A Message for Advent 2020
Some weeks back a book called “Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ” came across Lynda’s ‘radar’. In her words, she was only part way through the second review when she went straight to Amazon and purchased the Kindle version. This book is authored by Reverend Fleming Rutledge, one of the very first ladies ordained into the USA Episcopalian Church in 1977.
This book draws together a series of Advent season sermons by Rutledge over the years in which she explores Advent as a time of rich paradoxes, a season celebrating at once Christ’s incarnation and His second coming, and she masterfully unfolds the ethical and future-oriented significance of Advent for the church today.
Having read myself through many of the reviews, this one particularly caught my eye - Fleming Rutledge has to be one of the most daring preachers I know. With moral courage and intellectual rigour she tackles challenging texts and nagging questions. She is unafraid to proclaim the truth that may hurt—because that same truth sets us free. I have squirmed, yet I am stretched—to deeper faith, to higher hope, to broader love.
As the ‘book’ is in Kindle format on Lynda’s mobile phone there has been limited opportunity to-date to read from it, but thankfully many of these sermons are available through various websites. This has allowed me to take the opportunity to read/listen to several from my laptop. Do yourself a huge favour, and either look to buy your own Kindle version of the book, or as I have done go and seek out on-line some of these Advent-themed messages from Rutledge.
This is by way of a long introduction to today’s message, which is to some extent inspired from recent reading of Rutledge’s sermons.
In the church, we are right now in the season of Advent. Superficially, Advent is understood as a time to get ready for Christmas, but in truth it’s the season for contemplating the judgment of God. Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks all of us in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too easily, or we will fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. As our Lord Jesus tells us, unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness: “If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23) Advent should encourage us to take a fearless inventory of the darkness without and the darkness within.
Advent begins in the dark. Understanding Advent begins with verses like these from Isaiah 64:6-7:
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins.
The significance of the birth of Jesus Christ will forever elude us if we are unable to take an inventory of the gravity of the human condition. Advent is designed to help us acknowledge the pervasive presence of the power of sin and death. Christmas is not some kind of “triumph of the human spirit.” Rather, it is an invasion of the irresistible grace of God which is never predictable, never deserved, and always arrives unexpected.
The counter-cultural nature of Advent, therefore, cuts across all the untruths and deceptions that surround our cultural Christmas. Observing the season is the least we can do to acknowledge that everything is not always going to be “merry and bright,” that Christmas is not “the most wonderful time in the year” for most people, that “silver bells” are not going to produce “smile after smile” in the city streets. No sentimental notion of an imaginary moonlit Bethlehem can dispel the darkness of anger, violence, poverty, oppression, lies, and despair that is the true condition of most of our world.
In several of Rutledge’s Advent sermons she makes reference to an African-American spiritual song that I have never previously heard (and with limited on-line presence). This song has a question-and-answer format, or, rather, call-and-response:
What month was my Jesus born in? Last month of the year.
What month? January? No…February? No… March? No…
Last month of the year…
Born of the virgin Mary.
What does this suggest to you? I think it means that the tide of human possibility was running out. Month after month, we thought that we could fix whatever was wrong. New resolutions, new products, new leaders, new technology, new strategies, new medicines, new regimes—surely we can fix it. Month after month the statistics tell the story: better lives for rich Arab sheiks, worse lives for African peasant farmers. Better lives for Scandinavian welfare recipients, worse lives for Syrian refugee children. Better conditions for those rich enough to escape Covid lockdowns, worse for most of the rest of the world stuck in lockdowns. Put your finger in the dike here, a leak springs-up over there. We look to the stars, we look to the earth, but for this word which we speak there is no dawn. Human potential has been explored to the infinite power and it is a dead end.
What month was my Jesus born in? Last month of the year.
What month?
Last month of the year…
Born of the Virgin Mary.
What does this suggest? When the tide of human possibility has run out, divine intervention takes its place. On the stroke of midnight when the executioner is due at the prison door, there is a blaze of light. At the farthest extremity of human hope, the Lord God Almighty slips into the world in disguise. Last month of the year; born of the Virgin Mary. It is no accident that these words appear: the Virgin Mary. The singer wants us to know that a miracle has occurred. The early Christians recognised that Isaiah’s prophecies meant that something had happened that had its source in another sphere of power. And so the prophet Isaiah declares: The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; a light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness (Isaiah 9:2).
Lying at the heart of the entire Jewish-Christian enterprise are these words from Isaiah 9:7 - The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. If we do not believe that God does things, performs things, accomplishes things according to His purposes, then the whole story collapses. This is what faith knows: heaven cannot hold our God, nor earth sustain Him. In the last month of the year “a stable place sufficed [for the birth of] the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.” When the very last human hope is gone, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; a light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness (Isaiah 9:2).
At precisely this point in our lives, whoever we are and wherever we are in our struggles, whatever our disappointments and failures, whatever our anxieties and fears, this Word arrives. In the last month of the year, at the last tick of the clock, at the bottom of the world’s midnight the message comes: our future is in God through the Lord Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, “God of God, light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not created.” These heavens and this earth will flee away and as the book of Revelation promises, we will receive a new heaven and a new earth.
There will be no gloom for her that was in distress.… The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; for those living in a land of deep darkness, a light has shined upon them (Isaiah 9:1-2)
Joy to the world! The Lord is come!
Title
Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ
Author
Publisher
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018
ISBN
0802876196, 9780802876195
