Turn

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, A.D. 2018 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This past week I went on quarterly retreat with my order, the Society of the Holy Trinity. This being Advent, our retreat was a bit quieter than usual. We had no visiting theologians, no lectures nor debates. Rather we had time intentionally set aside for prayer, reflection, silence, meditation, and reading. I utilized this time well, I think, preparing for the next installment of our Adult Formation series this morning.

During this time, confessors made themselves available for private confession and absolution. I know this isn’t something we typically associate with Lutheranism. These days we stress corporate forgiveness, which is wonderful. But Luther said that if private confession were ever taken from God’s people, it would be because the devil stole it from us. Private confession is true balm for the fretful and weary soul, available to anyone in need. The Episcopalians have a pithy and, to my mind, rather helpful saying with regards to private confession: “All may; some should; none must.”

Traditionally I have availed myself of confession and absolution while on retreat because, frankly, I need it. The word of God’s forgiveness brings me peace, relief, renewal. But at this particular retreat, I just wasn’t feeling it—which I know is a terrible excuse in any situation. The hours available for private confession ticked by, and I opted to stay in my room reading and catching up on daily prayer.

I didn’t want to go because for me it’s always the same old sins. Every retreat my confessor hears what he or she has heard from me so many times before: I am impatient with my children, too quickly wrathful, too harshly critical; I am selfish and prideful with my wife and our marriage; slothful with regards to both spiritual and physical exercise. And I am deeply weary, as is every parent, every pastor.

I have confessed these sins for years and always returned to confess them once more. I didn’t want my confessor to hear them yet again. More to the point, I didn’t want myself to hear them from my own lips yet again. I consoled myself that there would be corporate confession, corporate forgiveness, which is indeed true and real and good. So I tried to ignore the clock and instead picked up a book. And what do you suppose were the first words that I read?

“Advent constitutes its own sacred season … a quiet season, compared to the great festival that follows, a period when believers are instructed to wait in confident hope, cultivating attention, repentance, charity, and joy.”

I read that and immediately knew what I had to do.

The hours for confession had just ended—the very minute that I looked back at the clock—so I hunted down my confessor in the chapel and confessed to him my unwillingness to confess, my unwillingness to repent. I did not want to turn back. I did not want to cultivate attention, yet again, to my sins. Yet without this turning, without repentance, I could not prepare myself for the King. It’s not that Jesus wouldn’t come; it’s that I would be looking the other way when He did.

And my confessor heard me confess my unwillingness to confess, heard me repent of my unwillingness to repent. And then in response to all this, he laid his hands upon my head, and in the Name of Jesus forgave me all my sins. In that moment my weight was lifted, my spirit freed, and my soul again made whole. And I rose, and he embraced me, and it was Advent at last.

This season of hope, charity, attention, and joy is our season to repent, to turn again towards the coming of the Lord, to be transformed in heart and mind and soul by the God who stoops down to join us here, in a manger, in the mud and the blood. God’s attitude towards us never changes. He is neither fickle nor changeable nor cruel. He does not love us in response to our repentance; rather, we repent in response to His love. He is always forgiving, always welcoming, always coming to save us.

It is we who turn away, we who are bogged down by the worries of this world, by the distractions and the entertainments and the sufferings and the despair. This is the season in which God comes to us, comes as the Christchild in Bethlehem born, comes in the Church, in her Word and her Sacraments, comes in the neighbor distressed and in need, comes as the King to conquer death and hell. He comes to us, calls to us, heals us, forgives us. He comes that we might have life and have it abundantly, a foretaste in the here and now of eternal bliss in God.

And in response to this we turn, we repent, we are transformed and resurrected! And so the cares of this life lose their sting—because we know now that loneliness, that suffering, that death and disease and disaster, depression and addiction, wickedness and sin, will not have the final say. Their days are numbered. Yes, we will suffer. Yes, life is hard. But God in Christ has joined us in our suffering, entered into it, to conquer it and us and all the world from the inside out. “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God!” All of it! Every single sinner. Every lost and wayward soul. So proclaims the Baptist, the Forerunner of the Lord.

So how then, brothers and sisters, shall we repent? How shall we prepare our hearts and homes for the King? Surely we can’t all go on quarterly retreat. Well, to be honest, you’ve made a good start already. You’ve come to Church. You’ve come to worship. You’ve come to confess and be forgiven, to hear the Word of God and receive the sacred Sacrament. You’ve come to sing and to give and to share the peace of the Lord.

And that’s pretty amazing right there. That’s the work of God, of Christ in you.

Take a look around at this sacred space. Notice there are no clocks here, very much by design. I won’t even wear a watch up front, though I’m sure some might wish that I would. Here we are not slaves to the clock, to the sands of time. Here we have a foretaste of eternity. Here eternity breaks into time.

Note there are no screens. Everything in this world is a screen these days. Our phones are screens. Our schools are screens. Our entertainment is screens. And that’s all well and good for what it is, I suppose—this sermon was written on a screen—but here we shall have no mediated reality. Here God is in your face, in the neighbor at your side, in the chalice that we share. There is no escaping reality here. It’s the rest of the world that seeks the unreal.

In your hands you hold a hymnal. Where else does this occur? Nobody sings anymore, not in community, not together. Our music has been outsourced to professionals, who sing into a microphone and play to us through speakers. And so we think we cannot sing, that it is the sole province of professionals. But the Holy Scriptures tell us that Heaven is all song, the music of the spheres, the beauty of the harmony of all created things. And so here we sing of one accord, graciously led by our choir, which is none other than the rehearsed voice of the congregation.

This space is different. This time is different. We are not in the business of entertainment. Nor is education our primary aim, important though it certainly is. We come here to worship. We come here to experience reality at its highest and deepest levels, in Goodness and Truth and Beauty, in purpose and value and meaning, to greet the God in whom we all live and move and have our being.

For He has promised in this place and in this way to meet us: to meet us in Word and in water, in bread and in wine; to meet us in this congregation who have one and all been given His own Holy Spirit and made into His own Body and Blood. And then He has promised to send us out, to do the things He does and say the things He says, that we might truly be little Christs for our neighbors and our world in need.

And yes, we may well fall into the same old vices each and every week, and confess the same old weary sins each and every Sunday. For indeed we are captive to sin, and cannot free ourselves. But for as real as our sins are each week, infinitely more real is Christ’s forgiveness, proclaimed from the pulpit, poured out upon us, freeing us, transforming us, and raising us from out the grave to life for everlasting.

And so we are turned. And so we repent. And so it is Advent at last.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The meditation quoted above is taken from A Season of Little Sacraments, by Susan Swetnam.