Saturday, December 31, 2016
Advent IV ~ Year A ~ December 18, 2017
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday
of Advent
Year A ~ December 18,
2016
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Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
Behold, a virgin shall conceive…
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
Vigilance, repentance,
expectation are the themes of Advent.
·
Vigilance: waking up
to what is happening in history, staying awake and keeping watch
·
Repentance Changing
our mind, a new consciousness about what
is real, and living in accordance with it
·
Expectation:
or gestation — the pregnancy of history, the fullness of time, the
arrival of the Novum, the utterly new
and unexpected.
Advent is a season of paradox: expect the unexpected! The end of the world,
in a New Birth. The world pregnant and about to bring forth the Promise, and
the world unable to produce anything that can help itself. For the past couple
of weeks I’ve emphasized the disconnection between salvation and natural
processes — including the processes of the world and its history. But here we
are on Advent IV adoring the most basic of natural cycles: human birth. As day
follows night, as season follows upon season, as all the world renews itself by
its natural processes, so — it seems — is Salvation born from the processes of
nature. A young woman conceives and bears a child. What could be more natural?
Her pregnancy, however, is not natural at all. She Is a
Virgin; she has conceived by the Holy Spirit. God has entered history to alter
its processes, so that creation may coöperate in its own salvation, which is
entirely God’s doing, and outside the natural order of things. The two English
translations of the prophecy tell us something about our own underlying ideology
and our difficulty with the paradox. The Hebrew word almah means not only a “young woman,” as rendered in our modern
translation of Isaiah, but it means,
specifically, a “young unmarried
woman.” A maiden as opposed to a matron. As in English, a maiden is assumed to
be a virgin. In the ancient culture, if a young unmarried woman were not a virgin, she would be in a lot of
trouble: she would not be marriageable, and she might be treated very badly,
even killed. The connection between almah
as “young woman” and almah as “a
virgin" used to be so obvious that when Jewish scholars translated the
passage into Greek a couple of centuries before Christ, they used the
unambiguous Greek word parthenos, or virgin, which is why the Gospel, written
in Greek, uses the term. Our modern translators, I suspect, hesitate to
make this connection due to current cultural preferences, but it is
historically obvious. I would say, further, that it is quite important, and not
simply incidental.
For the virginal maternity of Mary is not just a symbolic way
to express God’s Incarnation; it is also the recognition that the natural
processes of this world, by themselves, cannot produce salvation. The Virginal
conception of Jesus does not diminish His humanity, but it emphasizes the fact
that creation cannot save itself. Salvation comes to the world from outside.
God must intervene. The natural processes of the world have a role to play, as
willing coöperator of God, but the fallen world has no power of itself to help
itself.
So, the Advent theme of
gestation recalls both natural process and divine act: God’s coming into
history to redirect it and transform its end. The cycles of time and season,
birth and death and birth again are not the Ultimate Reality. God is bringing
them to an end— a glorious End.
And Joseph
awoke from sleep. He took Mary as his wife, but she remained a virgin until she
had borne her Son. And he named Him Jesus: [YHWH Saves]. For He will save His people
from their sins.
AMEN!
MARANATHA!
COME, LORD JESUS!
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