Worldfire

Propers: The Second 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.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

Peter here is talking about the End of the World—or at least what Jesus refers to as “the End of the Age.” And for many people I suppose this sounds scary, because that’s usually how it’s presented to us, isn’t it? The End is coming. Be afraid. But note how Peter prefaces this: “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” That’s what the End of the World means. That’s the End of the Age.

Western civilization, it has been said, rests upon three pillars: Greek philosophy, the idea that there are truths in our world and in ourselves and that we are able to discern them; Roman law, which is to say the Rule of Law, applied equally to all; and biblical narrative, the notion that history is going somewhere, that existence has a point, and that the arc of the universe may be long but it bends toward justice.

To say that the world has an “end” doesn’t mean that it stops. It means, rather, that existence has a purpose, a meaning, a goal. We’re working toward something. And that something is nothing less than union with God: God, who is Goodness and Truth and Beauty; God, who is Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; God, who is All-Knowing, All-Loving, All-Powerful, everywhere present and nowhere at all.

The world is not as it ought to be, not as it should be. And you don’t have to be religious to notice this. You just have to be human. The message of the Bible is that it is not God’s will that we suffer, that we grieve, that we despair. It is not God’s will that even one of us perish, but that all—explicitly all—shall come to repentance; that is, to turning: turning back to God, back to truth, back to life. This is the will of God, and God’s will shall be done.

We might wish, then, that we could skip to the good stuff. Why toil in this fallen world, bereft of faith, torn by sin, walking ever through the valley of the shadow of death? Can’t God just snap His fingers and make it right now? Can’t He just rend the heavens and come down this Tuesday?

Well—of course He can, and of course He did. The very heart of Christian faith is that God does not sit aloft and aloof on His throne in heaven, dispassionately shaking His head at the mess we’ve made, waiting for us to sort it all out on our own. Not at all. From the very beginning He knew what must be done, how to bring us home, all of us home, without tyranny, without force, without compromising who and what He is—namely, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty—keeping our free will intact.

He came down as Jesus Christ, born of a human mother, into the remnants of a has-been kingdom on the far side of the world. And He hallowed that humanity, that family, that place, by becoming fully part of it Himself—thereby hallowing all humanity, all families, all places, the Creator become one with His Creation. And He went about doing God’s will, His will, by healing the sick, raising the dead, gathering the lost, rebuking the wicked, forgiving the sinner, boldly speaking truth to power, and promising a grace so scandalous that we murdered Him for it.

Yet He took what we gave Him—violence, rejection, death—and He turned them upside down, using the very brokenness we poured out into Him and remaking it into the instrument of our salvation, so that death is now life, the Cross is now hope. And maybe we think this is all too convoluted, too quiet, too messy. Maybe we’d prefer if He’d come riding a white horse and burning the world. But this is puerile. Imagine believing that one could solve the Problem of Evil by killing the devil.

No, it is love must conquer hate, life must conquer death. And that might seem naïve or saccharine to those of us born here below, into a world of power and of pain. But if there were a better way to save us all, all we sinners, all we devils, then surely Christ would have done it. But we wouldn’t let Him, now would we?

In point of fact, God has never been cruel or uncaring regarding our fate. We have, but He hasn’t. Jesus died for you. He quite literally went to hell and back for you. In Jesus God has given us absolutely everything He has, everything He is. And our salvation is assured precisely because it has nothing to do with our blood, sweat, and tears, and everything to do with His.

All this is promised to us, all this is given to us, already—and not yet. We have the promise. We have the foretaste of the feast to come. We have the Spirit and the Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ, in Word and in Sacrament. Yet still it’s not enough for us. Still we yearn for more. As if there could be more than God.

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance. We are given this time we have now as a gift, all the goodness of this world as a gift. Which is not to say that when bad things happen, God intends for them to happen, wants or approves for them to happen. But it does mean that when terrible things occur, Christ is with us in them, beside us, beyond us, within us. And He can take all the evil this world can dish out—and somehow, impossibly, redeem it for our good.

We are waiting. We are waiting for the fire that will dissolve all the world. But this is not, as some suppose, a fire of destruction, a fire of wrath. It is not even, at heart, a fire of punishment, though some will surely think it so. The Fire we await is the Holy Spirit, which is to say the Life and Breath and Love of God—which is to say God. God is the Fire. God will subsume all the world. He will permeate every crack and crevice, every shadow of corruption.

And it will all burn—burn in the Light of pure and perfect Truth, pure and perfect Love, pure and perfect Justice-and-Mercy which are both one in God. And the only things that will be destroyed, truly destroyed, will be our illusions, our lies. God will burn down everything that separates us from Him: no more hiding, no more running, no more pretending to be other than what He intends for us to be.

And if we are wicked, which we all are, that fire will burn out of us our sins, our impurities, the false self of ego to which Christ bids us come and die. And that will hurt, a lot, if we think our sins are who we are. The fire will feel like justice, like punishment. But Love demands no less. Love must have Truth, must have all, must be real. It will accept no substitutes. But take heart—for again, the Fire is God, and God’s love for us is infinite.

Know this—know the grace and mercy and promise of God in Jesus Christ our Lord—and the fires are revealed not as punitive but as purgative, making us who we truly are, who we were always meant to be: sons and daughters of God Most High. God will make us like Him: good and true and beautiful, powerful and loving and free, forgiving and merciful and eternally joyous in our bliss. That’s the End of the World. That’s the End of the Age. That’s where all of this is going.

So imagine if we lived as though we actually believe this. Imagine if we lived as though we knew the promise true. Imagine if we saw every human being as a sinner in need of forgiveness, as a neighbor in need of our love, as a child and heir of God in Christ, with an eternal destiny, an infinite purpose, for whom God has died. Imagine if every thought, word, and action in our lives were understood in the sure knowledge that someday all deception, falsehood, hiddenness will be burned completely away in the white-hot light of loving Truth; that no good thing could ever truly be lost and no bad thing ever ultimately endure.

How would that change how you live right now? How would that change how you see every single person, beast, and thing that you encounter? To know that one day God will fill every cell, every thought, every particle of Creation? And yes, for every sin, we’ll have to pay. That’s the price of truth. But we wouldn’t want it any other way. Because perfect mercy is perfect justice, which we know when we perfectly repent. All of this is worked for us by Christ upon the Cross.

You, my friends, are the vanguard. You are the sainted sinners chosen to bear God’s Word unto this world. Do not bother sitting around asking when God will bring about the End of the Age in justice, truth, and bliss. Rather, pray for the grace to be that End for every person we meet in every day of our lives. When will Christ come at the last? Jesus Christ comes now in you.

So let’s get out there and live like we know it.

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