Homily for
The First Sunday in Advent
Sunday 27 November 2016
The Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
A Parish of the Diocese of Bethlehem and The Episcopal Church
Readings:
At the beginning of this Mass we heard
again the words of the Exhortation. We
heard again the call to prepare our hearts and minds for our encounter with
Christ. It is fitting that we hear this
call for preparation today as we begin Advent.
Into the midst of this call for
preparation, visions of what this Advent shall bring when it dawns for each and
every one of us spring forth. I think
here especially of the vision we have seen in the reading from the prophet
Isaiah. He speaks of the whole world
being drawn to God. And by the end of
this brief but powerful reading, the prophet of God announces that those who
seek God will “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks; nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war any more.”
How wonderful this text sounds! Perhaps it even sounds too good to be
true. After all we know that the means
of warfare which Isaiah identified as he wrote these words in the Holy City of
Jerusalem have certainly evolved. And
from the Holy City itself and in places such as Syria and Iraq, it is quite
clear that the learning of war has continued on generation after generation.
Is this too good to be true; this vision of
the transformation of weapons? The answer
varies, my friends, depending upon where we ask the question and in what place
we set our eyes in search of the answer.
If we are simply gazing into this world, then it seems quite clear that
this vision is too good to be true, a pipe dream that cannot be brought to
fruition. Only remember that the sake of
Advent is not to gaze into this world.
The purpose of this time is to prepare ourselves for the dawning of the
Kingdom of God that transforms all things and brings, in the words of St. John
the Divine in Revelation, a new heaven and a new earth.
When we set our hearts on this, we are
reminded of the truth that this breaking into the world of the Kingdom of God
is filled with many and various ways in which God acts on our behalf, doing
those things that we cannot do for ourselves.
The vision of Isaiah is just a piece of this. But it is a wonderful piece. The day is coming when God and none other
will take the weapons with which we harm and injure others, and transform them
completely. On that day there shall be
no more warfare, nor instruction in how to do harm to anyone. The last battle, fought by God and won by
God, is that along with sin and death, warfare will be no more.
This Advent we long for that day,
especially when we see so strongly the need for that day and how it is so
clearly and painfully obvious that no one but God can bring about that
day. Only, my friends, we do more than
just simply sit and wait. Once more
recall that we are called to prepare for Christ to come to us once more. We may not be able to change the world, to
transform weapons of destruction into life-giving tools or cause others to
forget how to wage war. But we can, with
the help of God, strive for such a transformation in our own lives and in our
own bodies. Imagine for a moment that
the swords we carry are our tongues; the spears our hands. How much destruction we cause with both! And yet how blind are we to this because
often times we have bought into that great lie that “sticks and stones will
break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
How often do we break the Sixth Commandment with words that hurt and
kill?
Today, as we mark the beginning of Advent
and as we prepare to greet Christ, we are reminded of the truth that there is a
day coming when war shall be no more, when sin and death shall be defeated
forever. Let us never forget as we look
outward and see great needs that exceed our comprehensions to also take a look
inward. And where we find needs in
ourselves from which we can be easily distracted by the bigger things out
there, let us ask Christ to break forth even now into our lives in foretastes
of something greater yet to come, and so transform us, our words and deeds, our
very presence in the world, even as swords and spears that have become plowshares
and pruning-hooks, instruments of life instead of death, tools intended to
build up others rather than to tear them down.
Father
Timothy
Alleman
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