O Lord, forgive the sins of the preacher, for they are many; that only your word may be proclaimed and only your truth be heard. Amen.
For the past 1,000 years, the Church has marked four themes in the season of Advent, and in a future Advent, I’ll probably preach a series on what is known as the Four Last Things, which are death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The second Sunday’s theme is judgement – which is clear in the text from Matthew. Every Advent, we have the same encounter with John. We might call him John the Doberman, because he’s the guard dog that makes sure that we don’t get to Christmas and only experience the Nutcracker, Polar Express, and elves on shelves. No, just as John prepared the way of the Messiah 2,000 years ago, he helps us to prepare to receive the gift of salvation anew as we anticipate, as we profess in the Creed, that “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Now, I realize that judgmentalism is one of the most obnoxious and unattractive characteristics there is. So before I go any further, I want to rehabilitate our understanding of judgement. The linguistic roots of judgment in the Bible are connected to justice in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and discernment in the Greek of the New. Justice and discernment – these are not bad things, even if they are uncomfortable when directed towards us. Judgement isn’t about seeing ourselves as miserable people or being burdened with shame. It’s about admitting that we are lost, drowning, and captive because of forces bigger than ourselves.
Judgment is good news – I am glad that there is a God in heaven who sees the injustice of this world is grieved and angered by warfare, racism, greed, lying, children going to bed hungry, and people not having adequate shelter. And that means that God also sees my sins and faults for what they are – things that do not align with the will of God that need to be rooted out. Judgment is an act of mercy whereas permissiveness or willful ignorance of wrongdoing would be evil. Judgment is something like a loving mother who helps a young child with a splinter – it needs to come out and the wound cleaned, and there may well be some pain involved.
In the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of the Naria series, CS Lewis writes about Eustace, a snobbish and entitled boy whose greed ends up turning him into a dragon. When the Christ figure, the lion Aslan, leads him to a pool of water to heal him, and you’ll notice the clear Baptismal connection to our text from Matthew, Eustace says, “The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe in it that I would be better. But the lion told me I must undress first… So, I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place… But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before... Then the lion said, ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So, I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off… And there was I, as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”
The scene is often called “The Undragoning of Eustace” and expresses the Gospel truth of the process of judgment, purgation, and renewal. Last Sunday, I said that the sermons in Advent are all going to focus on the theme of light. Today, the aspect of the light that we focus on is how light purifies and refines. But, like a fire, the process can be harrowing and uncomfortable. John says the same thing differently – “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear the threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” What scales would you have Jesus remove from you? What chaff do you wish the wind would blow away from you? Arrogance, despair, stinginess, fear, our propensity to judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions?
One of the more influential books that I’ve read is Low Anthropology, by David Zahl, someone I hope that we’ll bring to Grace and St. Stephen’s as a guest speaker at some point. The premise of the book, which is firmly grounded in Scripture, is that there are two poles of how we view both humanity and Jesus – anthropology and Christology are the fancy words for that. If we have a high anthropology, meaning that we think humans are mostly good and can get pretty close to perfection on our own, this would be secular humanism, then we really don’t need a Savior to save us from much. The other perspective is that humans are limited and prone to misunderstandings, duplicity, and selfishness. That gives a Savior a lot of work to do, and thanks be to God that our Savior, Jesus, was willing to go as far as the Cross for us and for our salvation. I’m squarely in the “low anthropology and high Christology” camp.
And I’ve found such relief in that truth about myself and others. It frees me from the tyranny of expectations. When people, myself included, mess up or cause disappointment, instead of getting frustrated and defensive, low anthropology helps me to say, “A sinner sinned, Robert, so don’t be surprised. But Lord, have mercy.” This sort of judgment is a relief and it is good news liberating us from the crushing burdens that we put on ourselves and others. We’re not supposed to be perfect, we’re not supposed to always get it right, we’re not supposed to have all the answers. And so we rely on God’s mercy to restore what is missing and heal our wounds.
To do this though, like Eustace, we have to strip off our self-righteousness, our perfectionism, our sense of superiority. This is what is meant by the admonition that John gives us – repent. The word literally means “to go beyond your mind” and isn’t merely about our cognitive recognition of wrongdoing, but an embodied reorientation. It’s like being on a trail and not only recognizing that we’re going in the wrong direction, but also doing the work to figure out where we went wrong so that we can find our way back to the correct path.
Last Sunday, the aspect of the Advent light that we considered was how God’s light guides us – so it’s not like we have to figure out which path we’re supposed to be on by ourselves, we look for and follow the light. The refining nature of that burning light though is more than a simple course correction, it’s a matter of asking the harder question of why we so often find ourselves on the wrong path and pray for God to burn away that part of us that makes us our own worst enemies.
A former Archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1900s said, “It is true that God loves the sinner while hating the sin. But that is a shallow psychology which regards sin as something merely separate from the sinner, which we can lay aside like a suit of clothes. My sin is the wrong direction of my will; and my will is just my active self. God loves me even while I sin… but it cannot be said too strongly that there is a wrath of God against me sinning. And though God longs to forgive, my will must be turned from its sinful direction into conformity with his, or else there is some power at work in me capable of effecting that change.”
Thanks be to God that power working in us is exactly what we are given in the Holy Spirit. As John says of Jesus, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Indeed, the Holy Spirit is a refining fire. Yes, a comforter and a guide, but a refiner as well. Repentance and judgment both involve recognition of our distorted wills. Turning again to CS Lewis, “Fallen humanity is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement, we are rebels who must lay down our arms.”
So often we resist repentance and avoid thinking about judgement, making the path of repentance, reconciliation, and relief all but impossible. The thing to remember, and that makes all of this possible, is that our judge is not the person in the mirror, it is not our children, it is not our parents, it is not our supervisor, it is not the random people we see throughout our day. God help us if we or they are our judges. No, we only have one judge, and his name is Jesus Christ, the just judge who was willing be judged in our place and who declares us “not guilty.” This is what makes judgment good and merciful news. As our Collect this week prays, repentance prepares us to “greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ.” We are judged in, for, by, and with love – a love that is, at times, passionate, fiery, and purging. To be clear, judgment is not done for God’s sake of pointing out our shortcomings and mistakes; judgement is for our sake, that we might repent and turn back to the path that leads to abundant life.
Our siblings in recovery have much to teach us, as steps four through nine of the Twelve Steps are all about this: taking a moral inventory, admitting our wrongs, preparing ourselves for God to remove these wrongs from us, asking God to remove them, and making amends, as able. These might be the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but they work for us not-so-anonymous sinners. What grooves paved by sin do you find yourself falling into? What would you like to be free from so that you could breathe a sigh of relief?
Please know that if the Church can help you with this, it’s literally what I’m here for. We have a gift in the Church called the Sacrament of Confession and I’ve seen the transformation and liberation that it can bring, both as one who has made and heard many Confessions through the years. James Baldwin remarked, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” You might be working through the Twelve Steps or maybe have a burden that you’re tired of carrying, if you want help in handing those things to Jesus, with the tool of Confession, it would be my sacred honor to help. God will bring the healing and transformation; we simply supply the sin and the desire to be made whole.
The reason why God is graciously and mercifully in the judgement business is not so we will have a good self-improvement plan. No, repentance and purgation are part of the Divine plan because, as we heard “the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” So that we are ready to receive and reflect this Kingdom, we need to be prepared, put on the right path, and cleansed from things that will distort or distract us from the Kingdom that is coming on earth as it is in heaven. It’s a vision whose fruits we see in Isaiah, of service to the poor and meek; of a kingdom of peace where wolves and lambs lie down together; of audacious hopes that trust that a shoot of salvation can arise from a seemingly dead stump.
For us to inherit this Kingdom which has been prepared for us, the chaff of our lives needs to be stripped away and burned with the power of love. God’s love for us does not leave us unchanged and stuck in our sins, but God’s love which judges between the goodness of the image in which we were made and the brokenness that we have fallen into chastens us, refines us, and restores us. We may well be a “brood of vipers,” but according to Isiah’s vision, God’s judgment and mercy will save us and make us fit to play with all of God’s children on that holy mountain where there will be no more hurt or destruction. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is coming near.”
