A Sermon for the Sunday before Advent
November 24, 2024 at Holy Communion
Jeremiah 23:5–8
“The Lord is our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
We categorize stories by how they end. Classically, all stories are “comedies” or “tragedies,” and although there’s a lot more that could be said about each of those, you’re not wrong if all you know about the difference is that comedies have a happy ending, and tragedies end, well, tragically.
The Christian year—by which I mean the Sunday readings that shape our encounter with God in worship—the Christian year is a story. It’s a story about Jesus, of course: we hear about his birth, his death, is resurrection and ascension. But it also becomes a story about us, as we accept the invitation to live with, in, and for the same Jesus who lives with, in, and for us.
But the Christian year is a circle: it repeats without interruption every year. So where does that story end? What does the ending of the church year say about what sort of story we are in?
Many people will tell you that Advent is the beginning of the Christian calendar—which makes today, the Sunday before Advent, the last Sunday of the year. And putting Advent first a certain amount of sense. It means that Advent and Christmas start off the story of Jesus with his birth, then we go through Lent and Easter and remember his death and resurrection, and then after that we learn how to live in faith based on what Jesus has done for us. The first half of the year is about Jesus, the second half of the year is about us.
If that’s how the story goes, it means that everything we do in church ultimately leads towards the practical life of virtue. The Christian faith becomes real when we live in love, humility, patience, and every other good habit we’ve been hearing so much about from St Paul over the past several months in our Epistle readings. There’s some truth in that.
But remember that the church year is a circle. Here’s a different way of telling the story of the church year: it starts with Lent and Easter. We become aware of the distance between us and God, and so we undertake a journey of repentance: that’s Lent. Then we have our foundational encounter with Jesus, dying to save us, rising to bring us life, returning to his Father and giving us a path to follow. We learn throughout Trinity Season that following Jesus on the road to his Father’s kingdom means living in kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and generosity.
But the story does stop there. In Advent, we shift away from talking mostly about practical good living, and shift towards themes like hope, patience, expectation. For everything we might do to “be good” here in this world, the longing of our spirits is still not fulfilled. We need God to come, to be with us, not just to be a God that we serve, but a God close to us. So we have Christmas: God coming into the world, fulfilling our longing for a God who lives with us.
If this is how the story of the church year goes, it means everything leads to union with God, intimacy with God, with the erosion of the barrier between us and God. It means that practical goodness, being a good person, is a crucial step along the way, but it’s not the whole deal. We can aim higher. Because God came down to live with human beings, we can aspire to live as God’s companions, always present to him in his divine wisdom and power even while we live in the flesh.
We believe and teach that God became incarnate, that God became a human being. But that’s not actually the point of Christmas: the point is that God united himself to humanity so that humanity could be united to his divinity. The point is not that Christmas changes God, but that Christmas changes us. St Athanasius put it succinctly: “God became man so that man might become god.”
For me, a short line from our Old Testament reading sums up this shift from working hard at living well toward yearning for closeness with God: it says, “This is the name by which [the Branch of David’s line] will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’”
The alternative to the Lord being our righteousness is, of course, that our good deeds and noble dispositions are what makes up our righteousness—I’m good because I do the right things and feel the right things. Good deeds are precious in the sight of God, but if the Lord is my righteousness, the final account on my life is not what I did or didn’t do, but how closely I lived with God.
“The Lord is our righteousness” means that God lives in us, making our inner life holy through his presence. Our sense of meaningfulness, our sense of rightness, our sense that things are as they should be, our confidence that things will turn out for the good—all of that “righteousness” springs from the assurance that God lives with you at the ground of your heart. When you say, “I,” you always mean, “God and I,” because you and God have become inextricably one. God and you, like husband and wife, have become one flesh. You share one life in common and day by day you deepen your communion of thought and feeling.
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