Saturday, November 28, 2015

Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent
Year C  ~  November 29, 2015

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life…  
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
NOW in the time of THIS mortal life. Not after We die, not at the end of time, but NOW –  in time – in THIS time, the TIME OF THIS MORTAL LIFE.  Anglicanism’s greatest liturgical scholar, the Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix called the liturgy the “sanctification of time.” For pagans, time is the enemy. Time wears us down and wears us out. In the end, time kills us. To be a creature of time is to be mortal.
Christ makes time holy. Liturgy sanctifies time. That is the Work of the People. Before our mortal eyes, time is shot through with Life, the inevitable darkness bathed in light, even NOW in the TIME OF THIS MORTAL LIFE. Therefore, one post-communion prayer says We have beheld your Resurrection, O Christ our God, We have seen the true Light.
Now, in the time of this mortal life, we cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light and the time of this mortal life becomes the Last Day, the Day of the Light Immortal.  The works of darkness we pray for grace to cast off are not so much our own squalid little individual failures but the gloom that seems to surround us and infect us collectively, the gloom that can penetrate our consciousness unto the despair that tells us darkness is the ultimate reality and death is the end. God gives us grace to put that off now and put on instead the “armor of light.”
This is a curious phrase, though, because we think of armor as a protective covering – a garment we put on to shield us from wounding assault.  A “chink in our armor” is the last thing we want – a flaw that will prove out undoing. But I think the metaphor should be reversed. We need not so much to keep the darkness out as to let the Light in! That is what our religion –epitomized by the Holy Eucharist – is supposed to do – not to shut out but to let in. To let the Light into our own hearts, to be sure, but also – and more importantly – to let the Light into the world. Liturgical worship is an opening for transfiguring Light. THAT is the sanctification of time, THAT is what the Eucharist does.

There are implications on every level of reality: the disarmament – to be sure –  of our own armored individual egos, but also the real subversion of the reign of darkness in political relationships, and the glorious illumination of the cosmos unto ages of ages.
Leonard Cohen, the great religious poet of our time, put it this way:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in. 


You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

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