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The Very Rev. Alan Jones In the name of the living and true God, in the name of the One who is coming, Amen. Advent makes me extremely uncomfortable. There is such a built-in contradiction. Here is the beginning of the Good News, and it’s announced by someone of the likes of John the Baptist. It does not bode well. It seems that in order for us to hear the Good News we have to experience the world differently. And Advent is a time when the world we know and think we control, falls apart and we stand naked before God. The fantastic claim of the Good News of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ is the test of reality, the test of what’s really real. And he turns everything upside down and calls for a change of heart. It’s called “repentance.” Think about the readings for a moment. About comfort and upheaval at the same time. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” Perhaps we’re too familiar with this text—and I risk the ire of the musicians here—maybe it’s been ruined by Handel’s Messiah. We’ve heard it too often. And then we hear in the Gospel that John the Baptist is coming preaching repentance and a new heaven and new earth. Where is the comfort? Where is the Good News in this after all? So Advent strips us of our pretensions and justifications and we find ourselves exposed and left naked, naked by the failed myth of secular salvation, for example, democracy, free enterprise, globalization, technology. We imagine they will save us from violence and chaos. And in the light of our fragility, we might also ask what sort of persons ought we to be? What would truly comfort us in a world of raucous and violent certainties? The comfort of the coming of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is neither what we expect nor what we want. In fact, it comes as an “in your face” shock. So, given the revolution of Advent, where would you look for God in a world and a Church addicted to polarization? Where would you look? The Gospel’s shocking answer is there is no place better to catch the wonder of Christ in this world than in the passion of the poor, in the people we would rather forget. Christ, as the test of reality, is shown to us in the place we would rather not look, the place of powerlessness and dereliction, not at first sight, comforting and encouraging. John Donne, the great dean of St. Paul’s, London, in the 17th century, tells us that a naked image of God, is a much harder thing. And there is much more art, he says, showed in making a naked picture than in all the rich attire that can be put upon it. And howsoever the rich man that is invested in power and greatness may be a better picture of God,—God considered in himself who is all greatness and all power—yet, of God considered in Christ, the poor man is a better picture. Christ himself carries this consolation not to a proximity only, says John Donne, but to an identity. He even says the poor are He. He is the poor. And so he who oppresseth the poor reproaches God: God in his orphans. God in his image. God in the members of his own body. God in the heirs of his Kingdom. God in himself, in his own person. And there you have the deep contradiction of the heart of our faith: the Good News, God manifested in powerlessness. So Advent challenges us with the issue of power and of our speaking truth to it. Once Hugh Latimer, the reforming bishop of Wooster, was preaching to Henry VIII. He knew that what he was about to say, the King wouldn’t like. And so in the pulpit he soliloquized. He said, “Latimer, Latimer, Latimer, be careful what you say. Henry the King is here!” And then he paused, and went on, “Latimer, Latimer, Latimer, be careful what you say. The King of Kings is here!” It speaks to Lenin’s basic question, “who has the power to do what to whom?” And this is how basically the world works. To whom do we, then, owe allegiance? Allegiance to Christ crucified is absurd in the world’s terms. It does turn things upside down. Where is the comfort? Where is the power? So this humble and naked Christ also raises questions about Christianity’s exclusive claims. If Christ is “the one,” the test for reality, where does that leave Buddha? What about other religions, other powers, and other stories? And what kind of authority does Christ exercise in all his nakedness? In this world many people take comfort in believing that they’re right and everyone else is wrong. A kind of spirit “I’m going to heaven, and the world can go to hell.” So what are the exclusive claims of Christianity that come to the fore in the Advent season? Is Christ the only way? Well, yes, in a sense, but it’s the way of humility, of gentleness, of peace. And he sends us out on mission. Father Timothy Radcliffe, who is the former head of the Dominican Order, the former Master of the Dominican Order, writes that as missionaries we see partners in building God’s home with us. And that’s what Christmas is about: building God’s home with us. And he says this can happen in wonderful and unexpected ways. Our Japanese brother, Oshida, founded a Christian community on the hill near Mount Fuji. And in the garden he set up a statue of the Buddha with the child Jesus on his lap. And the villagers began to come discreetly during the night to leave offerings. So, a place was coming to be where people of different faiths could gather and prepare for the Kingdom. People of different faiths could gather and prepare for the Kingdom. Actually, I quoted that on our website, and I was sited as someone representing very dubious spirituality. But they didn’t check that it was by Father Radcliffe. So, I hope he doesn’t get too much blame. Some Christians believe that paying deference to Buddha is betraying Christ. So we might ask what does it mean to be Christ-like? How does he exercise his authority? Does he throw his weight about? Does he bully, coerce? The One who is coming, who is he? What are the marks of his sovereignty? How would he treat the Buddha? Yes, we do make exclusive claims for Christ. We can’t get around that. But we are shown to be poor followers of the King of Kings. And by the test of the Gospel there are those who would not call themselves Christian who follow Christ more closely than we do. Those who inherit the Kingdom, as we know from the Gospel, are those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, who welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick and visit those in prison. “Just as you did it to one of the least of those who are members of my family, you did it to me.” From this we can take great comfort. So the shock of Advent confronts us with Christ’s subversive power, putting a question mark beside every other human allegiance, all the little idolatries that we indulge in. Our ultimate loyalty to Christ gives us tremendous freedom, and our submission to the King of Kings enables us to sit loosely to our political and social allegiances. Are you a Republican? Christ enables you to be a critical Republican. Are you a Democrat? Christ liberates you to be a critical one. Because deep down, Christians are independents. And if you are a Christian, what kind are you? Do you love Jesus? Do you want to follow him? There’s a recent story from a cathedral in England, of a Muslim, an Imam, in an encounter with some kind of a Christian. The Imam was speaking at the cathedral and the Christian was outraged, and he stood up in the middle of the talk and said, “What do you think you are doing? Why are you here?” And the dean, I suspect, tried to intervene, you know, slowly, as an Englishman would. And the Imam spoke up, and he said, “I’m here because I love Jesus. Do you?” Not a bad question. And we take comfort because the Christ who is coming challenges the old story of power. There’s a story from the Dominicans, when the Dominicans went to what was Hispaniola, now Haiti in the Dominican Republic, in the early 16th century. The Brethren wrote back to the Brothers in Salamanca in Spain about the violence done by their fellow Spaniards—and fellow Christians—to the indigenous people. They were shocked, not merely by the very existence of these people, but by the violence they endured at the hands of Christians. And one of them, Father Antonio de Montecinos, preached a powerful sermon on the first Sunday of Advent, 1511. And he dared to confront the Spaniards with their treatment of the Indians. Are they not human, he asked? Do they not have rational souls? With what right do you make war on them? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves? And Father Radcliffe notes the irony: the Christian Spaniards were the idolaters worshipping gold, and the pagan Indians were Christ crucified. So ask yourself, where do you see Christ in the world today, and do you love him? How could those Indians be blamed for rejecting Christ when they saw the cruelty of the Christians? And this is at the heart of the mystery of our claiming that the One who is coming is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. If Christ is the test for reality, then God help us. We fall far short of it. Because Christ sides with the oppressed and oppressed people, and they do not necessarily play the parts we assign them, for, says Father Radcliffe, they are Christ crucified, and it is the Christians who nailed them to the cross. So when we claim that Christ is the test of reality, we place ourselves under judgement. We are called to repentance. So Advent provides us with an opportunity—so out of tune with the popular view of Christmas—not only to recover our lost loyalty to Christ, but also the story of freedom that has been so terribly deformed by prejudice and un-Christian hatred, leaving the world comfortless with no Good News. So part of telling our Christian story is to confess that it is not the only story to tell. Christ is silently and humbly present in other stories, even sitting on the Buddha’s lap and seen in the faces of the silent poor. Those Spaniards in 1511 were swollen with imperialist pride, the arrogance of power. They were possessed like many of us with an obsessive certainty that they and they alone were right. They present us with a scandal of un-Christlike Christians. Just as in Hispaniola the indigenous people were crucified by Spaniards, Father Radcliffe reminds us that in the Holocaust we have seen our Jewish brothers and sisters crucified on this same cross. And maybe now, after 9/11, we may be more aware of how we are at the center of an economic system which is crucifying much of humanity. And how Islam may well help us see how better to tell our story as one which reaches to out to all. All. All our fellow human beings. And this is from a leading Roman Catholic theologian and thinker, a beautiful Christian, a wonderful man, and he reminds us that ours isn’t the only show in town. We believe it to be the ultimate one, not because of power, its power to bully, but because of its strange and awesome humility. That’s what brings me to my knees. Christ’s authority expressed in such breathtaking self-giving. Our Judge, naked, vulnerable and fiercely humble, is coming and will be suckled at Mary’s breast. Our King and Savior now draws near. Come let us adore him. Repentance is key because our longing and need for authority—a King, an Emperor, a Dictator—makes us vulnerable, especially when things seem to be falling apart. And so we’re in great danger of giving ourselves over to things and people less than God, when only God will ever satisfy us. We cannot live without an appeal to authority. And so we live in a culture where self is king, where we have no sense of true north in a spiritual and moral life. A recent critic of British life writes, “to make up for its lack of moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality, followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self righteousness are its substitute for the moral life.” This sounds uncomfortably like us. We are not a people open to the surprise of the unknown. And George Will, the columnist, put it well. He said, “America is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging and crashing certainties.That is why there is a rhetorical bitterness absurdly disproportionate to our real differences. It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right.” The spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right. And one way to immunize ourselves against misplaced certitude is to contemplate, even to savor, the unfathomable strangeness of everything, including ourselves. And our inability to contemplate that strangeness, that unfathomable mystery really makes us prey to forms of cultural and political tyranny. President Roosevelt in 1939—some of you may be familiar with this—said, “But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the life of our citizens, then fascism and communism will grow in strength in our land.” Democracy relies on responsible and repentant citizens being truly informed. And our democracy is more fragile than we think. Ten years ago the Italian writer Umberto Echo, wrote an essay on the shape of the mentality which surrenders to an authority which robs us of our freedom, rather than it being its container. It’s called, loosely, fascism, a way of thinking or habit of mind. Things like that the truth is revealed once and only once. An obsessively certain religion interpreting a fundamentalist constitution. You don’t have to think. Secondly, doctrine outpoints reason and science is always suspect. Does that sound familiar? Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals who betray the culture and subvert traditional values. And this is one of the biggest lies of this mentality: national identity is provided by the nation’s enemies, now perhaps conveniently provided by anonymous Arabs. And the last, from Echo, argument is tantamount to treason—perhaps the most disturbing of the trends. And Louis Lapham, in Harper’s, thinks we are well on the way to a kind of fascism. “After all,” he writes sarcastically, “we don’t have to burn books as the Nazis did. We can count it as a blessing that we don’t bear the burden of an educated citizenry.” The systematic destruction of the public school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government’s propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit. But the people who don’t know how to read or think, they do as little harm as frozen snow flakes falling on a frozen pond. But, take comfort. Christ rescues us from the petty, debilitating allegiances, the piddling idols for sale in the market place. So ask yourself, who or what is Lord over you? Where is your primary allegiance? Christianity, or better, Christ, gets out of hand, and widens the circle of allegiance and affection to include the whole world. “What do you think you’re doing, and why are you here?” And the Muslim responded, “I’m here because I love Jesus. Do you?” John the Baptist announces Christ’s coming, and what do we see when we look at him? We see true authority. We see the really real. And when we look at our brothers and sisters we see partners in building God’s home with us. Remember our Japanese brother, Oshida. He set up a statue of the Buddha with the child Jesus on his lap. The villagers began to come discreetly during the night to leave offerings. A place was coming to be where people of different faiths could gather and prepare for the Kingdom. May this Cathedral be such a place of such Good News. I’m here because I love Jesus. How about you? |