Cole J. Banning

As preached at the Advent Vespers service at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Tuesday, December 19, 2023.

Psalm 126
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
Hebrews 10:35-11:1
Mathew 25:9-14

Some of you might remember that I gave a sermon on this Gospel passage this past spring, for the second Sunday of Easter. And I’m glad that I did, because if I didn’t I would be tempted to give the sermon I gave then tonight. But that sermon was an Easter sermon, and this–this is an Advent sermon.

To look at this passage about St. Thomas and the disciples in the upper room through an Advent lens, we need to put ourselves in the sandals of the disciples in the wake of the Crucifixion, to put aside our preconceptions and understandings shaped by two thousand years of Christian tradition and theology.

The death of Jesus would have been shocking to His disciples, in the way that the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend is always shocking. But it would not have been paradigm-shifting, at least not in the way we might think.

It is not at all clear that any of the disciples, let alone all of them, truly understood Jesus’ fully divine nature. The first explicit mention of Jesus as God in the Gospels--indeed, the only truly explicit mention in the entire Bible--is in our Gospel reading this evening, after the Resurrection, when St. Thomas addresses Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).

So if the apostles were shocked, it was not so much that Jesus died on the Cross. They understood perfectly well that if you nail a human to a cross and leave them upon it, that person will die within days. Indeed, they understood that all humans die eventually. If the apostles were shocked at Jesus’ death, it was not that Jesus died, but that God let Jesus die.

Scripture makes clear that the disciples did understand, if imperfectly, that Jesus was both the promised Messiah and the Son of God. They knew that Jesus was the Savior sent by God to liberate and save the oppressed people of Israel. That Jesus’ revolutionary movement seemingly ended in defeat with a death upon the cross would have seemed to them to indicate the ineffectualness of God. It was only with the appearance of the Risen Christ that the fullness of God’s plan was finally made known to the disciples–first to the women, then to the other disciples, and then to St. Thomas.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. The Church clarified long ago her Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, and so we do understand (albeit still imperfectly, if possibly not quite so imperfectly) and receive as essential doctrine that Jesus was and is God, fully divine and fully human, of one being with the Father and part of the indivisible Godhead which is the Holy Trinity.

For us, with the benefit of hindsight, the truly paradigm-shifting event is neither the Crucifixion nor the Resurrection but the Incarnation. (Remember, this is an Advent sermon.) The shocking fact is not that Jesus died, or even that Jesus rose again on the third day; it’s that Christ made himself vulnerable to death by becoming incarnate of Mary His mother, the God-bearer, and became human. Christ’s giving of himself for us (Gal 2:20) did not happen on the Cross, at least not primarily: it happened in the creche, with the first gasping breath of the baby Jesus.

In the creche Christ enters into our human condition, making Himself vulnerable to pain, suffering, and death, and on the Cross He actually suffers in a way which is immediate, real, and extreme. He experiences not only being human, but the very worst of that which it entails. The Cross, then, makes explicit what was already implicit in the creche.

When St. John writes that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16) the evangelist is not referring to the Crucifixion alone, but to the Incarnation, to the 33-year-long event of the incarnate God living in the world. God the Father sent Christ into the world--not out of the world, but into!--that the world might be saved through him (Jn 3:17).

Just as Jesus almost certainly was not born on the 25th of December, St. Thomas probably didn’t die on the 21st of December, the date upon which we commemorate him. But when, back in the 9th century, the shortest day and longest night was chosen for his feast day, I think those who made that choice were onto something. The feast of St. Thomas signals that the long wait of Advent is coming to a close, that soon we will be celebrating the great feast of the Incarnation which is Christmas.

In many ways, our lives in the 21st century parallel the experience of St. Thomas in the upper room. Christ is already Risen, has already won the victory over death and sin. Scripture and sacred tradition testify this to us just as the other disciples did to Thomas. And yet, we and Thomas understandably remain skeptical. We yearn for the moment when the completion of Jesus’ victory will be made fully manifest to us.

And so we wait, an Advent people. We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory. None of us know the day or hour of when Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. But our celebration of Christmas at the close of the Advent season is an expression of our belief that our waiting is not in vain, that one day we will face our Lord and Savior face to face, flesh to flesh, just as St. Thomas did. We stand at our watchposts, as the prophet Habakkuk puts it in our first reading. “For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.”

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Amen.

So, my friend Elizabeth has started a practice of writing "unpreached sermons": what she would say if she were preaching that Sunday, even though she isn't. I've really been inspired by the practice, and want to take it up in the new liturgical year as an intellectual/devotional exercise. So, while I'm obviously not licensed to preach in the Episcopal Church in this universe's reality, if I were to give a homily today, this would be it.

My goal is to have it finished by the Sunday it'd be preached on if it were going to be preached, so I can then compare it to the other sermons I'm exposed to that day: Fr. Nathan's, Nate Hulfish's (which is the odd one out in not following the liturgical cycle), and, of course, Elizabeth's. Then I can see how the trains of thought are similar or different. I expect them to be very, very different, even though Fr. Nathan, Elizabeth, and I will be preaching on the same texts.

1st Advent

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

So, on this, the beginning of a new liturgical year, all of the readings are about endings. Which makes sense, of course; it's also the beginning of Advent, a season of anticipation, a time when the Church waits for the coming of Christ, as figured in the celebration of the Incarnation at Christmas, but also as figured in Christ's "second" coming: the coming again in glory. Advent is the time of the year when we look to the future.

And so, in the passage from St. Luke's Gospel, Jesus directs the attention of the gathered crowd to the eschaton, to the end of the world as we know it. The evangelist has Jesus begin by prophesying the destruction of the temple, an event which to St. Luke and his community must have seemed apocalyptic in its importance, and then goes on to remark on other signs of the end times: signs in the sky, and upheaval upon the Earth.

Now, obviously, a great deal of time has passed between St. Luke's time and our own, and a whole lot of history has happened in between. Empires have risen and fallen. Entire continents have been discovered by peoples previously ignorant of their existence. Human beings have set foot on the moon. The "time of the Gentiles," as St. Luke has Jesus call it, has lasted nigh-on two thousand years.

But even in the time when St. Luke was writing his gospel, it had already begun to become obvious that the notion of an imminent eschaton, of an end of the world that was just as likely to be twenty seconds in the future as two thousand years or more down the road, was already quickly becoming untenable. In the passage immediately preceding today's assigned gospel passage, St. Luke has Jesus say to the people:

"See that you are not deceived, for many will come, saying 'The time has come.' Do not follow them! When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for such things must happen first, but it will not immediately be the end."

A paradigm shift had already taken place, ushering in a worldview focused not on waiting for the end, but rather on living in the time in-between. And now, living in the 21st century, it seems much less clear that the eschaton will ever be an event within history, taking place this Tuesday or next Tuesday or indeed any Tuesday or any other day ending in -y.

But, then, what is the use of all of this talk about the end of the world? Is there any value that we can collect from Jesus' lesson of the fig tree? Is there even any point at all in thinking about the eschaton?

The answer, my dear sisters and brothers and siblings in Christ, is a resounding "yes."

Stories need endings. What if we ended the old fairy tale with Red Riding Hood in the stomach of the wolf, or still on the path picking flowers? What if the prince were still out searching for the foot that would fit into the slipper of glass or gold? What if Snow White and Sleeping Beauty simply slumbered on? Without endings, we don't have stories at all; simply chronicles, mere listings of events. Endings are what allow us to take chronicles and fashion out of them a narrative, to deduce a moral. They are, as John Gardner put it in The Art of Fiction, "not simply the end of the story, but the story's fulfillment."

How we end the Christ story, then, is no idle question, even if it concerns events which exist only in the unrealized future, as the hope and dream of a human people. How we end the Christ story has powerful implications as to how we live our lives in the here and now, for the ending to that story has the power to transform the very meaning of what we choose to do in the present.

For some, the second coming of Christ can act as an excuse to defer dealing with our problems and our neighbors' problems on a systemic level, for surely Christ will take care of them when Christ comes. All that's important is that we hang in there, following God's commandments until either we die or the Rapture happens, whichever comes first. If we succeed at that, we win the game, and if the rest of the world goes to hell in a handbasket, well so be it, as long as we faithfully executed our own duties to spread the Gospel and save souls, as long as we've spent that time doing our works of mercy, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, as Jesus directed us. "Politics," the desire to engage power and wrestle it out of the hands of the oppressors, can become a dirty word.

This type of worldview has the ability to produce powerful saints: the Dorothy Days and Mother Teresas of the world, the St. Clares and the St. Francises, those who trust in God to take care of the big picture and go about living out their vocation by performing one small service after one small service, feeding the hungry one person at a time. "How the final solution will be brought about is in God's hands," wrote Day in 1959. "The immediate solution will always be the works of mercy."

These types of women and men are called to an important vocation, and their example is one which should inspire and uplift us, and thus holds in it the power to change the world. But it is naive, I think, to think that it can change this sick and fallen world all on its own, and to wait for Christ to have wrought these changes is to put God to the test over what can be performed by human hands.

Where would the Catholic Worker movement be without its newspaper, its attempt to remake the world, to shake it up even beyond the streets of New York City, to change society as a whole radically and fundamentally? We cannot forget that even as the fight for social justice is personal, so too is it political. It requires--as Day and Teresa and Clare and Francis all knew full well--an engagement with the world: rewriting laws, shifting cultural norms, changing the way we as a society use language by coming up with new vocabularies. Setting the example as Christians who love one another and care for our neighbors is an absolutely necessary prerequisite, but it is a beginning, not an end. We cannot rest on the laurels of our works of mercy. We must lobby; we must demonstrate; we must protest; we must agitate; we must vote and encourage others to vote; we must educate. We must not only feed the hungry, but also work to end hunger. Not only visit those in prison, but reform the prison system.

We must, as Mahatma Ghandhi said, be the change we want to see in the world. We must make social justice happen.

There's another way of telling the end to the story of Christ's involvement in the world, a way of telling it in which it is not a mere deus ex machina where the benign God arrives and sets everything right because we are too depraved to do it ourselves. It is an eschatology that's focused not on messianic expectations in a distant future, but an ongoing rebirth in the here and now: not a realized eschatology nor an unrealized eschatology, but an eschatology continually in the process of being realized. And we're the ones who are doing the realizing. The story of Christ's return, the lesson of the fig tree, the promises made to the Hebrews, these stories are important because they fill us with joyful optimism in telling us that a redeemed world is possible, to allow us to be a forward-looking people, but it falls to us to be active agents in the world's redemption.

It is not only Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, not only Christ, of one Being with the Parent God, who is called to "execute justice and righteousness in the land" in the apocalyptic vision of the Christian Church, to be the "righteous branch" risen up for David. It is the Church itself, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It is all of us. We are called to change the world.

The coming of Christ is not an event which exists solely in the past, in a Christmas night millenia past, or in the future, in a triumphant, rapturous return. The coming of Christ is, instead, a constant process which is always going on, a continual revelation of God through Christ and Christ's Spirit as God works in and through the world. The liturgical calendar recognizes this fact as each year we wait anew for Christ's coming in the season of Advent, and celebrate it anew in the season of Christmas. And we, the followers of Christ right here in this room and throughout the world, we the Church, we who are the Body of Christ, we are the agents, the vehicle of that coming.

Amen.