Majesty

Lections: The First Sunday of Advent, AD 2025 A

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.

Welcome, my brothers and sisters, to Advent, perhaps my favorite season of our Church’s year; from the Latin adventus, literally “a coming to”; a translation in turn of the Greek παρουσία, meaning “a presence” or “an arrival.” People used παρουσία to indicate the appearance of an important or weighty individual: a king visiting a city, a general marching onto the field of battle, or even the epiphany of a god. We can see, then, why Christians would relate this term to Christ, as He is all three.

We welcome Advent as a season of patience, penance, and preparation; a season of hope and of joy; even a bit of a spooky season, as shadows lengthen, nights deepen, and winter shows the whiteness of her teeth. All is silence and stillness outside of our homes. For indeed, this is the season of waiting. We do not go to Christ; Christ comes to us; this is His Advent. He finds us when we need Him most, amidst the bitter dark and cold. Truly He is on His way. He is arriving even now.

But Advent isn’t only about the coming of our Christmas. It’s about all the ways God comes to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. The pithy way of putting this is that Advent celebrates the arrival of Jesus in history, in mystery, and in majesty. Jesus comes to us in history, the single spoken Word made flesh, by which God reveals to us all that He has and all that He is. Jesus is the visible Image of our invisible Father: born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth; having taught in Capernaum and all throughout the Galilee; betrayed, murdered, and resurrected in Jerusalem.

In our historical lectionary—the one used generally until 60 years ago or so—the reading on this First Sunday of Advent would have been Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He arrived as a King; arrived as a Conqueror; arrived as God Almighty. The life He lived, the death He died, and more than anything His Resurrection, all reshaped the history of our world. And obviously we tell this story every year in our Church’s liturgy. Yet as the lyric goes, Christ has never been bound to distant years in Palestine.

He comes to us today, in mystery. And by that I don’t mean some sentimental slop. Mystery, in the Church, has a very specific meaning, connoting not something we cannot hope to understand, but rather something that we must first experience in order then to grasp. The Latin term for mystery is sacramentum, whence we get our word “sacrament.” The Sacraments then are the mysteries of the Church. When we participate in them—when we drown in the Font, breathe in the Spirit, hear the spoken Word and taste the Body and Blood of Christ—then He arrives in us, making us one in Him, in Body and in Spirit.

We are Jesus sent out to save the world. He promised to be with us, unto the end of the age, and God does not break promises. He comes to us today in this congregation; in the Word rightly heard and preached. He comes to us in the power of His Spirit, in the needs of our neighbor, in every child’s prayer and every dying person’s plea. Our calling as Christians is to welcome Him when He comes, welcome Him into our daily lives, into our minds and breath and bones. He inculcates within us spiritual life, eternal life, beyond the fears and vicissitudes of this fallen, passing world.

And when He does, miraculous to say, then we cannot help but share Him. His grace wells up within us, overflowing to fall upon all of those around us. In those moments, in that state, we are His Resurrection poured out for all the world, for the whole of His Creation. Yet we are not expected to do any of this alone. We are never truly alone. Christ is ever with us; His Spirit, ever with us; and we have the Church, this communion of sainted sinners, who together shoulder His Cross and together proclaim His salvation.

How any of this works is truly a mystery. If Christ had not been with us, we’d have ruined everything long ago. The fact that we’re still here, shows that He is here.

And then of course the Christ will come in majesty, at the end of the age, the final trumpet. This has proved to be a bit of a sticky wicket. The usual story goes that Christians, like some other groups of Jews at the time of Jesus, expected the imminent end of the world. When that didn’t occur—when the world kept turning and the sun kept burning—we kind of had to scramble to make sense of things, reinterpret our Scriptures. Jesus, in this line of thinking, set us up for expectation and ever since has left us hanging.

I find this too simplistic. It’s pretty clear that early Christian communities, some of them at least, were preparing for the long haul. It’s also pretty clear, to my own eye, that Matthew viewed the destruction of the Temple as the end of the age; that Luke viewed Pentecost as the end of the age; and that John viewed the Crucifixion as the end of the age. And in a sense, all of them were right.

The Hebrew Scriptures use apocalyptic imagery not to predict the literal end of the world, but to indicate the fall of great worldly and spiritual powers. Books such as Revelation don’t intend to give us a roadmap to the Endtimes, but rather to reassure frightened, faithful communities during times of crisis. Apocalyptic literature, as a genre, may be adequately summarized as: “There will be an end of the world, a good one, and this isn’t it.”

In truth, Jesus’ enthronement in majesty ought not to be understood as a specific point in time—not a single date within our future history, however some might try to predict it—but as an eternal truth beyond all space and all time. From the right hand of the Father, He judges not simply the end of things but every single moment of existence. He reveals them in the light of divine and perfect truth, burns their dross away, and redeems the entirety of future, past, and present, rewriting our reality into what it was meant to be.

This to me might be the most wonderful promise of all: that our past, in Christ, is no longer set in stone; that we are not merely forgiven for our sins, but also given the opportunity to right our every wrong, to heal what we have harmed, to resurrect what we have slain!

Think of every godawful tragedy, in your life and in others. Would you fix it if you could—not losing the lessons, not negating the good that God has drawn out even from our evil—but repairing your past nonetheless, undoing every sin? Because that is what awaits us in the coming of the Christ. The παρουσία of our Lord works, as it were, both forward and back. He saves not only our future but our present and our past. It isn’t simply His Second Coming in history; we’ve already covered that.

No, when Christ comes in majesty, He breaks eternity into time. He lifts us up from flesh to spirit, from death to life, from Law to Gospel. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Emptiness, falseness, nothingness, shall all be burned away. And God at the last shall be all in all. The Evangelists saw this in Christ. St Stephen proclaimed it in his martyrdom. The Prophets all announced it in the various Days of the Lord—which were really all the one eternal victory of Christ.

History, mystery, and majesty; the past, the present, the future and beyond; He comes to claim it all, to save us all. This is the Christ whom we one and all proclaim. This is the Advent of our Lord now come to us.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026