A Sermon for Advent: Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgment

Little Trinity Anglican Church, Toronto

 

Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgment

 

 

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                                                              November 16, 2008

 

 

[The Lord said] because of the iniquity of [Israel’s] covetousness I was angry, I smote him, I hid my face and was angry...(Isaiah 57:16)

 

The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God. (I Peter 4:17).

 

For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ…(I Thessalonians 5:9)

 

*******************************************

 

My family, like most families, loves to tell and retell certain stories. One of our most beloved stories concerns some favorite New England cousins, some years ago, whose daughter was to be married. She’d been raised as an Episcopalian and wanted the Episcopal service, but her grandfather, who was a prominent minister in the Congregational Church, was asked to conduct the ceremony. My cousin and her grandfather sat down together to go over the service from the 1928 Episcopal Prayer Book. Now you need to understand that this grandfather was a Congregationalist of the theologically liberal Harvard variety, who made it a point of honor to distinguish himself from his Puritan ancestors. He and his granddaughter began to read through the traditional Anglican marriage service, and they quickly got to the place where the minister is supposed to say, “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed....”

 

“Well!” said the grandfather. “You certainly don’t want to use that. We’ll just leave that part out.”

 

“No, Grandpa!”[1] exclaimed the bride-to-be, “I love the dreadful day of judgment!”

 

The approach of the Advent season sets before us the question, How shall we love the dreadful day of judgment?

 

As a good many commentators have noted, the Advent season actually begins before the first Sunday of Advent. It’s a seven-week season, beginning after All Saints Day. In the Northern Hemisphere, the weather cooperates with the change in the lectionary readings. Have you noticed? When the change from Daylight time to Standard time takes place, when the darkness comes on so abruptly, that’s when the lectionary begins to take on a note of foreboding. Prophecies of doom from the Old Testament begin to appear. From the gospels, we get parables about the coming judgment. Last week we had the parable of the bridesmaids who ran out of lamp oil in the middle of the night, and tonight the parable of the judgment upon the man who wasted his investment. “Cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’ Jesus said that! Did we know that Jesus said things like that?

 

Advent begins in the dark. St. Paul writes,

 

…as to the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters…the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them…and there will be no escape. (I Thessalonians 5:1-3)

 

The intended effect of the readings at this time of year is to disturb our peace and security. The purpose of this seven-week season is to take an unflinching inventory of darkness. That’s why the Anglican tradition refuses to celebrate Christmas until Christmas Eve. It’s one of the very best things about us, one of the things we really do well. Our liturgy is designed to show that we are willing to refuse the easy comforts of the commercial Christmas. Advent is an exercise in delayed gratification. One of the classic readings for the season, a lament from Isaiah, expresses the mood:

 

Behold [O Lord], you have been angry...in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved? We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. We fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away….you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.

 

When we observe the seven-week season of Advent, we ponder these things. Like the falling leaves and the early darkness each year, the 24-hour news cycle performs on cue. I have never had any trouble finding Advent messages in the newspapers.

 

Here is the front page of The Globe and Mail two days ago. At the top of the page, the latest incarnation of James Bond minus his wit and easy charm—he is grieving, depressed and angry, more disposed than ever to use his license to kill. Just below, “Faces of Suffering in Afghanistan.” Afghan girls, blinded and disfigured by an attack of acid sprayed in their faces because they had the temerity to go to school. Advent begins in the dark.

 

Exhibit number two: A three-part article for Remembrance Day, also from the Globe, about the problem of remembrance in three countries where people died at the hands of their own government—the Soviet Union under Stalin, Spain under Franco, Germany under the Nazis. According to the article about fascist Spain, more than one hundred and thirty thousand people disappeared during the regime of Franco (this era is vividly portrayed, by the way, in the remarkable movie Pan’s Labyrinth, which shows how the Church supported Franco). A leading Spaniard is quoted, saying, “We [the Spanish people] need to condemn the fascist period, but we haven’t.” According to the article about the Soviet Union, a movement to memorialize the millions who died in Stalin’s Gulag is “being opposed by the [Russian] Orthodox Church and its highly placed friends in Putin’s new Russia”—the Church cooperating with repression yet again.[2] Here perhaps is a place to listen carefully to the announcement of the first Epistle of Peter: “The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God” (4:17).

 

Exhibit number three: Stephen Lewis, that admirable Canadian, is collecting testimonies from women who have survived politically motivated gang-rapes in Zimbabwe. These women were deliberately chosen for rape because they have been active in the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change), seeking the overthrow the tyrant Mugave. I can’t give you the details from the pulpit, but they are beyond horrifying. Let me just quote one woman, who said that after the assault she could not stand or walk, so she had to crawl away. The leader of the team who attacked her told her repeatedly, “You deserve this, this is your punishment for daring to support the MDC. We have a list and everyone on it like you will receive a punishment.” [3]

 

My students ask me, how do we preach about judgment when there is so much resistance to the topic? It would be hard to exaggerate the degree of this resistance throughout the church, even though it is one of the most important and pervasive themes throughout the Bible—not only the Old but also the New Testament. A student in one of my classes bravely chose to preach about judgment even though one of her Christian friends scolded her for it. “Why do you want to focus on all that sin and judgment?” Last year a well-known Canadian theologian[4] and his wife were visiting my husband and me and we took them to one of our local Episcopal churches. The gospel lesson was one of Jesus’ teachings which prominently featured judgment. The preacher—who was a recent graduate of a distinguished American theological college that shall remain nameless—announced that he would not preach on the gospel that morning because “we don’t believe in a God of judgment.” The visiting theologian and his wife were, shall we say, appalled—and I wanted to crawl under the pew in mortification.

 

How shall we love the dreadful day of judgment? One woman working with Stephen Lewis to collect testimonies said, “We are exposing the fact that [Zimbabwe] is a terrorist state and the entire country is either living in a culture of complete terror or a culture of complete impunity.” This is an important concept, impunity—Latin im-punitas: without punishment. When a culture of impunity is present, so that one can do whatever comes to hand with no fear whatsoever of consequences, human beings become bestial toward one another. That’s not an opinion; that’s a fact. We know this now. Even the nicest American boys and the sweetest Canadian girls, under certain conditions, will turn on other people with ferocity. That’s what produced the conditions in the Abu Ghraib prison. Imagine a world without judgment. That’s impunity. Is that what we want?

 

How shall we preach judgment? If we are unable to live with the thought of the judgment of God because we don’t want to allow it into our tidy concept of God as loving, forgiving, and accepting, then what we need to do is envision those Afghan girls whose only crime was to seek education. The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is so threatening right now, despite the excellent efforts of the Canadian soldiers, that many girls are now quite literally unable to attend their classes. If we are reluctant to think about judgment, we need to call to mind the Spanish desaparecidos, the people who wrote editorials or joined political groups in opposition to Franco, who were taken from their families under cover of darkness and never seen again. If we remember them, and the violated women of Zimbabwe, and the young Canadian journalist Melissa Fung who was kept in a hole for a month because she wanted to tell the truth, then let us ask ourselves, do we want a world without the wrath of God? If we summon these examples, the words of God to the prophet Isaiah seem more suitable: I was angry, I smote [Israel], I hid my face and was angry. In such circumstances, we can understand that the judgment of God upon all evil is good, right, and necessary. A culture of impunity is nothing less than Hell.

 

The trouble is, as I am sure you have already figured out, is that we don’t mind God being wrathful against somebody other than us. The difficulty comes when judgment draws close to us, to our friends, to our group, to our favorite cause. How are we to understand the words of Peter? How shall the Church stand first in line for the dreadful day of judgment?

 

We begin to do this by remembering that the Church is not a collection of autonomous individuals, but a family, brothers and sisters of Christ by adoption and grace, “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:19-20). When we reflect upon that gospel truth, doesn’t it become clear that there is nothing, not even God’s own judgment, that can destroy a structure built upon the cornerstone that is God’s only-begotten Son? In that sense, truly the fellowship of the baptized has already passed through the judgment, as John says.[5] In that sense the words of Paul in our reading from First Thessalonians are also true: “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is true security, a security that the empires of the world with all their might cannot pretend to convey.

 

But this true security does not simply lift us clear of this world. We must live this perilous existence along with everybody else. This is a world where cancer strikes the just and the unjust indiscriminately, where punishment is meted out to those who do not deserve it while those who do deserve it go free, where the poor get poorer and the rich, even in this financial crisis, are only a little bit less rich than they were but a whole lot less inclined to be generous this Christmas. This is the world of Advent, a world that makes no moral sense to the unaided eye. Advent begins in the dark. Anyone that tells you otherwise is living in denial.

 

“But you are not in darkness, brothers and sisters,” continues the Apostle Paul:

 

You are not in darkness for the day [of judgment] to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not children of the night or of darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.

 

As children of the day we stand first in line at the bar of judgment by repenting of our sins and the sins of the whole Church and the sins of the whole world. We are involved in each other because God was first involved in us. The wrath of God and the love of God are two faces of the same thing. The world will be purged of its iniquity in the consuming fire of the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the Advent theme. He will come again to set all things right. In the meantime we take up the weapons of his warfare: “Since we belong to the day, let us…put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (I Thessalonians 5:8) Anything we can do—anything at all, however small or large—any deed of kindness or generosity or courage that eases the load of someone else or brings truth and justice to light—such deeds are signs of the advent of the One who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty (Revelation 1:8).

 

“The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God,” but “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him…

 

“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing….” and the power of the Ruler of the universe will be your strength and your shield, your rock and your fortress, your shepherd and your judge, your Saviour and Redeemer, your Lord and your God.

 

AMEN.