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Advent Sermons, 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
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Advent Sermons, 1998
The Rt. Rev. John T. Cahoon, Jr. |
Sermons on this page:
Advent IV, December 20, 1998
Tomorrow is the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. Thomas was not with the other disciples when they first saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. When they told Thomas, he replied, "I'm not going to believe you until I can see the wounds in his hands and his side and until he lets me stick my fingers into them."
That is why he has the nickname, "Doubting Thomas."' It doesn't seem to me that his doubting was a particularly horrible sin. In the first place, it wasn't all that common for dead people to be seen walking around later on, and as soon as Jesus showed him his wounds, Thomas surrendered his doubts, saying, "My Lord and my God."
We are going celebrate Jesus' birth later this week, in case you didn't know. Last week we talked about the birth of his cousin St. John the Baptist. John's birth was miraculous because his parents appeared to be too old to conceive a child. What went on with them sounds exactly like what happened to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis. God said they would conceive their first child; their age made them doubt; the baby came anyway.
The miraculousness of Jesus' conception was of a greater order of magnitude. His parents had never slept together -- his mother was still a virgin. It is most important that we not fall into what we could call century-ism or era-ism -- which would be to think that God had the miracle of the Virgin Birth take place in the first century because people were superstitious and ignorant enough to believe in such things then.
If you read the accounts in St. Matthew's gospel and St. Luke's gospel, you discover that the first two people who doubted the possibility of conceiving a child without both a male and a female parent were the first two people to hear about it -- St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.
These were people who knew where babies come from, and who were able to see that what they were being asked to take part in was in fact a miracle -- a suspension of the rules of how things non-nally go by the man who wrote the rules in the first place.
The archangel Gabriel told Mary God wanted her to be the mother of his son. Using her native shrewdness, she asked, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Gabriel explained how it would happen, and then used as a clincher -- to remove all doubt -- the example of John the Baptist's mother. Look at your cousin Elizabeth. Everybody thought she was too old to conceive a child, and she is six months pregnant. That should make you confident that he can give you a baby without using a man -- with God, nothing shall be impossible.
St. Joseph visited his fiancee shortly thereafter, and she gave him a sort of good news/bad news report. "The bad news is I'm pregnant, but the good news is that the father is the Holy Ghost." St. Matthew makes it plain that Joseph just plain did not believe her -- he doubted, too. God's word spoken to him in a dream by an angel took his doubts away.
Now I don't bring all that up just to show that religious doubt and questioning are healthy things -- healthy if you pursue your questions until you get answers as the doubting Bible characters did. The doubts of Joseph and Mary also suggest something about Advent we don't often think about.
What I am talking about is what they went through for the nine months of her pregnancy -- which we mark in the church calendar as the period from Annunciation Day on March 25 until Christmas itself. We have no reason to think that there was anything extraordinary about Mary's preganancy other than its beginning.
But still -- what can they have been thinking? What could they have been expecting? They knew the baby was going to be a boy, so that mystery was solved. They knew what they thought had happened to them was not an hallucination, because the pregnant Mary met her cousin Elizabth, pregnant with John the Baptist, and John leapt in her womb for joy at being in the presence of the saviour. But it still must have been puzzling for them -- as well as a bit frightening.
Joseph and Mary's experience in those nine months exemplifies a question we all ask about all sorts of things, "I wonder how it is all going to turn out?" Today we say farewell to Advent. Advent tells us Jesus is going to come back, Advent tells us that if he doesn't hurry up, we are going to die before he comes back.
The Bible gives us a good bit of information about how the world is going to end -- how all that is going to turn out. But we still wonder how our own lives and the lives of people we care about are going to turn out. One message of a funeral is -- this is how it turned out.
The New Testament assures us that as long as we remain faithful in our union with Jesus, it doesn't matter how our lives come out in this world. We know how things are going to turn out in the longer run -- we are going to go to heaven, where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes.
The only people who will go to hell are the ones who insist upon going -- and we can believe people will make that choice at the end, because we see them making the same choice now. I see no reason to doubt any of that one bit.
The Collect: O Lord, raise up, we pray thee, thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 4: 4 - 7
The Gospel: St. John 1: 19 - 28
Advent III, December 13, 1998
The pregnancy of John the Baptist's mother caused a certain amount of comment within her own circle. Everybody thought Elizabeth was too old to conceive a child. Everybody thought her husband Zecharias the Priest was also a bit long in the tooth for that sort of activity. But when Elizabeth's pregnancy was announced, and then when her baby was born, everybody was happy for her anyway.
Elizabeth had what many women might consider to be an ideal pregnancy. When her husband showed some doubt in her ability to conceive, the angel who had come to him with the news struck him dumb. So Zecharias was silent for the whole nine months Elizabeth was, as they say, with child.
Boy children in Israel were circumcized on the eighth day of their lives. Circumcision bestowed membership in the people of God and also provided an occasion to give the boy his name. One custom in Israel in the first century was to name a first-born son for his father. When the people attending the circumcision wanted to name this baby "Zecharias," both his mother and father insisted that he would be named "John."
"John" means "gift of God." It was the name the angel told Zecharias to give his son -- as a reminder of the rather surprising fact that the son existed at all. This indication that Zecharias had finally decided to pay attention to the angel made God allow Zecharias to put down his portable blackboard and speak.
It is hardly surprising that this weird sequence of events amazed the onlookers. Note the emphasis on the word "all," as St. Luke tells us, "And they marvelled all ... And fear came on all that dwelt round about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judaea. And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, what manner of child shall this be?"
What manner of child shall this be? What did all these bizarre goings-on portend? What was God going to make baby John grow up to be? Zecharias used his newly rediscovered speaking capacity to sing a psalm-like song we call the "Benedictus" -- which begins, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people."
Toward the end of this "Happy Circumcision" song, Zecharias looks at his eight-day old son and says, "Thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the highest; for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways." Or, "You, my son, will be called a prophet of God, because you will be the one who will appear just before the Messiah to tell people he is coming."
What Zecharias said was based upon a prophecy from the prophet Malachi. Malachi said that before God sent the saviour, he would send another man to get things ready for him. He wrote, "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me." Zecharias was saying, "My baby boy is going to grow up to be that man."
Some thirty years later the Messiah himself used the same prophecy to describe the work of the baby who grew up to be John the Baptist. Jesus asked the crowd, "When you went out into the wilderness to hear John preach and to watch him baptize, were you expecting a weak, tentative character who was used to a comfortable life?" -- of course not.
"Were you expecting to see a prophet?" -- I hope so -- but John is even more than a run-of-the-mill prophet. John is the one about whom Malachi wrote this hundreds of years ago: "Behold, I send my messenger before thy face which shall prepare thy way before thee."
At the end of John's life, Jesus used the same prophecy to describe his work that his father had used at the beginning of his life. John is the messenger who got things ready for Jesus. This morning's collect suggests that what John did to prepare people for Jesus' first coming is what the ordained ministry of the church is supposed to do to get people ready for his second coming.
Zecharias' song continues on to say that his baby will, "Give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins through the tender mercy of our God." Jesus and John the Baptist and the church announce the coming of salvation. Salvation means wholeness, health, a proper relationship to God.
So in the terms Zecharias puts forth, salvation comes from knowing in your heart that God forgives your sins, and that he forgives us because his attitude toward us is tender and merciful. We are not saved by our accomplishments or our own obvious religiousness and rectitude and general wonderfulness, we are saved because of God's tender mercy.
Today's collect calls upon bishops, and priests, and deacons to prepare the way for Jesus by doing what John did -- turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. John's message and the church's message are the same, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand."
What manner of child shall this be? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.
The Collect: O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee; Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 4: 1 - 5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11: 2 - 10
Advent II, December 6, 1998
Because of today's epistle, and the imagery today's collect borrows from it, the Second Sunday in Advent is known as Bible Sunday. St. Paul tells us the scriptures were written for two connected purposes. The first is to teach us what we need to know about ourselves and about God. He writes, "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning." The second, related purpose is to give us hope -- what the collect calls, "The blessed hope of everlasting life ... in our Saviour Jesus Christ."
The hope we get from the scriptures is a certain hope -- a guaranteed hope. It is not uncertain hopefulness -- on the level of "I hope I go to heaven, but I can't really be sure." If you have committed yourself to Christ, heaven is a certainty -- not a possibility. Christians can be confident of the ultimate happy ending.
That most important piece of learning helps remind us that Christianity is a religion of revelation. What we believe about God is not what we have thought up by our own best efforts, but, instead, what he has told us -- what he has revealed. The first and most important deposit of that revelation is the Bible, and the Holy Ghost has continued to help the church discern and apply God's revelation throughout history, just as Jesus promised he would.
Today's gospel takes up a subject which we would never have been able to think up on our own -- we have to hear the word of God himself to find out about it. The scene comes during the last week of Jesus' earthly life -- the time after Palm Sunday when the crowd thought he should have been doing less teaching and more recruiting of an army to fight the Romans.
Jesus takes the disciples to the hill overlooking Jerusalem which is called the Mount of Olives. He wants to discuss the issue of the end of the world, and he wants to do it there, because Old Testament prophecy associated the coming of the Messiah and the end of the world with the Mount of Olives.
Jesus reveals to the disciples that some day the world is going to end, and he is going to come back to earth. The signal that those things are beginning to happen will be major disruption in nature -- both in the sky and on the land. When the disruptions start to occur, that will be as sure a sign that he is coming back as new leaves on trees are a sure sign that summer is coming back.
He contrasts two possible attitudes toward the disruptions -- the signs of the end. People who don't understand what is going on -- those who do not know or do not believe the word of God -- those people will be in a state of complete terror. Jesus says that their hearts will fail them, because they will be so afraid about the upheavals on earth and the shaking of stars and planets in the sky. He prophecies, "Upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity."
He tells the disciples not to be terrified, but, instead, to be happy and optimistic when they see the signs of the end. He says, "When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh."
Christians will have nothing to fear and everything to be excited about. The sooner the signs appear, the sooner Jesus will come back; the sooner Jesus comes back, the sooner we shall go to heaven. We shall be able to remain calm in the midst of all the disruption, because God has revealed to us what is going on, and we believe him.
As St. Paul puts it, "We, through patience and comfort of the scriptures, have hope."
The Collect: Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Savious Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 15: 4 - 13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21: 25 - 33
Advent I, November 29, 1998
In the fisherman spirit of St. Andrew I went trawling on the Internet recently looking for some information about him. I came up with some great new material which I'll tell you about tomorrow night. I also discovered a sermon preached in Glasgow on a recent St. Andrew's Day by a dissenting minister. I am not particularly partial to cutesy sermon illustrations, but I thought one he used was worth stealing and repeating.
The devil calls his three chief imps together. He says to them, "We need a new campaign to try to steal some more souls. Does any of you have any bright ideas? The first imp says, "This isn't exactly new, but why don't we try to tell them that there is no God?" Satan replies, "The mainstream churches have stolen that idea, and it has never worked very well for us anyway." The second imp says, "Why don't we tell them that there is no such thing as the devil?" Satan says, "That never works -- we'd have to get them to stop reading newspapers and watching TV too." The third imp says, "Why don't we just tell them that there is no hurry."
Why don't we just tell them that there is no hurry? The third imp obviously won the day. The devil wants us to believe that there is no hurry -- that we have all the time in the world -- that there is no real deadline -- that we can wait until we feel like getting around to it to pull ourselves together and get straight with God. Why don't we just tell them there is no hurry?
In the section of Romans which is today's epistle, St. Paul says quite clearly, "There is a hurry. We can't afford to wait around for later on to come. The time for decision is now." He writes most pointedly, "Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light."
The reason for the hurry is two-fold. We know that two events lie ahead of us which will bring things to an end. They will destroy the idea that there is still a later on that allows us to stall around forever. The two events are our own deaths and the return of Christ to earth.
No matter which of those events comes first, the aftermath is going to be the same. We are going to come face to face with Jesus. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. "Why don't we just tell them there is no hurry?
So if there is a spiritual deadline, and if now it is high time to awake out of sleep, and if we are going to face the judgment of Christ himself, what should we do?
In a few moments I am going read you the Long Exhortation from the Prayer Book. The Exhortation takes seriously the idea that every celebration of Holy Communion is a rehearsal for the end of the world. At Holy Communion we meet Christ and we face his judgment. At the end of our lives -- at the end of all things -- we shall also meet Christ and we shall also face his judgment. Coming to Communion gets us into practice for the end. The same thing happens both places.
The Exhortation borrows language from both Jesus and St. Paul to tell us how to prepare. It says, first, "Judge yourselves, brethren, that ye be not judged of the Lord." That means, "Evaluate your life by God's standards, so he won't have to do it for you."
Then it says, "Repent you truly for your sins past." That means, "Admit that the evaluation has turned up some shortcomings, so confess them, and say you are sorry you are responsible for them." Then it directs, "Have a lively and steadfast faith in Christ our Saviour." That means, "Be confident that he is going to forgive you and not hold any of what you have done against you."
To follow up and conclude, the Exhortation commands, "Amend your lives, and be in perfect charity with all men." That means, "Resolve with God's help not to do the bad things you have been doing anymore; and resolve with God's help to act toward everyone on earth in the way that is best for them -- the way you would want them to act toward you."
Summing up, the Exhortation says, "So shall ye be meet partakers of those holy mysteries." That means, "If you do those things -- examine yourself, repent, accept Christ's forgiveness, and shape up -- you will be receiving Holy Communion properly -- in the way that will do you the most good. We should add, "if you make a habit of doing those things, you will always be ready to face Christ's final judgment without being afraid.
What Jesus wants from you is not a list of your credentials and your many selfless achievements. What Jesus wants from you is repentance for your sins and confidence in his love. He wants that from you at Holy Communion, he is going to want the same thing from you at the end.
Why don't we just tell them there is no hurry? Just go ahead and try.
The Collect: Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 13: 8 - 14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21: 1 - 13