A Homily For Advent 1

Lectionary Readings for The First Sunday in Advent, Year A: Psalm 122, Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

As we enter Advent and begin our liturgical year anew, I want to briefly reflect on the tradition of preaching about The Four Last Things on successive Sundays in Advent and on Advent as a season. I’ll also include a bit of hopefully meaningful wrangling with the layered, coterminous meanings of the word “advent.”

The Four Last Things traditionally are Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. If you’re less familiar with this tradition, these might be some of the last four topics you’d associate with Christmas, as they’re a far cry from the usual chintzy, commercialistic images of Christmas that we see on our televisions each year. If we stay at the surface level, it’s very difficult to see what these weighty theological concepts have to do with the familiar vignette of a baby lying in a manger. However, if we look more closely at the word “Advent”, we might be able to more closely relate the Four Last Things to the Nativity.

The word “Advent” comes from the Latin verb advenio, advenire, “to come or to arrive”. Although “come” and “arrive” are technically synonyms in that both words signal motion that originates in one place and ends in another, discrete location, I want to suggest to you that there are a few nuances of note here. Who/what exactly is coming to us and where/when is it arriving? In Advent, as we prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, we also prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. This means that we are simultaneously contemplating and occupying two different points in Jesus’s scriptural timeline.

When we speak of the Second Coming of Christ, we are describing Jesus’s return to judge the living and the dead in the eschaton, the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of the Reign of Christ. Isaiah prophesies about the eschaton in today’s passage, describing a time when there will be no warfare or intercultural violence and Jesus will be our Judge: “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2: 4). Jesus’s judgment, as depicted here, is not dread-inducing; instead, it quite literally ushers in a new age of mercy that obliterates conflict and fundamentally repurposes the instruments of death-dealing that we know all too well, culminating in a new justice that Jesus alone executes. Already, it’s apparent that, while it is a “last” thing, we might need to look at judgment with new eyes. Read as part of Jesus’s return, judgment becomes another facet of the all-encompassing love and mercy of God rather than an exercise of godly terror. Similarly, our ideas about Jesus’s arrival into a confused and corrupt world that wasn’t ready to receive him (sound familiar?), might also need revising in light of what we’ve just outlined about the Second Coming.

Jesus’s birth, his arrival in the world as true God and true man, as the Incarnate Word of God, is his First Coming. This season, we prepare our hearts for yet another impending winter, yet another revisiting of the story of the Nativity in scripture, yet another year in which the world, desperately in need of salvation, yearns to receive Emmanuel, “God with us”. We spiritually ready our hearts for Christ’s coming by meditating on the prophecies that herald his birth, on Christ’s own teachings, and by offering up our lives, souls, and bodies to God. Often, Advent is also a time in which many parishes read a text together to invite communal spiritual inquiry. Preparation of these sorts is important because, like Lent, Advent is a penitential season. Both Advent and Lent present opportunities for deep self-examination and recommitment of our lives to God, and, should we choose to do so, we might avail ourselves of the Sacrament of Reconciliation as well. On the subject of confession, it’s important to keep in mind as well that penance is not about punishment, but, rather, facilitating true repentance. The point of confession is to both acknowledge the ways in which we’ve fallen short of God’s requirements of us and, more importantly, turn our hearts back to God so that we may proceed in the work that God has set before us in right relationship with our neighbors. The sacrament of Reconciliation also sends us out of the confessional with a recommitment to forgiveness, not only as received when we are penitents, but exhibited by us as servants of Christ in the world, honoring Christ’s sacrifice for the whole world. It also bears saying that Jesus, born into the world to redeem it, must die in order to do so. Jesus’s death is the link between his birth and his reign, and it removes the link between us and our sin. In the midst of life we are in death, and, in the midst of contemplating the start of Jesus’s early life, we must also reckon with his death. In a manner of months, our collective joy at the birth of Christ will become sorrow as we wait for Jesus to rise from the tomb during the Triduum (But, as we know, death doesn’t have the final word, even if it is a “last” thing. More on this later in the liturgical year). For now, while we watch and wait for the arrival of the Christ Child, as Paul’s letter and Luke’s Gospel admonish us, we must be vigilant, for no one knows when the Second Coming will come about. We do, however, have a bit more knowledge about what some have called the Third Coming, which I’ll very briefly touch upon now.

The Third Coming of Jesus is his entrance into our hearts each time we invite him there and receive him through the Sacraments through prayer, with thanksgiving. Truthfully, God has never stopped being with us. We, however, have often either separated ourselves or been separated from God. But, as the days grow shorter and the forces that undergird violence, destruction, and war swirl around us, we put forth earnest efforts to recommit ourselves to God and continue being agents of mercy and love in the world, making ourselves ready for the Second Coming, whenever it shall appear, and preparing to spiritually receive the infant Jesus. I wish you a safe and happy Advent, and may we all welcome Jesus into our hearts, laying them at the Christ Child’s feet.
JKR+

Lady Chapel Arrayed in Sarum Blue, Christ Church New Haven (photo: Jae Kirkland Rice). The frontal features the Latin words “Ave Maria Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum” (“Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee.”)