Sermon — November 28, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
It’s nice to have a gradual hymn again, isn’t it? That’s what that’s called – that hymn before the Gospel reading reminding you to stand up for the Gospel and then giving me a minute or so to walk back here and shuffle my papers. Eight hundred years ago it would’ve been a gradual psalm, sung from the steps of the pulpit. And “step” in Latin is gradus. The English words “grade” and “graduate” come from the same root. When you “graduate” from eighth to ninth grade, you are taking the next step in your education. Likewise, if something is “gradual” in the ordinary sense, it means that it doesn’t happen all at once, but step by small step. So while the “gradual hymn” is named after the gradus, the step up to the pulpit from which it was once sung, it’s nice to think of it as being “gradual” in our sense too, a way of easing us from the readings toward the gospel and the sermon, gradually.
The last few months in the church calendar have been a gradual kind of season, too. Not just because of our gradual recovery as we slowly return to in-person church, but in the church’s calendar itself. Week after week, we hear stories of Jesus’ parables and miracles in the low-drama season that follows the excitement of Easter and Pentecost. Even the names of the Sundays blend together like the words of a child counting in some kind of ecclesiastical hide-and-seek: the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, the Last Sunday after Pentecost, then — BAM! Ready or not, here Advent comes!
I say “ready or not” because there is nothing gradual about Advent.
Of course, we know that the secular version of Advent—by which I just mean December—is not a gradual season at all. For many of us, it’s a busy and increasingly-frenetic season as school semesters and fiscal years end, holiday planning and cooking and shopping accelerate, and our small apartments begin to overflow with hidden gifts. For others, it’s a dark time of the year, literally and metaphorically, when we feel the absence of those we’ve lost and wait for the dark nights and cold days to loosen their grip. Many of us pray to find just a few moments of peace and quiet to appreciate what the season is really all about.
And then we come to church and find that it’s not exactly “peace and quiet” season here either. I don’t mean that we’re busy with preparations for Christmas services or the pageant. I mean that the liturgical season of Advent itself is a bit intense. We don’t get four weeks that take us step-by-step through Mary’s eighth month of pregnancy, as she sets up a nursery and freezes lasagnas and rides ninety miles on the back of a donkey. (Ow.) We don’t get Joseph the Carpenter perplexed by the Ikea instructions on the crib. We get: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-26)
(“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”)
Again and again, our readings today point to a time of sudden change, a season or perhaps a single day that will mark a sharp break between the way things were and the way things are to be. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord” to Jeremiah, “when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel.” (Jer. 33:14) May “you may be blameless before our God and Father,” Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:13) “Be on guard,” Jesus tells us in the midst of holiday happy hours and hectic preparations, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” (Luke 21:34-35)
It’s often said that in the season of Advent we prepare for “two comings,” two Adventūs, to give you a bit more Latin. Not only for the First Coming, the birth of God the Son as the human child Jesus of Nazareth on Christmas Day, but for the Second Coming, his return to judge the world at the end of time. Not only, as the stunning Collect for the First Sunday of Advent says, for “the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility,” but for “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” And that last day, that second Advent, is coming “like a trap.” At the moment we’re least expecting it will snap closed on us, and we’d better be prepared.
Advent, it seems, is not a gradual season at all.
But dig a layer deeper and you see the quieter changes going on beneath. It’s telling that where Jeremiah has a Branch, Jesus has a tree. “I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David,” God says to Jeremiah. (Jer. 33:15) “Look at the fig tree and all the trees,” says Jesus to his friends. “As soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.” (Luke 21:29-30) This isn’t just a cute arboreal pairing by the lectionary committee. It has a point. Before every sudden branch springs up, before every green leaf sprouts forth, before every tree trunk pierces through the earth, there’s been a winter’s worth of gradual, quiet work. There is in every seed unthinkable potential, the power to transform itself, from nothing but the air and the sun and a few of the minerals in the dirt, into a towering behemoth, in a process so gradual that we don’t even stop to think of its majesty, because if we did, we may well faint from fear and foreboding. And while we know that the leaves on the trees are a sign of the sudden arrival of summer or spring, the seasons have been turning all the time, and it is in fact the gradual, quiet growth that enables the green leaves suddenly to spring forth.
St. Paul was a good writer, and in a nice symmetry he imagines two reunions in the future. He prays “night and day” that he “may see [the Thessalonians] face to face” (1 Thess. 3:10); and he warns them about a day when they’ll want to be “blameless,” the day when they’ll see Jesus face to face. (3:13) Thomas Cranmer, too, knew the power of a good symmetry, and in our collect for today, which he wrote in 1549, he balances “the time of this mortal life” and the day when we may “rise to the life immortal”— the time of this mortal life in which” Jesus came, and “the last day, when he shall come again.” But I wonder whether this poetic symmetry obscures what each is trying to say. The present and the future, are not equally balanced. The future is sharp, and sudden, and maybe a little frightening; the present is slow, and repetitive, and maybe a little boring. The future will happen once, some day; but we live the present over and over again, every day.
And so the things that they prescribe for us to do are not one-off events; they’re things that ought to happen over time. Again and again, we will need God’s grace to “cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” Slowly, over time, God will “make [us] increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” (1 Thess. 3:13) Gradually, slowly, our spirits’ branches gather strength until one day, the leaves will spring forth, and we’ll know that summer is near.
Advent is not a very gradual time. And yet it is. Christmas doesn’t come out of the blue; as abrupt and as wild as their imagery may be, Advent really does ease us toward it. And I wonder whether the very abruptness of Advent is part of its gradual work; whether these wild predictions of the turbulence and change, of the roaring of the sea and the waves, are the only thing that could really prepare us for the birth of a sweet and gentle baby, which is itself a world-unraveling event. These predictions that the world will be turned upside down, that the sun and the moon and the stars themselves will be changed, are there precisely to prepare us for the most extraordinary thing of all—not the day on which God sees us as we really are, but the day on which God reveals to us who God really is: all-powerful and powerless, begotten of the Father before all worlds and yet just minutes old, the one through whom all things in heaven and earth were made unable to lift up his own tiny head. What’s startling about Christmas—what’s startling about the day when almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, enters into the world—is precisely how gentle that day is.
The sudden first Advent of Christmas Day doesn’t actually give us much to do in response, and that’s okay; we don’t need anything more on our to-do lists this time of year. Nor does the second Advent that is to come. Christians have spent a thousand years making guesses about the arrival of the Last Day, and every single time, they’ve been wrong, leaving us only with the conclusion that maybe Jesus was right after all; it’s going to come when we’d least expect.
In between these sudden, world-shaking events, we live our gradual lives. Day after day, in ordinary ways, we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. We pray to God to strengthen our hearts and restore our faith. It can sometimes be hard to see any change. But I wonder whether, in and through all these gradual days, God is transforming us, as profoundly as the ancient prophets expect God to transform the world; whether in the season of Advent, God is not just over-turning our ideas of who God is, but our ideas of who we are, too.
So “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:11-13)