Advent II

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

Last week, I referenced the Medieval themes of Advent, the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. Our emphasis has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold strictly to these themes. For example, I have never been up to the challenge of exploring the theological concept of Hell on the Sunday before Christmas, where either the annunciation or the nativity is our Gospel reading. However, after all these centuries, this very clearly remains judgement Sunday—in our readings, in our psalm, in our collect—the theme of judgement is present. Whether you are a lifelong Episcopalian, formerly of some other Christian tradition, or not much of anything, religiously speaking, before finding your way here, we reside in a regional culture that has given us all some degree of familiarity with the fire and brimstone preacher. Energetic, ecstatic, usually wearing a suit and wiping his face with a handkerchief, this man’s favorite topic of preaching is the immanent, wrathful judgment of God, presented in a way that often fails to answer that pressing question of preaching: Where is the good news of Our Lord in that? Our Creeds say that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Judgement will come for us all and it is something to be taken seriously, not something to dismiss and tell ourselves we need not be concerned with. The image of Christ as judge is not something outdated, not something people standing where I am talk about to people sitting where you are to scare you or control you. It is a tenant of our faith, an essential part of the story. And our collect today asks that we “greet with joy the coming of Jesus our redeemer.” How is it we greet Christ the judge with joy? How do we look at judgement in the context of Advent, in the hope of all things made new in Christ? Our reading from Isaiah this morning is a messianic prophecy, a passage about the coming messiah, the Christ. We are told that he will be a righteous judge endowed with “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” He will give fairness to the poor and equity to the meek. He will destroy the wicked. His aim is not simple punishment or vengeance, but justice and fulfillment. We get a further description of that holy mountain from a few weeks ago: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” This is what the judgment of the Lord accomplishes, a world turned upside down. Or rather, a world turned rightside up for the first time, and this is difficult for us lovers of the disordered world. Our notions of power and glory are both subverted and fulfilled in Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, born out back in the stable, living with no place to lay his head, dying on a cross and buried in a borrowed tomb. Christ returns to make right the world in justice and mercy. In justice, the mighty are cast down and in mercy the lowly are raised up. Or perhaps it is a mercy that the mighty are freed from greed and excess, and justice that the lowly are raised up to the dignity they have long possessed but never experienced. Perhaps it is 2 perfect mercy and perfect justice, inseparable and simultaneous, rewriting the landscape of the human heart in preparation for the reign of Christ. A popular motif in the art of Medieval churches, from the country parish to the cathedral, is the image of the Last Judgement. These rich tableaux depict Christ in glory, surrounded by Saints, with angels presenting the instruments of his passion. Below the dead are being raised for judgement, some are lifted to heaven, others being dragged down to hell. In many of these paintings, Christ is enthroned on a rainbow, a symbol of God's covenant with all creation, of divine promises kept. He is always in loose clothing, prominently displaying the wounds of his passion. Christ did not come to us once as a lamb to return as a lion. Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever has always been both the lamb of God that was slain and the conquering lion of Judah. He is infant king and doomsday judge, God and man, Alpha and Omega. The same Christ who went willingly to the Cross for our redemption is the same Christ that comes to judge in glory. He does not descend from the clouds with some newfound wrath or shortened patience. He arrives bearing the mercy and justice that have been inseparable from his character since before the foundation of the world was laid. In these doom paintings, pope, prince, and peasant ascend together to the company of Saints and angels. On the other side, pope, prince, and peasant are also carried by demons into hellfire. There is no status in Church or society where redemption cannot reach, but, conversely, no social or ecclesiastical status alone secures redemption for us (“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”). We stand on that day in a fearsome equality, the reason why, save an identifying hat or handheld object, many of these paintings portray the rising dead as nude figures. It is who we are when all else is stripped away that is judged. And it is the wounds of Christ that are the instruments of our judgement. Each of us bears the guilt of sin that pierced his sacred body, yet he in absolute power submitted himself wilfully to the infliction. His retaliation was mercy, his victory was surrender. By the wounds of his Passion, death, hell, and the grave are defeated. And we cannot help but give way to fear and trembling when we stand before this inexhaustible mercy. We are compelled to surrender, to be totally transformed. And so we continue to build on this Advent theme, not only the coming of Christ on the last day, but also how each of us is to keep watch for his coming, how we are to greet with joy our saviour. Last week we talked about how, while we are to await Christ’s coming in fullness at the end of time, we will not greet him as strangers, for he is with us here and now, in Word and Sacrament, in our hearts and minds. So how do we greet with joy Christ enthroned as judge? By understanding that it is not our own power, but his mercy and grace that is shaping us into his likeness, that is by the power of Spirit we are being prepared even now to meet him on that last day, not as who we are in our faults and failings, but as who we are in Christ. So let us turn to him each day in surrender, that we may stand before him with joy as his beloved. Amen.