ADVENT The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ
Fleming Rutledge
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2018 Fleming Rutledge All rights reserved Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ISBN 978-0-8028-7619-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rutledge, Fleming, author. Title: Advent : the once and future coming of Jesus Christ / Fleming Rutledge. Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018018269 | ISBN 9780802876195 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Advent. Classification: LCC BV40 .R88 2018 | DDC 263/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018269
Lines 1–4 from “Of course I prayed,” line 1 from “I saw no way - the heavens were stitched,” and lines 15–18 from “Just once! Oh least request” by Emily Dickinson from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson. Brief excerpt from pp. 55-6 from LIFE TOGETHER by DIETRICH BONHOEFFER and TRANSLATED BY JOHN DOBERSTEIN. English translation © 1954 by Harper & Brothers, copyright renewed 1982 by Helen S. Doberstein. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Advent at Ground Zero Christ Episcopal Church, Charlottesville, Virginia Second Sunday of Advent 2001 Malachi 3:18–4:1
Advent: never has this exceptional season been better timed to meet the situation at hand than it is this year. Three months after the eleventh of September, Advent is a preparation for Christmas in the war zone. Advent says Christmas is not for sissies. Advent says—flatly contradicting the Christmas song—all your troubles are not going to be “miles away.” Advent says this world is full of darkness, and it was into “such a world as this,” not fairyland, that the Son of God came.1 Advent is the season that forbids denial. It brings into the open all the turbulent emotions we have been feeling since September 11. When that American Airlines plane full of Dominicans went down just out of JFK last month, there was not a functioning person in the United States who didn’t have a moment of panic. Three weeks ago, unbelievably, we had anthrax up in rural New England where I go to get away from it all. We don’t quite know how to conduct ourselves; we want to help out the economy by shopping, but when Sarah Jessica Parker, no less, says she doesn’t feel like buying anything for Christmas, you know that the merchants of America must be feeling anxious. Advent is perfectly in tune with these moods. Advent has long been the season that embodies the anxieties and fears that force themselves upon us, citizens of a world in danger. Around the world, we see a universal human phenomenon. We deal with insecurity by dividing up the world into good and evil. Everyone has been in overdrive doing this since the eleventh of September. It would be absurd if 1. A verse from a much-loved Christmas carol sung by the King’s College (Cambridge) Chapel Choir says that Christ has laid aside his divine glory, that he “[has] come from highest bliss / down to such a world as this.” “See amid the Winter’s Snow,” text by Edward Caswall.
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The Sermons: The Armor of Light it weren’t so deadly serious. Here is Osama bin Laden in his cave, separating humanity into two groups: the faithful and the infidels. Here we are on the other side of the globe, talking about civilization versus barbarism. I don’t mean to equate the two sides in this instance. The point is that the human tendency to make these absolute distinctions is universal. And, of course, we always—always!—place ourselves on the side of the good guys. The lectionary readings for the Sundays just before Advent seem to be making these same distinctions. Malachi, for instance: “You shall distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him. For behold, the day comes, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts” (3:18–4:1). That sounds like Osama bin Laden, don’t you think? The righteous are going to stamp out the wicked, reducing them to ashes. That’s too close for comfort right now—very scary stuff. This is the sort of passage that we read just before Advent, every year. And then there is John the Baptist, Mr. Advent himself. We just heard from him. “He said therefore to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ ” (Luke 3:7). John’s message was hardly one of inclusion and tolerance: “[The Messiah’s] winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matt. 3:12). That leaves us with a huge question: Who is wheat and who is chaff? Affluent white Episcopalians have not embraced the theme of judgment— at least they didn’t before September 11. We have tended to think of God exclusively as loving, merciful, kind, forgiving, and embracing. The trouble with that is that it makes God sound like a pushover. Perhaps we are newly receptive right now to the Old Testament presentation of God as a warrior who defeats evil. But not just the Old Testament! The New Testament is full of warlike imagery also, not only the image in Revelation of Christ as a conqueror on horseback, but also Paul’s conception of the Christian life as conflict, and the challenging language of Jesus himself. The biblical imagery shows God as the great arbiter of all things who brings justice and righteousness upon the earth. We have heard much talk of this since September 11. When we unexpectedly find ourselves facing ferocious enemies, we change our minds about things: suddenly we are glad to remember that God judges evil. We are delighted to hear that we are going to tread down the wicked under the soles of our feet. But who exactly are “the wicked”? Who is wheat and who is chaff? Opinions change. As the whole world knows by now, one of the great shifts in 282
Advent at Ground Zero public consciousness since September 11 resulted from the stories about the bond traders going down the stairs of the World Trade Center and the firemen going up. Before the attack, people in the financial markets, software specialists, and other technocrats were considered most valuable people—masters of the universe, if you will. Now it is the firemen who are the heroes. The New Yorker magazine cover showed children dressed like firemen for Halloween. Women are going down to the site to fling themselves at firemen. A cartoon shows a mother saying to her little girl, “Why do you want to marry a doctor? Why not a fireman?” In view of all this, it is probably a good thing—a reality check—that a disappointing episode took place a few weeks ago when angry firefighters, demonstrating at the World Trade Center site, insulted and punched their fellow heroes, the police. Mayor Giuliani, world champion fan of the FDNY, declared that they had committed sin, if you can believe that. Today’s heroes are tomorrow’s sinners. Idolizing people is never a good idea. There is an underside to everyone. A few days after the 9/11 attack, the great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote an op-ed piece about his experiences at ground zero. Professor Gould is respected all over the world. He knows everything there is to know about the natural sciences; about human nature, not so much. He tells a genuinely moving story about volunteers giving out food to the rescue workers, but then he falls into a common mistake. He writes that “Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people.”2 This is a very naive view of humanity. Let me give just one example. I used to go to an Italian restaurant in New York City. The very popular owner was an incredibly friendly, exuberant man who created a warm, hospitable environment for his customers. There is no doubt in my mind that he would be first in line to donate food to rescue workers. However, as a pastor, I was in a position to know for a fact that this man regularly beat his wife, sometimes in front of their grandson. Is that man evil or good? Is he wheat or is he chaff? All the great writers know that the line between the two is blurred in all of us. In Following the Equator, Mark Twain wrote, “If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?” A reviewer wrote of novelist Muriel Spark (author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) that she does not “campaign for the goodness of one character as against the evil of another,” but is interested 2. Stephen Jay Gould, “A Time of Gifts,” New York Times, September 26, 2001.
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The Sermons: The Armor of Light in “the dark formations that lie within.”3 In a recent book called The Fragility of Goodness, Tzvetan Todorov asks why the Jews of Bulgaria were not sent off to the death camps (I didn’t know that, did you?) and discovers that the reasons were mixed, not purely altruistic by any means. The author concludes, “we can never draw a straight line and consider ourselves completely innocent.”4 So then, why does the Bible constantly say things like this: “You shall distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him” (Mal. 3:18)? Isn’t that, in fact, one of the themes of the Bible? Isn’t it one of the themes of Advent, this distinction between the godly and the ungodly? Well, yes and no. Yes, because the meaning of life is serving and honoring God. That is what our worship this morning represents. But no, because there are “dark formations” in each one of us. And no, because none of us serve and honor God as we really should. All of us are in rebellion against God in one way or another. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”5 Saint Paul makes this very clear in his letters to his churches. We must be disarmed by God. That’s the theme of Advent. God is on the move to disarm us all—as Isaiah tells us in today’s first lesson: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. (Isa. 2:4) This will not happen without judgment. But note this: the judgment of God is not just judgment on someone else. There’s a very important verse in the first epistle of Peter: “The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?” (I Pet. 4:17). That puts the matter in the right perspective. God’s judgment will be exactly fair and right, and we can count on him to establish justice and righteousness in the earth, as the psalm says; but the judgment does not take place in a remote location, over in Tora Bora, as if the evil people were all far removed from us, the righteous. The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God, and that means you and me. 3. Andrew O’Hagan, “Double Lives,” review of Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark, New York Review of Books, April 26, 2001. 4. Chris Hedges, “They Saved the Jews, but Few Were Heroes,” New York Times, May 26, 2001. This article was about Tzvetan Todorov, the Bulgarian historian of ideas. 5. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 59.
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Advent at Ground Zero I don’t want to be misunderstood here. Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists must be stopped. Period. It looks as though that grim task will be the work of our generation. But America must not lose its soul in the process, and Christians must help to see that that does not happen. There is something built into American society, and I believe it is because of Christian influence, that helps us to understand that there is no sharp line to be drawn between the wicked and the righteous. It is the openness and generosity of our society, our respect for each individual, our commitment to human rights, that makes us the envy of the world. If we lose this, we lose everything that we are fighting for. Some people in high places are saying that suspected terrorists do not deserve the protection of the American Constitution. But that is exactly what we don’t want to do, get into talk about the deserving and the undeserving. The very definition of grace is “favor shown to the undeserving.” That’s what makes it “amazing grace.” If it were favor shown to the deserving, it wouldn’t be amazing. We need always to have before us the lesson from the epistle to the Romans: “There is no distinction; all have sinned, all fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:22–23). Wars must be waged with resolve, but resolve is not incompatible with Christian humility. The lesson from Malachi states that the righteous are going to trample the wicked under their feet. This is tricky. We want to trample the wicked, we are delighted to trample the wicked, but we want to be able to define who the wicked are. That’s where Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson went wrong. They wanted to blame the abortionists, the lesbians, the feminists, and the ACLU. “I point my finger in their face,” said Mr. Falwell, imagining himself to be Elijah no doubt, with no indication whatever that he himself also is under God’s judgment. Ultimately, it isn’t for us to decide who is a good person and who isn’t. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). Our appointed task is to fight evil itself, not to divide up the world into good people and bad people. I went to a Presbyterian church in New York City on the Sunday after the attack. The pastor, a noted preacher, was remarkably direct in his sermon about the rage that he felt about what had happened. He was in a passion about it, as a matter of fact. It was a very warlike sermon. But he said something very important along the way. He said, “I don’t hate the terrorists. I hate what they have done.” That’s where the line should be drawn. It isn’t that this clergyman was soft on terror. You could tell that he wished he were young enough to sign up for combat duty himself. But he drew the distinction in the right place—not between people or groups of people, but between what Saint Paul calls Adam and Christ, the old human being and the new. 285
The Sermons: The Armor of Light True Christians continue to have a lot of the old Adam in them all their lives. We don’t understand that very well; we compare one Christian to another based on our superficial impressions of their supposed goodness, but we can’t really compare one person to another in that way because none of us knows what sorts of inner pressures another person is under, or how that person would behave under certain conditions. The test of a true Christian is not degrees of goodness, but quite simply the love of Jesus Christ—his love for us, our love for him, shining through in spite of everything. If one thing is clear in the aftermath of September 11, it is that the people who went immediately to the top of the list of those most admired were those who gave their lives for others. Madonna, Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, the People magazine “sexiest man of the year” will always have their fans, but they will never be able to evoke the tidal wave of emotion that arose around the world and that will never be forgotten. The firefighters’ deeds and the sacrifice of the passengers on Flight 93 have already passed into legend. And note: they were not giving their lives for Americans only. They were giving their lives just for people, human beings of every stripe, without regard for whether they were deserving or undeserving. In that respect, their actions reflect Jesus Christ, who placed himself in the space between the human race and the onslaught of Satan, and in so doing took upon himself the sin of the whole world. He, the Son of God in person, became the Judge judged in our place. Today I have one concern and one concern only—to bring before you the person of our Lord Jesus. How can we not love him with every fiber of our being? We were unworthy, but he counted us worthy. We deserved judgment, but he gave us mercy. We were slaves to sin and death, but he gave himself to release us into life and righteousness. He is remaking us into his image and likeness. The advent of divine judgment means that we do indeed find ourselves in urgent need of a complete overhaul, but the final act of the drama is resurrection and a passage into eternal life. In this sense, the oppressive threat of condemnation has already been lifted. The theme of judgment will follow us—must follow us—all the days of our life in this world, but there is a true sense in which the sentence has already been passed and has been fully absorbed into the crucified body of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, as the Fourth Gospel tells us, the Lord himself has promised us: “Truly, truly, I say to you, those who hear my word and believe him who sent me have eternal life; they do not come into judgment, but have passed from death to life” ( John 5:24). Amen.
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