William Yagel
Grace Radford
November 20, 2022
Advent 1, Year A
Please join me in the collect of the Day from your bulletin insert:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of
darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of
this mortal life in which your 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 living and the
dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and
for ever.
Amen.
Our collect of the day you will hear again later, because we are celebrating Morning Prayer instead of Eucharist it comes later in the service, just after the suffrages. It may be my favorite collect in our book, I love the language, cast away the works of darkness, and put on your armor of light! Good stuff!!! Anyway, as you likely gleaned, some of the words of that collect come right from our Epistle reading from Romans today as Paul writes:
“For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
The Day is near.
Put on the armor of light.
My friends this is our good news today as we enter a new year in our church. We return today to the beginning. In our liturgical cycle we return to the purple hangings and vestments of our season of contemplation and reflection. We return to a season of joyfully awaiting the light that came into the world, that is coming into the world, and that light will come again. I want you to notice that this is a season of Joy, but a different type of Joy than we hope to experience in a month or so at Christmas. That is the celebratory culmination with all the bells and whistles. And unlike Lent, the other purple season, where we remove all trace of the Alleluia from our liturgical celebrations, and enter into a time of self-denial, Advent is asking us to do something else entirely. It is a time of reflection, but it holds none of that somber nature. It is a time of quiet, yes. But it is primarily a time of making space for our coming savior. A time of considering the implication of God who would join us in our earthly pilgrimage.
I want to remind you that we are not entering today into simply a historic and static reenactment of the time just before God became incarnate as human. We are not engaging this season so we can act surprised on Christmas Eve and pretend we didn’t know what was coming. We know that Christ came into the world 2000 years ago, lets not act as though we don’t. Recognizing the historical birth of Jesus is an important part of our work, but if that is all we accomplish in this season we are missing the boat! We are also, and in my opinion more importantly, welcoming the coming Christ into our lives here and now.
This is the time when we as a church community and as individuals prepare ourselves by making ourselves hungry for the light of Christ in our lives here, and now. In her Magnificat, Mary captures exactly what we need to remember in this season. Her poetry, fittingly, comes after the annunciation when an angel of the Lord told that she would bear the Son of God. She is visiting Elizabeth and in one of the verses of her hymn she says that God has “filled the hungry with Good things, but the rich he has sent away empty.” I hadn’t considered this verse until I was recently reading the work of the Czech Theologian Pius Parsch, who offered that Mary reminds us that “in order for bodily food to nourish us, we must feel hunger.” Food without hunger is unrewarding, and those without hunger are without need, and are sent away with nothing. Hunger then, is central to our relationship with God.
Now, we are always in need, all of us, so please don’t hear me offering that God’s grace is conditional. Rather, I am saying that in our faith we recognize a need to acknowledge that hunger. We recognize that it is our condition to move away from God, to imagine self-reliance and independence. That is why we are called to joyfully participate in this season. We are invited into a season of reflection and penance so that we might create that hunger for relationship with God.
A hunger for the light.
I love that the light of the season will follow us in this hunger. We are living in the shortest days of the year for the coming weeks. Where the darkness leaves later and later in the morning and that comes to us earlier and earlier in the evening. We are moving through darkness until the 21st of December and as we make our pivot on the earth’s axis and roll back toward the sun, our days will begin to expand. The light comes into the world both spiritually and physically.
Our season of preparing for the light of Christ to come into the world is paralleled by the season of God’s creation also creating a need for the Sun to return. Bending back from the long cycle of the solstice, leaning toward the light. We find companions then in our natural world who also long for that warmth, that light.
In the Advent gifts you will find on your way out you are invited to embrace this solar reality. The darkness of the season is a companion to the light. One must have the other. We are invited to create a need for the light. We recognize the darkness to let the light shine all the more brilliantly.
So, we start slowly, one candle at a time. Gradually bringing more and more light into this space. This wreath and the candles which we light are tools for our contemplation and reflection here as a community. Maybe you have your own advent wreath at home, or maybe the table tents will afford you the same.
Know that our work in the next month is therefore extremely counter-cultural. Everyone knows the challenges of scheduling in this season, and if we are not careful by the time December 25th rolls around we are done with it. The stress that our consumer culture places on us can be stifling and maddening so we can easily arrive at our moment of celebration exhausted by the preparation. Instead, we are trying to slow our pace and to recognize the darkness and to yearn for the light that has come, that is emerging, and which will come again.
Paul, then, when he is inviting us to put on our armor of light and to live honorably as during the day is inviting us back into a holy life with Christ. So put on your armor of light and join me to Joyfully create space for the Christ who is coming into the world.
Amen