Hope Burns
Midweek
Evensong
First
Week of Advent, AD 2022 A
Reading: Isaiah1:10-20
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.
Wreaths have been around forever, give
or take a few thousand years: a simple, decorative circle, adding color and
life to the house, especially in wintertime when we cherish evergreens. Lutherans
appear to have been the first to associate wreaths with the Advent season
specifically, though German Catholics also claim some credit.
The modern tradition hails from one
Johann Hinrich Wichern, born into poverty in nineteenth century Hamburg. He
grew up to give back. He founded hostels and schools for the poor throughout
Germany, and dedicated his life to the Christian duty of care for one’s
neighbor, especially the indigent, the disabled, and the criminal.
The story goes that in one of his
schools, the boys simply could not wait for Christmas; they asked him every day
how long remained before the Nativity of Our Lord. Part of this might’ve
stemmed from the fact that Advent used to be a rather penitential season, one
of fasting and repentance, rather like Lent. Regardless, the boys, just like
us, were eager to get on to the celebrations: to the tree, the food, the games.
Yet Advent is a season of waiting,
and of finding peace within that waiting. It isn’t simply something to endure.
Advent is a time set aside by the Church to meditate upon all the ways in which
Christ comes to meet us, is present with us. His is a threefold arrival, a
threefold presence: in history, mystery, and majesty.
In history, He is born as the babe of
Bethlehem, the Christ and King of all. In mystery, He comes to us in the
Sacraments, in the Word of God made flesh, made tangible today. And in majesty
He shall close out the end of the age, that the Resurrection begun in His
rising from the tomb shall spread as the fire of the Holy Spirit, consuming,
repairing, renewing the cosmos, that God at the last shall be all in all.
So, yes, Advent is about Christmas,
about preparing ourselves for the feast. But it’s also so much more than that—as
well as so much less.
To teach this lesson to the boys in
his care, and perhaps to silence their pestering, Herr Winchern took an old
wooden cartwheel and affixed upon it four large white candles with little red
ones in between. The large ones each represented a Sunday, with the red as the
days of the week. Thus every morning he would light a successive candle, so
that the glow of the wreath would grow, counting the days to Christmas with
warmth and light and flame.
It’s a beautiful tradition, which
spread rapidly. Like most of our Christmas customs, it feels ancient but ain’t
necessarily so. This one that we have here today—our modern sanctuary Advent
wreath—dates back about a century. You’ll notice it now has five candles: four
on the outside, three blue, one rose, lit for the Sundays of Advent; and that
big festal-white one in the middle for Christmas Day.
Blue for hope and purple for penitence
are the liturgical colors of the season. And that pink one—rose, technically—that
stands for joy. A number of associations or themes have accrued around each of
these candles, each of these weeks. Tonight’s, for example, that first one, is often
called the Prophecy Candle, and it has to do with hope. Hope and prophecy: a
man could write a thousand sermons on those two words alone. But I’ll spare you
just the one.
A prophet is a truth-teller, which
is the literal meaning of our term soothsayer: to say the sooth, to tell the
truth. Prophecy, in the Bible, is not all about the future. It isn’t a roadmap
for centuries to come, as so many have attempted to make it. Rather, the
prophetic word is one of justice, of speaking truth to power, of giving voice
to those whose voices are ignored, if not outright silenced. Prophets, in the
Bible, rail against evil, especially in the halls of power, amongst priests and
kings.
But within this present-mindedness
is always an implicit hope for the future. God is angry at the pain we cause,
the evils we ignore, the oppressions in which we participate, precisely because
He does not will this for His children, for any of us. God does not will evil.
He cannot do evil. If He could, He wouldn’t be God. And so we know that evil
shall not stand. God alone is good, and God alone is eternal. Thus we know, we
hope, that the vision of justice will endure, will outlast all our sin.
And justice, mind you, is the
public face of love. So when we speak of God’s wrath, God’s justice, God’s
judgment, keep in mind that this is our hope and not our fear. We hope for the
day, yearn for the day, when the fires of the Holy Spirit will burn out of us
all the dross of sin, all our failings and fallings-short, burn out of us
everything that is not us—that we shall shine as silver purified in a furnace
seven times.
The prophets spoke of the Day of
the Lord, eternally outside of time, whence the presence of God breaks into our
world, to right every wrong, to raise all the dead. They spoke of what it would
look like, whom it would look like, when God and Man at last are one—one as we
were intended to be, one as we all shall be again. And so, yes, all prophecy
speaks of Christ. All prophecy points to the God-Man, who is both Creator and Creation,
both the Alpha and Omega.
He is our hope, our truth, our
justice and our love. He always has been, even when we didn’t know Him, even
when we could not call Him by that Name. All of Scripture is about Jesus. That
is the secret of the Bible for us: that it gives to us Christ and it gives us
to Christ. That’s the point of everything that we read together, every
prophecy, every psalm.
Hope is not a maybe. Hope is not a
wish. Hope is the power of the Holy Spirit deep within us, driving us to that
Kingdom for which we hunger, placing our trust in the promises of Christ, in the
promise of the Christ, and releasing us, liberating us, that we rely not on our
own strength but on the white-hot grace of God. Hope burns. And before it every
shadow is banished, all miasma blazed away, and all our fears are put to
flight.
Because, yeah, the world is broken.
And yeah, our life’s a mess. But God knows. He sees. He cares. And He doesn’t
just sit up on His throne aloft and aloof in the heavens; He comes down here to
get things done, down into the mud and the blood, to feed the hungry, cure the
sick, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant, teach the ignorant, free the
enslaved, flood every crack and crevice of hell, and raise up all the dead!
And all of that’s already done—already
and not yet. The work of Christ is complete in eternity. Only here below, with
time still spooling along, does the final act have yet to play out. The culmination
of salvation begins to rise beyond the horizon. There’s your hope! There’s your
God. There’s your resurrection. And that fire will keep you warm on the darkest,
coldest nights; because you know that our hope is love inexhaustible, and one
day it will burn all the world.
In the name of the Father and of the
+Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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