is probably not a surprise to those of you who know me, but it bears clarification in light of this morning’s Gospel. There is not a counter-cultural bone in my body. I love structure and a clear delineation of authority and all the rules of society which my parents’ generation scorned. I’m not saying my disposition is better, just that it is what it is.

That said, John the Baptist is a rather uncomfortable character for me. John’s message and the very fact that it was him preaching it would have been incredibly subversive. God’s message was not coming through the expected channels, through the institutions set up to be the agents of God (in the case of the high priests) or through those in positions of temporal power, such as the Emperor or the Governor. Rather, the message of God, the call to repentance, was coming from this strange figure, this apparent madman, John, to whom few of us, if we were honest with ourselves, would have probably listened. I know (to my own discredit) I probably wouldn’t have.

Now, John the Baptist was subversive in a manner wholly different from the culturally appropriate subversion which we’ve come to appreciate after the twentieth century, and which we’ve come to label “counterculture”. With apologies to those of you who grew up in the sixties, John the Baptist was not the personification of some Ancient Judean zeitgeist. He was not countercultural in the same way a hippy or beatnik might have been or even a contemporary protestor might be. He was not even anti-establishment in the same way that the anti-Roman zealots of his own day were. He was much weirder even than that.

In this morning’s Gospel we read “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey.” This was almost as strange a way to dress and eat in those days as it would be now. What’s more, John didn’t go to the temple or to one of the gates of Jerusalem to preach his message where it might be heard by those with some political or economic power. He remained in the desert.

This would have been reckoned very strange by the people of the first century, even the counter-cultural people of the time, who would have been used to self-proclaimed prophets, but of a more socially acceptable variety. This John character was not like them, but those with any sense of history would have recognized that he fit the bill, as it were, a great deal more closely than these other so-called prophets.

It had been more than four-hundred years since a legitimate, canonical prophet had preached in Israel, but if one were to look back at those Old Testament prophets, one would notice the similarities between them and John. John’s message was not self-promoting, as were the sermons of first-century pseudo-prophets, who claimed a messianic identity for themselves. Rather, John, like the legitimate prophets of the Old Testament, pointed away from himself and always to another, namely Jesus, as the longed-for Messiah. Like so many of the Old Testament prophets, chiefly Amos (whom we’ve been reading in Morning prayer this week), John arose from obscurity to take on the prophetic vocation. And his message, the message of repentance and of preparation for the day of the Lord, mirrored that of the legitimate prophets, particularly Elijah, the prophet with whom John was most readily identified.

We don’t get the full John the Baptist story this morning, but what can we learn from the little introduction to John which is this week’s Gospel? It seems to me that the most important lesson we get is that the Word of God comes to us from sources we might least expect. Certainly, we should be attentive to the normal modes in which we’ve come to experience that Word. We should be attentive to the Scriptures and to the teachings of Church Fathers and Councils and even to the minor insights I struggle to provide every week. But sometimes the grace and love of God is made even more apparent, presents itself even more tangibly, in unexpected ways from the people we least expect.

I’ve had the Word of God preached to me more compellingly by people who come in and out of my office looking for help than I do from slick preachers. I’ve seen more trust in the power of God in the hearts of uneducated peasants in Christian slums in South Asia than I have in my own heart. I’ve seen more love and hope in the lives of apparently unlovely people in apparently hopeless situations than I have from those who, like me, are in the business of loving people and instilling hope. I’ve even heard more fulsome expositions of Christian truth from the mouths of children than from many academic theologians.

And these are all prophets of a sort, modern John the Baptists who have surprised me with their insights and have given me a new perspective on that old, old story. I suspect that many of you have had similar experiences, the Word of God being made real in ways and from people you least expected.

So, keep watch. Open your eyes. Look for these modern prophets. We hear over and over again, and especially in Advent, to be watchful. Last week’s sermon was all about watching and waiting for the Kingdom of God. Let us be watchful, though, not only for Christ at his return, but for the risen Christ in our midst, right now, being made present in ways and through people we do not expect. Pray that God may give you the eyes to see his messengers for what they are, and ask Him to give you faith in the message they preach, and that John the Baptist preached, and that each of us should be preaching: namely that great message of hope in our Lord’s return.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we mainline Christians have ceded too much of what is essentially Christian belief and action for fear of being identified with fundamentalist Christians, and that in particular we tend to shy away from talking about Jesus’ second coming and the advent of the Kingdom of God. This is precisely what Advent is about (it’s not just about waiting to put the bambino into the crèche), but, due to mainline discomfort with the idea, we’ve been putting conditions on the meaning of the doctrine ever since the nineteenth century. Back then, liberal protestants started speaking in terms of gradually building the Kingdom of God themselves rather than expecting Jesus to actually, literally come back and establish it himself. The view has even gained some traction in American Catholicism with a very popular, but theologically unfortunate hymn whose refrain proclaims “Let us build the city of God.” Little is said in the hymn about Jesus’ role in the matter. Such an approach is full of hubris. It suggests that we’re more powerful than God, or at least that God chooses not to act in history. Smart people like Karl Barth, have pointed out the error, but still many hold the view.

Conversely, we find people who espouse the view that we’ve really no part in God’s work. The claim is that being responsible stewards of creation, that working to bring about a better state of affairs for the poor and the oppressed is really to no avail, because Jesus is going to come back and fix everything anyway. The only thing we should be concerned with, the argument goes, is saving souls, so that our fellows can enjoy the Kingdom when it does come.

Like so many other theological issues, the truth here may be found in the middle way, the via media that our own Anglican tradition talks about so much but seems to overlook so often. The historical Christian view, which we hear in the Gospel appointed for this week, is that Jesus really will come again, there really will be a second advent, more grand and glorious even than Christ’s first Advent on the first Christmas, and, what’s more, we’ve got got something to do about it.

For one, we watch and wait. “Watch therefore — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.” This is rare for me, but I actually prefer the newer translation of this passage, which is less accurate, but somehow more resonant. Instead of “watch,” Jesus says “Keep awake”.

We not only watch, but we pray. We pray ceaselessly for the establishment of God’s reign. “Thy Kingdom come,” we say every week in church, and many of us every day, but we probably don’t fathom the full extent of the words when we utter them. They’ve become rote. If we did indeed pay attention, we’d recognize how potentially frightening those three words are. Jesus said in today’s Gospel:

But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

Scary stuff, huh? Actually, our Gospel reading this morning picked up right after the really nasty bits; I love nasty bits, so here they are:

But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle. And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be.

It’s no wonder we tend to shy away from this theme in Scripture, why we replace the old themes of Advent—death and judgment and heaven and hell—with sentimentality. I think we’ve made a big mistake in that regard.
The response that the kingdom of God will elicit when it does ultimately come, doesn’t sound too comforting; but two-thousand years have passed since Jesus said these words, which has tended to take away the sense of urgency. But, guess what, we don’t need to be frightened or, worse, to cling to strange theories and time-tables regarding Christ’s return, but we should, nonetheless, urgently pray that God’s will might be done, that his Kingdom might come and his reign might begin on earth as it is already in heaven.

And prayer is not the only duty to which we are bound in light of our expectation of Christ’s return. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth with the following words of encouragement:

I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge — even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul doesn’t say, go out while you’ve still got time and rack up souls for Christ, like notches on a belt. God saves souls, we can only share our experience of his love for us with others. What Paul does say is “[be] not lacking in any spiritual gift” and “[with God’s sustenance be] guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God is the agent, of course, the one giving the gifts and sustaining us in holiness, but it is ours to open ourselves up to that. It is up to us to permit God in to make us love our neighbors and to make us more holy, more saintly, in preparation for eternity.

You’ve all seen the bumper sticker: “Jesus is coming, look busy”. In fact, what it should say is “Jesus is coming, let God get busy.” Let God get busy making each of us a temple of his presence, a mansion made ready for Christ when he shall come again. Let God get busy, his power working in us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Let God get busy, restoring whatever is lacking in our faith. This is what Advent is about. Jesus is coming again; let God get busy, making us ready to receive him when he does.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.