Saturday, December 12, 2015
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent
Year C ~ December
13, 2015
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
…we are sorely hindered by
our sins
Rejoice greatly and again I
say: Rejoice!
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Today’s propers
present us with a paradox. How can we rejoice when we are sorely hindered by our
sins? Our sins are Pharaoh’s army, about to massacre us at the Red Sea, and there
is no one to blame but ourselves. How are we supposed to rejoice? Let’s see if we
can find some instruction in the paradox. How timely that it should appear the
day after the Paris climate conference. Unless that succeeds, we’re pretty-much
doomed – sunk – some of us literally
sunk, like the poor Pacific Islanders. Whether the announced agreement is a success
is a matter of controversy. Some say it’s a good start, others say it’s close,
but inadequate – rather like when the lottery comes up with the number next to your
own – very close, but you still lose. Indeed, we are sorely hindered by our
sins.
It is clear that sin is the root of the problem – our
separation from one another, our inveterate insistence on advancing our own
interests as opposed to the common good. “Me and Mine” as opposed to “Us and
Ours”, Nowhere is this more clear than in our treatment of the poor – both in
our own neighborhood and globally. How relevant the advice of the Forerunner to
those he called a brood of vipers on
how to prepare for the Messiah:
Whoever has two coats must share with
anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.
Note what he did NOT say: “obey the commandments, purify
yourselves, avoid individual transgression, forsake your carnal appetites”. No.
None of that will help. The way we can prepare for the coming Doom is to share anything
we have that is extra. THAT is the indispensable change of consciousness –
repentance – that may fit us to rejoice in the Day of His Coming: the actual acknowledgment
that we are not separate but that we are
in this together, and to act accordingly in facing global warming.
Rational people of good will can no longer deny the looming calamity. Do we have the will to forsake
our sin? Maybe, but the jury is out. Alarmingly, the rich nations at Paris were
less than entirely willing to "…share with anyone who has none..."
And His winnowing fork is in His hand.
So how are we supposed to rejoice? This is the paradox of
Advent. It is not a matter of optimism or pessimism, which are worldly
temperaments, but of hope. We rejoice in hope, which is substantially the same
as faith and love. We give up all traces of fatuous optimism that imagines we
can overcome our sin on our own, that we can escape Pharaoh’s army by our own
efforts. We do have to make those efforts – just as the Children of Israel had
to leave and go out to the Sea – but even if we did everything we could it
would not be enough. Even if all the countries met their carbon-reduction goals,
it would not be enough. We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. Our
only hope is that God will Stir up [His]
power, and with great might come among us.
Our faith – our trust – is that God will do so. That is the
meaning of hope and the only cause of rejoicing. Our deliverance may not look
anything like the future imagined by worldly optimism or pessimism. Things, may
very well get unimaginably worse. This is what my old theology professor
probably meant by saying “it is always darkest just before it gets pitch black”:
the natural cycles of dark and dawn are not going to get us out of this one. Our
only hope is in the love of God, Who reigns even in what seems pitch-black to us,
Who has promised through the mouth of the Holy Prophet to
remove disaster from [us], so that [we]
will not bear reproach for it.
That is the Paschal Mystery: we are like the Children of
Israel on the shore of the Red Sea, caught by Pharaoh’s armies. I think our
present global cataclysm can be compared to their hopeless situation, except
that the army that enslaves and destroys us is our own global sin and we have no
one to blame but ourselves.
So, the Forerunner advises us, as he told the Brood of Vipers at the Jordan, to bear fruits worthy of repentance. Have
we really changed our minds about the way we are headed? Then let us put our
money where our mouth is. Let us in the so-called developed world give
everything extra to those who have not. Even if we do so, there is no guarantee
that it will be enough. The Advent paradox is that we are not to worry about
that.
The Lord is near. Do not worry about
anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let
your requests be made known to God.
Rejoicing is not divorced from supplication. We will follow this advice of Paul to the Philippians after
Communion today using the supplication
provided by the Prayerbook for times of war and calamity. We do so in hope that
God will speedily help and deliver us,
that the Sea will open for us to pass over on dry land. Our hope is not optimism,
but faith in God Who acts in history. This is the season, after all, in which
we expect a Virgin to give birth, and the One she brings forth to take away the
sin of the world. So that we may
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I
will say, Rejoice… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
