Worship

Sermon Archive

Sunday November 29, 2009
11:00 am - Saint Thomas Church
Preacher: Fr Mead

Advent Sunday: Greetings and Homily

Grace to you and peace from him who was, and who is, and who is to come, even Jesus Christ our Lord and God. Amen.

It is a joy to welcome you to the beginning of a new Church Year. This is the First Sunday of Advent. Our welcome includes the equally large, unseen congregation listing to us on the webcast – the webcast on our new website – same address, new website, for which we have received a cascade of compliments.

There are four Sundays of Advent leading up to Christmas Day. Advent derives from the Latin and it means “coming to” or “arrival.” These themes of coming are hallmarks of a faith which involves God’s revelation of himself, God’s self-disclosure to those who are given the gift of faith to receive the revelation or disclosure. At Saint Thomas on the first Sunday of Advent, also called Advent Sunday, we touch each of the advents, the comings, of God to us in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Historically and closest to the Christmas festival, there is the conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary his Mother. She conceived through the gift of her faith, by which she heard and heeded the announcement of the Angel Gabriel that she would become the mother of Christ. “How can this be?” she first responded to the angel, “For I know not a man.” Mary was a virgin and only betrothed to Joseph. The Holy Spirit would come upon her; God’s power would overshadow her. Therefore the conceived Child would be called the Holy One, the Son of God. And with God nothing shall be impossible. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” she said. Let it be. Mary was an active agent in her own and the world’s salvation through her Son’s incarnate Advent. So also was Joseph as the guardian of the Mother and Child.

Then there is the advent of Christ’s public ministry announced by his kinsman John the Baptist. The next two Sundays’ Gospels concern the work of this prophet with one foot in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament, this herald of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. This morning we heard the Angel Gabriel’s announcement of the birth of John, Christ’s forerunner, to his slow-to-believe priest-father, Zechariah.

But Christ has another Advent, yet to occur. We began today’s service with it. It is mentioned in every creed. That Advent is Christ’s Second, glorious return: He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom shall have no end.

All around us and within us are the signs of a perishing world, of things, people, and institutions, even of kingdoms and nations passing away. All things have a shelf life, especially manmade things. This past year we have seen financial institutions totter and fall, along with the assurances of an economy built on ever-expanding debt. But the greatest example of things believed too big to fail for me still seems like the day before yesterday, but for some of you it happened before the dawning of your political/cultural consciousness, the year 1989 – this was the peaceful fall of the Iron Curtain, thought to be permanent and impregnable, fortified by unimaginable military power. It all crumbled, suddenly, without any military conflict. What a miraculous change from the carnage of the Second World War which produced the Berlin Wall! There are many other examples of perishing, but this surely is one of the most dramatic in human history, and within most of our lifetimes.

Speaking of lifetimes, there is then the certain perishing that we experience within ourselves: illness, aging, all part of the great truth, that “in the midst of life we are in death,” as the Prayer Book says in the funeral service. The world rushes forward, seemingly endlessly, carrying us all off into the cold night of death.

The Gospel says that death is but an aspect of God’s good creation, a creation he visited personally in Christ to redeem. The Gospel says that we live in the meantime. The meantime is between Christ’s first, historic Advent and Christ’s second, glorious return. The Church expects, we wait for, the full fruition of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension on the other side of his death on Good Friday. For Jesus was raised from his tomb on the third day, manifestly revealed his resurrection to his disciples, and in their sight ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, that where he is there we might also be and reign with him in glory. The night of death is the sleep of nightfall before the dawn of the Day of the Lord. We do die, and we rest in the peace of Christ, awaiting the great wake-up call of his return: The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

When Jesus returns, every eye shall see him, even those who pierced him. All shall see the wounds by which he paid the price for our salvation. Christ shall take all God’s people home with him, to a new heaven and a new earth, for the former, perishing things will have passed away. Evil shall have its own, self-determined home in the abyss of its own darkness. But in God’s kingdom, there shall be no tears or crying, no death. There will be only life and joy, bliss beyond all imagining.

In the meantime, we have been given God’s two greatest gifts. The first is his love as our Maker and Redeemer. The second is time, time for his Spirit to turn us towards this love and receive it.

Our King and Savior draweth nigh. O come, let us adore him.