The Armour of Light: Advent, Penitence and Joy

“The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light.” Romans 13.12

We have come together this morning for a short time of meditation, prayer and silence in order to open our hearts to the mystery of Advent. In the following two addresses, I hope simply to suggest images and themes for your prayers that emerge out of the Prayer Book lections for Holy Communion and Morning and Evening Prayer appointed for Advent, readings which teach us this season’s rhythms, themes and concerns. I will keep my reflections brief in order to ensure significant space for private prayer which is the real gift this morning offers us. In this first address I will say something about Advent and its place in the liturgical year and the larger theme of sanctification. In the second address I will look more closely at the central theme of Advent: the coming of Our Lord not only in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, but his coming again at the end of time to judge the quick and the dead. Judgement, no less than love, is the central theme of Advent and we must struggle to understand the relationship between these two realities.

But let’s begin with the theme suggested in the title of this first address: Advent and its relation to penitence and joy. Every Advent, the Church begins again its yearly pilgrimmage through the liturgical year. The season of Advent is a season of tensions. For example, as we celebrate the Church’s new year with a season of hope and light, the nights grow longer and darker. And as our culture rushes headlong towards December 25th in a frenzy of consumption and merrymaking, we put on the purple of mourning and practice the ascetic disciplines of fasting, prayer and almsgiving in anticipation of the birth of Christ. Hope and penitence, joyful expectation and repentence are the hallmarks of the Church’s keeping of Advent. But why? Why must our hopes, our deepest desires -- all of which find their fulfillment in the birth of the Christchild -- why must this hope be bound up with penitence? And how can we hold in our hearts both penitence and joy?

Dante, the greatest medieval poet, provides one answer. His Divine Comedy is about the ascent of the soul to God made possible through the mediation of his beloved Beatrice. Beatrice is the young woman Dante fell in love with during his youth in Florence. She died at an early age and in this poem she prays for Dante’s soul as he journey’s towards heaven. Written in three volumes, Dante quite consciously models each volume on a stage in medieval traditions of courtly love. In the first stage, the lover becomes aware of his unworthiness as he reflects upon the beauty of his beloved. That is to say, the experience of love leads to self-knowledge. Dante recounts this in the poem’s first volume, the Inferno (or Hell). In the second stage, the beloved condescends to the lover with a smile of encouragement so that his straining after virtue will continue. This occupies the second volume of the poem, the Purgatorio (or Purgatory). The final stage is the union of lover and beloved, the Paradiso, or Paradise.

Our hope this Advent is like Dante’s hope in the first book of the Divine Comedy. Dante begins his journey in a dark wood, “the right road was wholly lost and gone”. The number and variety of Dark Woods through which individuals labour is infinte. For each of us, no doubt, the wood is at times more and at times less severe. Dante’s wood is simply made up of all those things that keep us from knowing that we are loved and loving others in return. Any lack of love in our soul is a forest, a wood, in which, sometime or another, we will lose ourselves through hardness of heart, or anger, or fear. Dante’s journey begins where every conversion begins, with the failure or the insufficiency of every attempt to pretend that there is no woods, that there are no feelings of isolation, acts of unkindness, or fear. He begins at the point where his own efforts to make and control his world are shown to be insufficient. This can come about through suffering, or heartbreak, or the disatisfaction that, curiously, often attends the attainment of long sought desires. The months before Christmas always make painfully clear the extent to which our world seems convinced that somehow consumption is a way to satisfying our desires for love. And we consume in any number of diverse ways: obsessive relationships to work, to money, even to loved ones. It is on the far side of this attempt to consume our way to heaven, at the point where our own efforts fail that our hearts open up to God.

Our mortality, our tendency to illness and to heartache, all of these things are reminders that we are not alright and that our hearts seek (and need) what the world is not able to provide. Poised on this precipice between unfilfilled desires and the promise of something wholly new, Dante tries early on his poem to return to the woods where he has been wandering. We too may seek precisely in our experience of being lost a return to old habits. This of course is why we have habits: comfort and ease. When St Paul encourages us to awake from our slumbers in the Epistle for the first Sunday in Advent he is commenting on just this tendency. But the way forward for us, as for Dante, is in fact not a retreat to the places of our sin, hardness of heart, insecurity and fear, but rather a movement forward, a turning, a conversion. This movement always involves a recognition of our sinfulness, the confession of our waywardness, and a knowledge of our need for God. This is why the first book of Dante’s poem is a journey through Hell -- here he encounters every sin that is in his heart actually or potentially, from lust, to murder, to the betrayal of family and friends and even of God himself.

All of this is simply to say that Advent is a season of joy and of penitence because it begins in the first instance with our joyful (and ultimately liberating) awareness of our own limitations. This is joyful because it occurs in the light of the promise of Christ’s arrival, announced by the prophets in the Old Testament; it requires penitence because our beloved awakens in us a desire to be whole just as he is whole, and to purge from us all that is not love.

Everything I have said suggests that conversion is a matter of extremes, that we must come to the end of one rope in order to reach out for the saving possibility of another. This is true, I think, of Christian patterns of conversion as they occur over and over again in each Christian’s life. They are extreme moments, even when they occur quietly. We must come time and again to the end of one way of living, to the failure of one more set of assumptions about God, even, at times, to a precipice on which our faith itself rocks back and forth, in order for the mystery of Christ’s love to catch us once again. Dante’s wandering in the dark wood is no more or less dramatic or heroic than our own wanderings. The grace of Advent is to make us aware one more time of our need to be converted. As St Paul teaches, “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 put upon us the armour of light.”

What I would like to leave you with for your mediations between this first address and the next is simply a thought about the first line of the Epistle for the first Sunday in Advent. Remember that St Paul tell us, “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another.” These words are both a council of perfection and a judgment and they illuminate what I have tried to suggest in this address: to reflect even briefly on this commandment is to know in your heart that you cannot do it. It is not within our power to fulfill this summation of the commandments. Paul’s injunction itself forces us towards the one in whom our weakness is made strong. The armour we must put on in this life is Christ himself so that we can become capable of offering and exchaning only love with one another -- only love for love, and even love for hate and love for evil. The kingdom of God which descends from heaven in the person of the Christchild has only one currency, one mode of exchange: charity. Until that currency is entirely our own, we are in a dark wood and must seek the one who can lead us from it: “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another.”

Christ’s Three Advents: Love and Judgment

“Owe no man any thing, but to love one another...”

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

In the previous address I suggested that if Advent is the beginning of the Church year, then it begins where our conversion begins, by highlighting our need for a love greater than the love we can manage on our own. How else can we fulfill St. Paul’s injunction to “Owe no man anything but to love one another”? On our own, it is impossible, and so we are left either to make the best of a bad situation or to seek a way out of the dark wood of imperfect loving through a perfect love. Christmas offers us the perfect love that Advent seeks.

In this address I would like to make some very simple observations about the season of Advent which arise from the lessons for Holy Communion the first Sunday in Advent. But first, I think, certain dominant Advent themes should be mentioned so that we can hear clearly the messages of the Gospels and Epistles in the coming weeks.

Preaching some 1600 years ago, St John Chrysostom suggested that the season of Advent is like two mountain chains seen from a distance. The first and nearer chain is the incarnation of Christ in Bethelehem some 2000 years ago. The second and further chain is his second coming at the end of time to Judge the world. From a distance, the mountain chains are indistiguishable. And so, in Advent, we are urged to commemorate both Christ’s first advent in the manger and his second on the last day. More than this, the Church will suggest this season that the Incarnation of Love in the manger carries with it the burden of Judgement and that the Judgement of Christ at the end time is the work of Love. The mysterious relationship between Judgement and Love is the mystery at the heart of Advent.

That Advent is concerned both with the birth of Jesus and his coming again is clear from the readings for the daily office and for Holy Communion this season. At the daily office we have been reading the prophet Isaiah who foretells the birth of the messiah and we have also been reading fom the book of Revelation which tells of Christ’s coming again. Moreover, the first Gospel of the Advent season is the Gospel for Palm Sunday. Remember that Palm Sunday begins Holy Week, when we commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection. Placing this Gospel at the beginning of the Church year is a reminder to us that the Christchild we await is the same Christ who will die for us on Good Friday, Rise on Easter Sunday and return for us the Last Day. In addition to all of this, the church has traditionally kept Advent as a time to meditate on the four last things, death, judgement, heaven and hell. And finally, our Advent collect, to be read every day and at every service during Advent, is a prayer for holiness now so that we may be judged holy when Christ returns. Strikingly, there is no mention of Christmas at all in the Advent collect. All of this suggests clearly that Advent is a time not only to prepare for the Christchild, but also for Christ’s return.

The Advent theme of Christ as judge and saviour is captured beautifully in the whole raft of medieval paintings that depict the infant Jesus on the lap of his mother with a globe in one hand topped by a cross. The middle ages were profoundly aware that the Christ born to Mary was a judge and ruler. In Byzantine icons of Mary and child you will have seen how the infant Christ embraces his mother -- he is the strength in the images (the child, as the Romantics say, is father to the man). These images came to exist because the ancient and medieval church always had before it who the Christchild is: he is not just one child amongst many, neither he is one prophet amongst many. Rather, he is God, the Creator of the world, the Word of the Father, the true image of God in whose image we are made. This is critical for our keeping of Advent. The child born on Christmas is God. This must be remembered -- it is why we read St John’s Gospel on Christmas eve in which we are reminded: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. For the infant Jesus to lead us out of the dark wood we must recongize God in him. In some sense, the work of our Advent disciplines is to cleanse the eyes and ears of our hearts so that in Jesus we will see the Word made flesh.

I have prefaced this address with two verses from the First Sunday in Advent’s readings for Holy Communion. The first we have discussed already: “Owe no man anything but to love one another”. The second comes from the day’s Gospel: “And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” There is, I think, a tension here. How is the love of St Paul present in Christ’s overturning of the tables in the Temple? Certainly we see here clearly the two themes of Advent expressed: love and judgement, but how do we understand their mutuality, their relationship to one another?

It goes without saying that judgement is not a popular topic. Very few of us enjoy being judged. And yet, our whole life is made up of a series of judgements, from the small and seemingly insignificant, to the large and life changing. For example, we judge what Christmas gift best suits a loved one. More significantly, we judge which causes our time should be given to, we discriminate between good and evil, we censure cruelty and we esteem kindness. These judgements form who we are and seem essential to being human. Having said this, it is also true that our judgements of others can carry in them the seeds of visciousness and so Christ warns us that with the same measure that we judge others we too shall be judged. There is, however, no question that judgement is a part of our lives.

But God’s judgement of us is a fraught topic. Who and what does he judge? On what basis does he judge? Do we desire this judgement or is it a hang over from a time in the life of the Church best forgotten? I would suggest that the Bible lessons for the first Sunday in Advent teach us that it is in fact only through God’s judgment that we can love one another. Remember that in our Gospel Jesus comes into the Temple and overturns the tables where goods are being bought and sold. St Paul has told us in the Epistle that the true means of exchange between humans is love and yet, in the Gospel, we see in the very heart of the Temple, the very heart of the Church, other forms of exchange. On the surface, it just looks like business. The money changers are there, after all, day in and day out: they are just trying to make a living. But in fact any form of exchange, any currency that is not love, must be cast out of the Temple of God. That is to say, it must be cast out of our hearts. The temple Christ enters in our gospel is in each of us, and the tables he overturns are our hearts in their many and varied self-deceptions, illusions, fears and sins. His judgement is on all in us that mitigates against love of God and love of neighbour. This judgement is our salvation, it is the greatest work of mercy. Without it we are left, again, to our own devices.

Love’s first act of mercy, you might say, is to teach us who we are and this judegment liberating. To pretend that there is no judgement, to pretend that the evils of this world do not call for a judgment, to act as if the suffering of innocents in Sudan and in the Middle East, that the hoarding of wealth and the violations of our brothers and sisters well-being that are perpetrated by us and around us daily do not cry out for a judgement, is to suggest that there is nothing wrong in the world. This makes a mockery both of our own suffering and of the suffering that inflicted on others.

Judgement is the life-giving promise that things which are amiss can be corrected, that what is crooked can be made staright, that what is not yet whole can be made perfect. It is to this judgement that Advent bids us submit ourselves so that what is imperfect in us can be transformed by the love of God.

I would like to conclude this address with an observation. Advent, it is often suggested, is a forgotten season. Where the world rushes headlong towards Christmas, Advent bids us wait and watch knowing that the one who comes, comes both to heal and to judge. We wait and we watch so that our hearts can be prepared to receive the Christchild. But it is not simply the world around us that rushes towards Christmas. We, the Church itself, the members of the Temple, are too often the forgetful ones. It is not the world that forgets, but the church itself. The prophets of the Old Testament did not deliver their message to those outside the faithful, to those outside of Israel. Rather, they always spoke with, challenged and judged the people of Israel themselves. Likewise, for this Advent to be the beginning of our own transformation will require in the first instance our quiet and patient and humble attention to God’s judgement of us. Only then, as our hearts are remade, can we be to the Church and the world a source of renewal. It is not non-Christians who must remember the “reason for the season”, but Christians themselves.

The work of Advent is simply to watch and pray, earnestly expecting the appearance of our Saviour and cultivating in our hearts the desire that the appearance of love will bring with it the end of all that is not love in us, and the transformation of our lives. We watch for the first coming of Christ, and we also watch for his second advent as judge of the world.

And perhaps most importantly, we watch for his third advent. That is, we watch for his advent in each of our hearts. May this be the day of his Advent there.

Watch ye alway, for that ye know not at what hour the Lord will come again: eventide, or haply at midnight or at the cockcrow, or morning. Watch ye therefore alway lest if suddenly he cometh he findeth you then sleeping. What then I say unto you I say unto all: Watch ye alway.