Advent Sunday Sermon

Sermon. 2 December 2018. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent Sunday

My late aunt was a churchgoer. She was a nun for most of her life. All the times I was in church with her (quite a few times), I never once saw her use a hymn-book. The organ would strike, she would stand (when she could) and sing out the hymn, word perfect, all from memory. I pointed out to her once how remarkable this was. She just turned to me and said: “I’ve been singing these songs since I was four”. (She lived into her eighties.) And that was the end of the matter.

So, brothers and sisters, we know each other. We know where this is going.

Lo, he come with clouds descending,

[inviting others to lead] once for favoured sinners slain…

Every eye shall now behold him

robed in dreadful majesty…

Those dear token of his passion

still his dazzling body bears…

Well, I don’t know if my aunt can rest easy in her grave, confident she still has the prize, or whether she’ll be spinning, because of the loss of shared knowledge of our hymnic heritage.

One more try:

Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing

shall the true Messiah see.

This hasn’t just been an act of mutual humiliation. I do want us to spend a moment thinking of this great Advent hymn, Lo, he comes. It does, I think, bear attention.

One thing about it: notice what is absent. It is an Advent hymn or carol, and yet there is no mention whatsoever about Christmas. No manger, no shepherds, no wise men… and no birth. The focus of the whole hymn is the second coming of Christ. Christ coming in glory. Christ at the end of time. God appears on earth to reign.. high on thine eternal throne, claim the kingdom for thine own… It doesn’t hide it, does it? This is about the resolution of history, the end of suffering; the full, healing, intimate presence of Gd. This is of course one Advent theme. We may be less aware of it than we were, but the Second Coming is a focus of attention throughout Advent. But it doesn’t normally push the first coming – the babe in the manger – quite out of the picture.

What is even more unusual, there is a second Christian festival hinted at in the hymn. Not Christmas, but… Good Friday. Those dear tokens of his passion… gaze we on those glorious scars. The carol picks up the idea of John’s gospel, where Thomas asks about and sees the risen Christ’s wounds, and of Revelation, where the one who reigns is the Lamb who was slain. The risen Christ does not have his earthly history airbrushed – photoshopped - out. We wounded him. He, in love, takes it. He bears the scars. At the glorious end, the scars are made glorious – changed, transfigured – but they do not disappear. Because this life counts, what we do and receive in this life has eternal significance.

It is a wonderful hymn, a wonder of the rich Wesleyan wealth of hymns. But there is one more thing. Sisters and brothers, we have to look again at the second verse.

Every eye shall now behold him/ robed in dreadful majesty/

those who set at nought and sold him/ pierced and nailed him to the Tree/

deeply wailing/ shall the true Messiah see.

Who are we thinking of? Who, amid all the feasting and rejoicing and the dazzling glorious glory – who gets to wail, to cry? To ask that question is of course to ask the deeper one: Who pierced and nailed him to the Tree? Who killed Christ? Is this making you feel slightly unsettled? I hope so.

There is of course a straightforward answer to the question “who killed Christ?” which is historical. The Romans. The Romans in the form of their army (their known-to-be-brutal army), under the instruction of Pontius Pilate (a brutal leader even by brutal Roman standards) killed Christ. But! But that doesn’t work here. In this verse, that doesn’t work. Why not? Because it makes no sense to imagine the Romans weeping and wailing on seeing the “true Messiah”. Romans had no concept of a Messiah – true or false. They could no more be thrown by seeing the “true Messiah” than we can be thrown by hearing we’ve made a mistake about “the line of tulkus”. The tulkus are those who, according to Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnate enlightenment and compassion, in such as the current Dalai Lama. You get the point. If it turned out that the person we know as the Dalai Lama were not a tulku, you might raise an eyebrow. You would not wail.

So here something else is going on. Here we are descending down to another Christian tradition. Here – I don’t like to say it, but I have to – we are saying, by implication, that “the Jews killed Christ”. Once we allow ourselves to see this (I don’t say agree with it), the verse makes sense. Talk of Messiah makes sense. It is a Jewish idea. Also, talk of selling and piercing and nailing to the Tree makes sense – these are all references back to the Hebrew Bible.

We have to be clear (clearer than we may like to be) that there is an ancient and widespread belief in Christian circles that “the Jews killed Christ” – and that is (bizarrely) all Jews everywhere. It has always been bad theology. Historically, a bunch of Romans, with a small bunch of Jewish leaders maybe, killed Christ. Theologically, we all have a share in the killing of Christ, every time we fall into serious sin. Whether we are involved in “Jewish-Christian relations” or not, we need to actively rid ourselves of any claim or implication that “the Jews killed Christ”. It is not true to the Christian way.

Fortunately, we can make an easy change, which allows us to enjoy Wesley’s hymn and sing it out with all the confidence of a musical auntie. Rather than sing “those who set at nought and sold him” we can sing “we who set at nought and sold him”, which is truer to the Christian way of thinking about things. When we, who say we know Christ, still act in ways which betray Christ, we bear the greater responsibility. When we fail, we can (thank Gd) be forgiven. For the whole message is about forgiveness. But we have to own the failing first. We who set at nought and sold him.

Now, if you tell me I am making a fuss about nothing, you aren’t the first to say that. But I want to say two things: it is the things we sing without ever needing to think about them that tell us what we truly believe. If we aren’t actively thinking “what is this about?”, then we are thinking “this is what is plainly true; this is home turf”. And secondly the idea that “the Jews – all Jews everywhere – killed Christ” is not at the front of our minds – I get that – but it bubbles up, still, even now. So a friend of a friend of mine – a priest who is ethnically Jewish himself – was stopped at Tel Aviv airport and asked about the church he was going to. He said: “Yes, it’s about Jesus Christ. You killed him. But, don’t worry. He rose again on the third day.”  Horrible, and stupid, and wrong words. Real-life words.

My late aunt was called Doreen. But as a nun, she took the name Bridget. She loved all things Irish, and was determined to take the name of the leading female Irish saint. (Her brother was a Patrick.) No pressure, but I invite you to sing out our final hymn – Lo, he comes  (but you’d worked that out that was our final hymn) with extra gusto, singing only “we who set at nought and sold him”, because otherwise it implies something which is damagingly untrue. Amen.