• "Advent, a Season of Repentance"
• Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent
• November 30, 2003
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

The calendar provides us with seasons of preparation for the two main feasts of the year. Advent prepares us for Christmas and Lent prepares us for Easter. We are given these seasons because we are not ready for the coming of Christ and the Resurrection. Advent and Lent are seasons of repentance. They call for us to look at our lives, discern what is amiss and make changes.

Advent focuses on the line in the Creed that says, "He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead." The gospel (Matthew 21:10f.) gives us an image of this judgment. Jesus came to Jerusalem amidst much messianic expectation, entered the temple and rearranged the furniture-an act referred to as the cleansing of the temple.

Jesus "cleansed" the temple in that he cleaned out some things that were amiss therein. But his violent actions in the temple also prefigured the temple's judgment and destruction. Within forty years of his temple cleansing, the Roman legions entered Jerusalem and completely destroyed the temple because, as Jesus said, "Ye knew not the time of your visitation" (Luke 19:44).

Now, the temple in Jerusalem was the house of God, the place where the worship commanded by God took place. That worship had been carried on for some time in a manner that Jesus found unacceptable. Somehow, those participating in the errors were not aware of the errors or chose to ignore them because of their investment in them.

The temple the Romans destroyed was replaced by us. The glory of God that once dwelt in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple now dwells within us through the Holy Spirit. As 1st Corinthians says, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are" (3:16-17, KJV).

Just as Jesus came to the temple in Jerusalem to cleanse and judge, so Jesus comes to us to cleanse and sometimes to judge. We pray cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, and, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood.

The great danger of the liturgy is that we will say these prayers with our lips but not with our hearts. As Jesus said, quoting Isaiah, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me" (Matthew 15:8, Isaiah 29:13). This was the error of the temple that Jesus cleansed. Sacrifice was offered each day for sins, but the people were not forgiven because they did not repent.

At the altar, we present before God the true, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for sin. But the liturgy teaches us that this sacrifice is efficacious only for those who truly repent and are in love and charity with their neighbors and intend to live a new life. The great danger of our common life in the temple of God is that we will outwardly go through the motions of liturgy and faith but fail inwardly to change according to God's word.

One principal way we avoid this danger is to take our participation in the Holy Mysteries very seriously. We must perceive that every week Christ comes to us at the altar in a manner that anticipates the Second Coming.

Jesus is really present in the Blessed Sacrament. We must make room in our lives for prayerful preparation so that we receive him worthily. This is one reason we attempt to keep silence in the hall outside the church doors (which in phase 1 of our building project doubles as a narthex) for fifteen minutes before the liturgy. We need time and silence to pray and prepare. We need to ask God to reveal to us the things that need to be changed so that we can make a good confession and be ready to meet Christ.

In our busy world, we get stuck in unfaithful patterns of behavior. However, because we are so busy, we think we don't have the time or energy to make changes. We must use our encounter with Christ on the Lord's Day as a time of accountability and change. We must open the doors of our hearts and let Jesus come into our lives, knock over some tables and chairs and chase out demonic influences that have gained a foothold.

We must, by grace, make new commitments to faithful habits of behavior. The Prayer Book tells us that our bounden duty is "to worship God every Sunday in his church." We need to commit ourselves to being present when Jesus comes to his temple on the Lord's Day, for this is far more important than the countless temporal urgencies or pleasures that we allow to keep us from the altar of God.

We must make new commitments to faithful habits of prayer and Bible reading through which we daily hear the voice of God and daily confess, praise, intercede and give thanks. For daily prayer and the habit of reading the Scriptures are infinitely more important than the temporal tasks that we use to excuse ourselves from prayer.

Time, and our use of time, is the key for we have a limited supply of it. The epistle says, "Now is our salvation nearer that when we believed" (Romans 13:8f.). Every minute and every hour of every day moves us closer to the time of our death and the Second Coming of Jesus. That is why the New Testament tells us we are living in the last days. We are counting down to the coming of Christ.

We can either, by repentance, by faithfulness in spiritual disciplines and by good works, redeem the time we have so that we pass it in service to God. Or we can allow time to slip away, forever running on the treadmill of temporal concerns, being unprepared for the coming of Christ but also being too busy, tired, timid or afraid to make changes.

The Spirit of Advent cries out to us, "Now it is high time to awake out of sleep... The night is far spent, the day is at hand."