A Sermon for Advent Sunday
December 1, 2024 at Holy Communion
Isaiah 62:10–12, Romans 13:8–14, Matthew 21:1–13
“They shall call them, Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken” (Isaiah 62:12). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
There was a time when senior clergy often did not live in their parishes. Bishops, archbishops, even sometimes rectors, would spend their time in the papal court at Rome or the imperial court in Austria or wherever else they wanted to be, and would leave the daily tending of their flock to someone else.
But this was not a good practice, and everyone knew it. So from time to time the church would issue new rules about “canonical visitations,” essentially laws mandating that clergy, bishops especially, visit their dioceses and parishes.
But these visits were not just, “Hey, good to see you, thought I’d come by” friendly encounters. The bishop’s job was to make sure that the church was taking care of the faithful and that everything was in good working order, so a canonical visitation would usually involve some sort of examination.
The priest would be the first target of the examination. Was he leading worship diligently and correctly? Was he visiting the sick? Was he correcting the wayward? The examination came for laypeople too. Were the church wardens administering the parish fairly? Were the service guilds well-organized? The examination also addressed moral issues. Was there unreconciled conflict that needed to be addressed? Were there any notorious drinkers or philanderers who needed to be challenged? And so on.
So of course, if you knew that your bishop was coming, you would make sure that everything was ship-shape. And that was the point.
If we pay careful attention to Jesus’ parables, we’ll sometimes notice that sometimes Jesus compares his Father in heaven to unsavoury characters. Think, for example, of the parable of the unrighteous judge who will give a decision to someone who pesters him enough (Luke 18:1–8). In one case, Jesus compares his Father to an absentee landlord who builds a vineyard and then goes away (Matthew 21:33–41). When he wants the revenue from the vineyard, he doesn’t even come in person, but sends servants (v 34). First his servants (v 35) and then his son (v 37–39) are mistreated by the tenants. But eventually that master will return and, as Jesus’ audience says, “Put those wretches to a miserable death” (v 41).
Jesus’ point is that the day when God visits his people will be a hard day for those who are not expecting him to come—which is why, in another parable, he compares us to servants whose master will be returning late in the night. “Stay awake,” he says, “ for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42).
Language like this—unexpected arrivals, visitation, staying up late to watch for a guest—it’s all over our Advent Bible readings and hymns. That’s because Advent is a time of looking forward. We yearn for time of deeper fulfillment. We feel that, for all of our striving, we still live at some distance from God. But we don’t know how to reach out to him, so we just have to hope and pray that he will come and visit us. Our expectation only increases because we know that God has promised to come and live with us, to be a God close to us so that we can be a people close to him (Deuteronomy 4:7).
So we have it in our Epistle today. “The hour has come for you to wake from sleep” (Romans 13:11). Why? Because our “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (v 11). We are coming steadily towards our end, and the glorious moment when we meet our Lord is getting closer every day. But it also means that we need to get ship-shape: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime,” he says, “not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy” (v 13).
This is also what we get in our Gospel reading. As the crowds celebrate that God’s Messiah has finally arrived, that “God has visited his people” (as in Luke 7:16), Jesus marches right into the Temple of God and cleans house. “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” he tells the money-changers, “but you make it a den of robbers” (Matthew 21:13).
But what do we make of this? I remember two weeks ago at the Bible study. The Gospel reading was the parable the separation of the wheat and the weeds, in which the wheat is gathered into the barn and the weeds are burned (Matthew 13:30). Set alongside an Old Testament reading about the final judgement, one person at the Bible study said the quiet part out loud: “Is this about hell? Is that what we’re supposed to get out of it? That we better smarten up or we’ll end up burning like the weeds?”
Yes and no. On one hand, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) so far be it from me to blunt a pointed message in scripture. There’s no denying what scripture plainly says: the day that God pays a visit is only a day of consolation and reward, but also a day of examination. On that day everyone will be humbled before the holiness of God, who will purify even the righteous.
But on the other hand, no, the point of all this talk about getting ready to meet God is not to make us afraid of hell. “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Our attitude towards God is trust: even though we expect that his glory will need to challenge and transform us in ways we cannot even yet imagine, we trust his goodwill not to destroy us but to save us (1 Timothy 2:4).
If we turn back to our Old Testament reading, it tells us everything we need to know about how to understand these images of examination and judgement with an attitude of confident trust. When salvation comes to the holy city bringing both rewards for righteousness and recompense for evil (Isaiah 62:11), the people receive a new name. “You shall be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken” (v 12).
The reason why those canonical visitations needed to be instituted back in the day is because the clergy were not seeking out their people; they had forsaken their cities instead of tending them. They lacked love, and their apathy toward the spiritual condition of their flock communicated this apathy.
Like the fiery furnace in the story of Daniel’s friends, heated seven times the heat of any fire on earth (Daniel 3:19), “our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), because he has a burning heart of love. He is a God who seeks out his people, a God who does not forsake his city, but visits it, tends it, purifies it like gold (1 Peter 1:7), weeds it like a garden. He entirely desires our well-being, and utterly hates our habits of self-destruction.
So now is the time to awake from sleep. It’s time to get ship-shape—not because we are afraid of the God who will visit us, but because we delight in the love he shows for us by seeking us out.
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