All Things New

Rise Up, by Somniodelic Workshop

   

Midweek Vespers

Third Week of Advent

The Feast of the Snow, by G.K. Chesterton:

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,

And never before or again,

When the nights are strong with a darkness long,

And the dark is alive with rain.

 

Never we know but in sleet and snow

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of earth is a raging mirth,

And the heart of the earth a star.

 

And at night we win to the ancient inn,

Where the Child in the frost is furled,

We follow the feet where all souls meet,

At the inn at the end of the world.

 

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown;

The gods lie cold where the leaves are gold,

And a Child comes forth alone.

Sermon:

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.

Advent is about the end of the world.

During this season, the Church looks to the coming of Christ in three ways: in history, in mystery, and in eternity. God in Christ comes to us as a baby born in Bethlehem. God in Christ comes to us in the Divine Liturgy of Word and Sacrament; in water, wine, and bread we take the Body, Blood, and Breath of Christ. And God in Christ comes to us in the eschaton, the last days, the end of all there is.

It would be simple enough to parse these Advents out as our past, our present, and our future. From the beginning, Christians have looked to the Second Coming of Christ. Fundamentalists hope for a day of wrath and reckoning, a day of steel and fire, when the wicked will be burned and the righteous justified. They keep trying to guess, trying to place a date on Ragnarök, to schedule Armageddon.

But the enthronement of Christ, His Ascension into Heaven, and His coming again to judge the world in mercy, is not just some single isolated point in history. Judgment Day won’t have a date like August 29th. Rather, the Kingship of Christ is an eternal reality, a divine truth beyond the bounds of space and worldly time. Christ’s Judgment is not part of history because His judgment is over history, the entire thing, from start to finish, the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, or however far it goes.

I noticed this over the years as I slowly read the Scriptures: that there does not appear to be a single Day of the Lord. Rather, the prophets hail the Day of the Lord whenever the eternal reign of God breaks through into our fallen world, whenever Goodness and Beauty and Truth prevail over sin and death and hell. When an evil dynasty falls: there is the Day of the Lord. When the poor are vindicated and the meek lifted up: there is the Day of the Lord. When prisoners find freedom, the voiceless cry out, the sick heal, the dead rise—there is the Day of the Lord! And all these many days are really one.

In the Book of Daniel, the Prophet has a vision while in Babylon of a divine Savior, “like a Son of Man,” ascending on the clouds before the throne of the Ancient of Days. We understand this to pertain to Jesus, who called Himself the “Son of Man.” Centuries later, St Stephen, Deacon and Protomartyr, the first Christian to be killed for faith in Christ, called out during his murder that he witnessed the glory of God in the Son of Man, Jesus, at the right hand of the Father.

Decades later, on the prison isle of Patmos, Jesus revealed Himself to St John the Divine as the Son of Man: the human God ascending into Heaven by the Cross. Yet these were not three distinct events. Christ did not Ascend on several separate occasions. In the words of Pr Kenneth Tanner:

The vision Daniel has in Babylon of Christ’s ascension to heaven by the cross is what John sees also on Patmos more than 500 years later, and is the same vision Stephen has before his death. It’s not a prediction for Daniel or a memory for Stephen and John, but an apocalypse: every moment of time is laid bare to this event—I mean, the ascension of the human God to heaven by the cross—including the moment you are reading this.

The enthronement of Christ on the cross draws all things to Christ, and this is the actual meaning that undergirds existence even when existence seems most horrific or muddled or mundane, often somehow all of that at once. The end of every moment of time is to be drawn into the event Daniel and Stephen and John witness and to know Christ’s ascension as the promise that all our moments will be healed in the arrival God always and everywhere brings in this human, Jesus, especially when this seems most improbable.

In other words, the reign of Christ exists outside of time, an eternal reality, an infinite light, the ultimate inbreaking truth, by which every second of existence will be revealed for what it is, judged by Christ who is the Light, and thus be redeemed. Imagine the implications. Every mistake you’ve ever made, every loss, every lie, every sin, every wound inflicted upon others, will be visited by Jesus, laid bare for what it is, and resurrected in the purifying fires of His grace. He will raise it aright.

Jesus does not simply forgive us our evils, forgive us our sins, liberate us from our present fallen state—He purges it from history! He redeems not simply our present, not someday our future, but the whole of our being, the whole of our past, the whole of our existence. Every wrong shall be made right. Can we comprehend? The Holocaust undone. Our swords beaten into plowshares. And every single child we have lost resurrected.

My God, the depth of that promise, that vision! Only God can undo what I have done. And He works in such a way that my past will not be lost; it will be redeemed, made whole, as it always ought to have been, as it will always have been. Eternal life, eternal resurrection, eternal theosis in the Body of the Christ cannot be contained to a finite stretch of time. It explodes, backwards and forwards, above and below, until the Apocalypse, the Day of the Lord, the Second Coming of Jesus, encompasses all that is and all that was and all that ever could be.

The end of the world means not its termination but salvation: a grace that reaches out to saturate and immolate the whole of space and time. It is the “end” in the sense that this has been our purpose, our destiny, our fate from the beginning: to return to the God from whom all things flow, in whom we live and move and have our being. I leave you with the words of the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, who writes:

We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes;

and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Amen! Come, Lord Jesus. Come and save us all.

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