Rend the Heavens

Propers: the First Sunday of Advent, AD 2020 B

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.

Ah, that You would rend the heavens and come down.

2020 has taught us a great deal about waiting. Waiting to gather. Waiting to travel. Waiting for life to go back to something vaguely resembling normality. We’ve lost holidays. We’ve lost vacations. We’ve lost income and jobs and stability. Many are far worse off than this, having lost health, homes, or those we love.

And we’re waiting for a cure, for a vaccine, for a new day to dawn. We’re waiting for God to rend the heavens and come down. We’re waiting for our salvation.

Advent is a season of preparation, of stilling, of silence. It is indeed a season of waiting—not just for Christmas, but for all the ways in which God comes to us. Adventus means coming toward, advancing, the immanent triumphant arrival of our God. But it’s not just something to get through. Advent isn’t simply about delayed gratification, a hurdle we all have to clear before we can get to the really good stuff. No. The waiting itself is a blessing. The waiting itself gives us Christ.

I know we’re not really big on waiting, as a people, as a culture. When seasonal fruits can be purchased year-round, when Amazon can ship from the other side of the world in two days flat, waiting is not a virtue. It is an inconvenience, a frustration. “I want it all, and I want it now,” right? That’s our motto. That’s our mantra. And every sage or prophet or wise one of old would unanimously tell us that that’s insane. Wisdom consists largely in the ability to wait, and to find meaning in our waiting.

This is important for Christians—because, you see, in Christianity, we do not go toward God. We can’t. He’s up there, and we’re down here. It is God who comes down to us. It is He who saves, He who forgives, He who promises us His salvation. We are the passive partner. Our calling is to respond to God’s grace in kind: to be thankful, grateful, joyful—and then to do unto our neighbor as God has first done unto us: to heal and forgive and minister and serve and to live out each and every day in justice, mercy, truth, and love. All because God has first loved us.

At Advent we celebrate three different ways that God comes to us in Jesus Christ our Lord: in history, mystery, and majesty. The history part is clear enough: God makes Himself fully known in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We are waiting for Christmas, yes, for the Incarnation of our Lord! But we’re also waiting for Easter, for His Passover from death to life.

When the disciples ask Jesus when the great Temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed, note how He responds: “Keep awake,” He says, “for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.”

And that should sound familiar. Jesus gathers His Apostles to celebrate the Last Supper, to proclaim the New Covenant and to give to them a new Commandment, in the evening. Then at midnight He is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. At cockcrow Peter denies Him three times. And at dawn He is tried, sentenced, and crucified. And all this finds the Apostles sleeping, unprepared and unaware.

Keep awake, keep alert, or you will miss what God is doing. You will miss His quiet Advent in the night.

He will also come to us in majesty at the End of the Age, when the Son shall hand over the Kingdom to the Father, the fires of the Holy Spirit shall consume all the world, and God at the last shall be All in All. We are promised an endless future of goodness, beauty, truth, and joy—nothing less than eternal life in perfect union with God, rejoicing with His saints, resplendent with His angels, so that heaven and earth are remade new, remade one in Him.

The ending is the most important part of the story. It makes sense of everything that has gone before. A good ending, a true and beautiful ending, rectifies and redeems all the horrors and the tragedies of history, impossibly setting all things right at the last. That is what we are promised. That is the hope which makes us whole. We are waiting for the Second Coming of our Lord to resurrect the entire world. Nothing and no-one can take that from us. Nothing and no-one can break that promise.

And this brings us to Christ’s coming to us in mystery—which is to say, His Advent in the here and in the now. Jesus is with us even as we wait for Him. He is with us in the Spirit and the Body of this community. He is with us in His Word, and in the Sacraments of His grace. A touch of water, a bite of bread, a sip of wine—simple, humble, everyday things—grant us union with Jesus in His resurrected life. We must simply keep awake and aware to see it.

Because here’s the thing about promises: if you trust the promiser, truly, completely, utterly, trusting them to keep their word—then it is as good as if you already had the very thing promised. You see? If a man promises you a thousand dollars, and you trust him, you believe him, you know that he’s good for it deep within your bones, then by God, that’s money in the bank. How much more so, then, must we trust the promise of the all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who cannot be false, cannot lie?

God has promised you forgiveness and salvation. He has promised you eternal life and joy. He has promised you that every wound will be healed, every tear dried, and all the dead raised up forever and for always from their graves. He has sworn this to you, by His Blood, by His Cross, and He has died and gone to hell and back to keep His Word to you, because you are His son, you are His daughter, and there is nothing He won’t do to bring you home in Him.

You cannot stop Him, cannot dissuade Him, cannot ever prevent Him from keeping His promise to you at the last. Oh, you can resist, you can sin, you can run, but He will outlast you, outlive you, outlove you. He will slay you in your sin and raise you right up from your grave. The love of God is an inexorable and all-consuming fire. And He will burn you back to life in Him.

And so here we are waiting. In the silence. In the stillness. Waiting for the Advent of our God, that He would rend the heavens and come down. Oh, and He will. Oh, and He must. It might be tomorrow, or ten billion years from now. It’s really all the same to Him—for in eternity, it has already happened. In eternity, the promise has already been fulfilled. In eternity, you and I are in heaven right now.

What does that mean for our waiting? What does it mean that you and I are inheritors of a promise that will burn the whole world to the ground, until the love of God permeates everything and everyone that He has ever made, until we glow like iron in the furnace of His grace?

I’m not promising an easy life. I’m not promising that you won’t get sick, won’t suffer, won’t lose the ones you love. This is, after all, a broken world, and we a broken people. But I promise you this: God knows you, God loves you, God sees you. He knows every hair atop your head and every thought within it. He knows the deepest desires of your heart better than you or I ever could. And I promise you—I promise you—He’s coming for you.

And nothing, nothing in heaven or in hell or in any other possible world, will ever dissuade Him, ever stop Him, ever make Him break His promise unto you. We could wait a thousand years. We could wait forever. It wouldn’t make any difference. Because He is with us in the waiting. He is with us in the silence. He is with us even in our brokenness, even in our wounds.

And through it all, He is whispering, pleading, stating, commanding, that we are His and He is ours and nothing will keep us apart. Not at the end. Not at the last. Jesus Christ is coming for you, and nothing will get in His way.

All of this, for us, has already happened, and yet is yet to be. For such is the promise of Almighty God, that He gives to you everything He has, everything He is, purely out of love for you. And God does not break promises.

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