Advent I

Father Tyler Proctor

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Advent, more than any other event in the Church year, draws me to Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot’s masterful sequence of poems. Eliot is a poet concerned preeminently with time–an unalterable past, a future we cannot determine, a present we struggle to be aware of, the challenge to find meaning under these conditions. It is quite bleak stuff. But after his conversion to Anglicanism, Eliot began to meditate on time in light of eternity. We tend to think about “eternity” as tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow forever, in a straight line. Temporality without finitude, time without end. But this is, thankfully, inaccurate. Eternity stands outside of linear time, with no beginning and no end. It is unchanging and unchangeable. It is all things rightly ordered, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in harmony, residing in the mind of God. Eternity stands unchanged as a thousand empires rise and fall. Eternity is present to us here and now, always and forever. It is where God is. It is where Christ comes to us from. It is where we are being carried to our ultimate hope and proper end. “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from”, writes Eliot in the last of the quartets. In Advent, we end one Church year and begin a new one. We look forward with anticipation to the end of the secular year where we mark the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, an event in history’s past, the beginning of his earthly life, the beginning of the Incarnation. At the same time, we look ever forward with as much anticipation to the return of Christ, man and God, body and spirit, into our realm of time, marking its end. In this season, beginnings and endings interweave and overlap. “But about that day and hour”, says Christ in our Gospel, about that day and hour when time ends, “no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” However, Paul tells us “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.” That day and that hour are closer to us today than they were yesterday. How do we keep Christ’s command to stay awake? How do we, as our collect says, “cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor 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”? During Advent, we will be using Eucharistic Prayer I in the Book of Common Prayer. In referring to Christ’s death on the Cross, it reads that he “made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death and sacrifice, until his coming again.” In the Mass, we do not repeat or add anything to Christ’s one perfect sacrifice that fulfills all sacrifice, nor do we merely memorialize an event long in the past. We instead unite our offerings to Christ’s offering at the Last Supper, the union of the bread and wine to his Body and Blood offered on the Cross. We do not simply put on a reenactment, but become present to these events that took place in time and opened up for us eternity. In each offering of the Eucharist, we do not remember Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure long since dead to us, but we encounter anew Jesus the Christ, the risen Christ, the living Christ, who sits with his nail scarred hands at the right hand of the Father, 2 who fills for us the bread and the wine with his body, blood, soul, and divinity, who sends his very Spirit to transform us and shape us in his likeness. If, in Word and Sacrament, in the prayers and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, we meet the living and risen Jesus, then we will not find ourselves unprepared for the opening of eternity and the end of time. Just as the Shepherds greeted him with joy and praise at his first coming, so we will be ready to greet him at his second. In the Medieval tradition, the four Sundays of Advent correspond to the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. While we no longer keep strictly to these themes, I think it is still fitting to acknowledge death on this first Sunday. As we turn towards the last things, death must be looked at, plainly and soberly. We must accept time, finitude, the ending of all things. We cannot escape it and we must pass through it…but death is not the final word. Time is not all there is. Let us turn to the one who conquered death, let us meet him who carries us to the life of eternity. As the years move forward, one after another, the Church year moves in a circle, repeating a narrative about eternity entering into time, repeating the story of our salvation that sanctifies and redeems time. “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling”, writes Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” By his first coming, Christ gives us all we need to be ready to greet him at his second. So let us return, again and again, to Our Lord at his altar, wherein the common food of our temporal life is transformed into the nourishment of our eternal life. Amen.