In Days to Come | a sermon for Advent 1

A sermon by Jamie Howison from the 1st Sunday in Advent

And into the season of Advent we go. Of course, contrary to what is happening in the shopping malls, there is not so much as a hint of tinsel or shiny ornaments anywhere in sight, because the Christian calendar has some work for us to do before we get there. And to be sure we will get there, but for this season the church creates a zone quite different from what you’ll find in the mall… and that’s a good thing.

And perhaps that’s just for an hour every Sunday, and maybe during daily online evening prayer if that’s part of your practice. You may even have begun to pull out a few seasonal decorations at home, or even set up the tree. I know of at least one household that has done that, in part because this year still holds the heaviness of the covid unknowns and the tree brings a bit of much needed light and life. Trust me, I won’t chastise you for doing that, but I am delighted that you’re making this space to engage Advent.

It is a kind of alternative zone, which begins with the Bethlehem story suspended off in the distance. Rather than an infant in a manger, we have a very adult Jesus in today’s gospel, close to the end of his ministry and speaking some rather dire words about “that day and hour” of the “coming of the Son of Man.” From here we will essentially back our way toward the nativity story, winding through the figure of John the Baptist toward Joseph’s discovery that his beloved Mary is pregnant, finally landing in the stable on Christmas Eve.

But for now, what is it that Jesus is so urgently speaking about in this gospel text? As N.T. Wright points out, modern readers will most often hear this reading as pointing forward. Given that teachings from the book of Acts and from both Paul and John insist that when God remakes the world in the fullness of time, Christ will be very much at the heart of it all, many lean toward seeing this urgent text as addressing that same thing: Jesus’ return in the fullness of time.  

Yet, comments Bishop Wright,

It is vital to read the passage as it would have been heard by Matthew’s first audience. And there, it seems, we are back to the great crisis that was going to sweep over Jerusalem and its surrounding countryside at a date that was, to them, in the unknown future – though we now know it happened in AD 70, at the climax of the war between Rome and Judaea. Something was going to happen which would devastate lives, families, whole communities: something that was both a terrible, frightening event and also at the same time, the event that was to be seen as ‘the coming of the son of man’, the ‘royal appearing’ of Jesus himself. And the whole passage indicates what this will be. It will be the swift and sudden sequence of events that will end with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. (Matthew for Everyone)

Yet, you might ask, if this is about that very specific crisis that happened at that particular point in history, what about those verses in which Jesus speaks of how “two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left” and “two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” Doesn’t that point to a coming crisis time, when the faithful will be taken up, with the non-believers being “left behind”, as the popular novels of the 1990s and early 2000s phrased it? “If anything,” says Bishop Wright, “it’s the opposite: when invading forces sweep through a town or village, they will ‘take’ some off to their deaths, and leave others untouched.” And this did in fact happen when the Romans pillaged their way through Judaea.

And yet the warning can still sound, and sound clearly in a world that yet knows war and crisis. In the time between Jesus establishing his church—his people, under his reign as Christ the King—and the day when God will remake this broken world we do live under a threat of crisis. Be awake, be aware, be ready, be open; that’s the abiding message, particularly in this season of Advent.

As was the case two Sundays ago, it is interesting then to be confronted by a crisis Gospel yet nurtured by a hope-filled passage from Isaiah. “In the days to come,” the prophet sings,

In days to come
   the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
   and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.

Swords into ploughshares, he dreams, spears into pruning-hooks. Not only will the nations no longer lift their swords against one another, but “neither shall they learn war any more.” The city of Jerusalem is imaged as the place that will stand at the centre of this new—or utterly renewed—world: a peaceable kingdom.

And yet in those early days of the ancient church, Jerusalem was flattened, and Judaism dispersed. No more was there a temple to which the people could journey to make their sacrifices and offer their tithes. No more was there the ritual of releasing a goat—literally a scapegoat—and chasing it from the city as a sign of the banishment of their sins and brokenness. The city itself was broken, its temple shattered, and to this day there is nothing left aside from the remnant that is now known as the wailing wall.

Was Isaiah simply wrong? Or will that temple need to be rebuilt? Some Christians do believe that the modern city of Jerusalem will one day hold a rebuilt temple, and that then all that Isaiah envisioned will come to be. 

But there is another way of looking at this, and one rooted in the scriptures. Do you recall the scene when Jesus chases the moneychangers and merchants from the temple? Well, in John’s telling of the story he is immediately confronted by some of the people, who question his right to do such a thing, and he responds “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” to which John parenthetically adds, “he was speaking of the temple of his body.” And then turn to Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, in which he’s tuning them up on all manner of issues, including questions of the respect—or disrespect—they are showing for their own physical bodies, and he says rather bluntly, “For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” (1 Cor 3:17)

So no, for while Isaiah himself might have been envisioning that the restoration of all things must be tied to the Jerusalem temple, in Jesus and in the early church there is a growing realization that the old temple has now been replaced by the new. And the new is Christ and Christ’s body, which is the church; which is us. The wailing wall in Jerusalem might still be a holy place, a pilgrimage place, a site of devotion, and that is not a bad thing. But we must primarily see that Christ’s work and dominion is not tied to this place or that place, but rather is meant to be wherever his people are.

Now I don’t know that I necessarily feel very temple-like, and certainly during those weeks in October when I was labouring under the weight of a covid infection my body felt anything but holy. Tired and worn, sure, but holy?

But Paul’s challenge is clear, and it is born out in all that he writes about the church being the Body of Christ. Tired and worn and vulnerable as we might be, we are meant to walk together as Christ’s body, even as the new temple. And so with Isaiah I am bold to proclaim, “come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

Welcome to Advent.