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.

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