The Kingdom of Heaven Come Near

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday of Advent , 2022, by the Rev. Holly Huff.

Advent is a season of waiting, a season of expectation and longing and hope reaching through the darkness. In Godly Play, the fabulous lectio divina-inspired children’s formation program we use at the cathedral, each session starts with looking at where we find ourselves in liturgical time, in the calendar of the church year that has been given to us to measure our days. Advent, we say in Godly Play, is the time for getting ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas. During these four weeks at the very start of the church year we look toward the gift of the Incarnation, God with us in human flesh in the person of Jesus. We look with joy and expectation toward God’s coming to us in this First Advent, the birth of Jesus at Christmas, and we examine ourselves to make space for God to live in us now, too: “let every heart prepare him room!” as the carol says. 

The season of Advent also builds on the final feast of the church year, the Feast of Christ the King, even as it starts the year over. As we move toward Christmas, the First Advent or “coming”, we look simultaneously toward the Second Advent of Christ, which the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer explicates this way: “Q. What do we mean by the coming of Christ in glory? A. By the coming of Christ in glory, we mean that Christ will come, not in weakness but in power, and will make all things new” (BCP 862). A beautifully Anglican answer, I think! Faithful and yet not overly defined—–speaking too smoothly and assuredly about things unseen usually bumps a grasping after certainty into the place of faith. Better to leave some things in holy darkness. So in this dark season we also look with joy and expectation toward Christ’s coming to us in power in this Second Advent and again we examine ourselves to make space for God to live in us. In this meanwhile time between the first and the second Advent—here we are, getting ready.

And if you stick around Godly Play long enough, you realize that we do really a lot of getting ready. Yes, there’s Advent, the season of getting ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas, but there’s also another entire season of getting ready, the season of getting ready to come close to the mystery of Easter which we call Lent. Each session of Godly Play begins with a time for getting ready in the circle to hear the story, and then the storyteller asks the kids: are you ready? It comes up in the Godly Play renderings of the parables of the kingdom, too—you have to be ready to knock on the door of a parable, in patient expectation that one day it may open for you. One starts to suspect that this talk of getting ready is more than a classroom management technique. The continual practice of getting ready might be pointing us toward a way of being, a disposition rather than a task, one that bears fruit in all seasons of the year. Getting ready is not a burdensome yet necessary preparation before getting to the thing itself, not a Sphynx’s riddle to be answered before we can enter the gate, but a way of living from a state of grounded watchfulness for the kingdom of heaven that has come near, right here! 

This is after all what John the Baptist came preaching, that wild man clad in camel’s hair, waving honeycomb through the air as he munches on locusts. You can practically smell his dependence on God to care for him in the wilderness! But this is John’s word, his prophetic cry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” 

Repentance gets a bad rap around town, but it’s such good news. John’s call to repent tells us: another way is possible! You don’t have to go on dragged down by all that has held you captive thus far. Your addictions and griefs, all the petty judgements, the constant search for affirmation and affection and security in people and stuff and achievements, everything that cannot satisfy and the preconceptions you wield against the world like an ax—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye you can surrender these, turn and come home to your life and find Jesus there, lying in a manger, radiant amid the barnyard scene of your pigsty heart. The kingdom of heaven has come so very near. God has come close to us. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

“And he did not come to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him!” If you’ve spent this whole time wondering whether you will be found among the good and holy grains of wheat bundled up safe or incinerated with the worthless chaff, whether you’re a fruitful tree or a miserable stunted thing getting axed, I have good news for you. None of us is just one thing. The truth of our life as revealed in this dark Advent season is that we are and we aren’t. Already, not yet. As St. Augustine says the line between good and evil, between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world, is a line that doesn’t divide totally good people from totally bad people but that line runs through every human heart––and every human institution. We are still unfurling. Each created thing already contains the seeds of love, we exist because we are loved and called into being and called good, and yet what we will be has not yet been revealed. We live in the meanwhile, between the gift of the kingdom and its full unfolding, and in this meanwhile we are burdened by sin and evil and despair. Discovering ourselves in the midst of this already-and-not-yet world, the dual invitation is both to rest easy and to get ready. 

Rest easy, because we were created by Love for Love and no one is getting burnt up wholesale. God will never give up on us. Rest easy in the strong love of God that goes ahead of us and makes a way for us. When Jesus (not we ourselves) holds the winnowing fork, even what we despise in ourselves can be revealed as beautiful when reoriented to God. It’s all been done, it will all be done. So rest easy, and get ready, repent, turn your heart back to that source of your life so you can come close to the mystery of God’s coming close to us. Get ready, keep awake, and, letting the dry husks of small-self identity drop away, become transparent to the love of God begging to shine through us like these window panes that shelter us in refracted light here.

I’ve not always found it easy to trust that light. The gap between the way things are and the way I sense they should be and could be, is sometimes too wide to cross with my understanding. I so long for the vision Isaiah articulates of the holy mountain where justice reigns and enemies are reconciled and apparently all sorts of beasts from the four corners of the world can play together in mixed-up Noah’s Ark harmony. “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” I remember as a young college student having an outright panic attack at choir rehearsal and having to duck out of the basement classroom because I couldn’t stand our earnest strainings at the “Hallelujah Chorus” a moment longer. We were practicing for Christmas, still a couple months out, and in the midst of a hairy semester where my classes were opening my eyes to the failed do-gooderism of international development and the sorry state of legal protections and equality for women around the world, I couldn’t stand to sing over and over: “the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” What I saw so sharply at that time were all the ways the kingdom of this world is not become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. I couldn’t bear the dissonance of it.

It took a long time to understand that the despair I felt at that rehearsal and for several years besides was not only despair. It was also love, and hope, hope for something I could not yet see. And I think I started to learn this in Advent. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,” Isaiah also says, and it came as a great relief to me to learn that sitting in darkness, helpless, not knowing where to turn, in need of a light outside myself, even despairing, could be a faithful posture. I didn’t need to change or fix anything I felt to be able to open to God. Lovingly tended to and held in the presence of God (and yes therapized and medicated) that despair unfurled itself as a form of Advent watchfulness, waiting and hoping and yearning for the kingdom of God, offering myself to work to make it so, yet also knowing it could only be brought about by grace.

I leaned heavily on the church in that time. I was supported by the faith of the congregation and by the whole body of the faithful who have gone before us. Their witness buoyed me up, and the liturgy nourished me with the Word. Even when I couldn’t bring myself to believe any of it with my mind, I knew I still needed to be there. I knew I was hungry, and holding up my empty hands to receive the bread and wine I started to let God feed me.

Church is a place where we proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of heaven. Where we teach each other to walk in love. Where we point out the light for each other when our own eyes go dim. Where we are nourished. As you’ve gathered it is also stewardship season, which is not quite a liturgical season but if it were on the Godly Play chart would surely also be rendered as a time of getting ready. In the very practical sense, your pledges help the vestry and clergy of St. Mark’s to make responsible decisions for what we can afford to do in the next year. So we pledge because we’re getting ready, making conscientious preparations. We don’t receive money from The Episcopal Church or from the Diocese of Utah; in fact we give money to support both of these bodies. It takes upwards of $650,000 to support all the ministries of this church, and we do ask that everyone who attends this church make a pledge to contribute financially for the coming year, whatever the amount may be. That you pledge matters more than what you pledge, because again, as with Advent, stewardship is more than getting ready for something. It’s a disciplined habit of wakefulness, aliveness, responsiveness right now. We respond to the generosity God has shown to us here, to the love we have received in community and to the beauty of holiness in worship and to the opportunity to serve Christ in the face of a patron at Hildegarde’s Food Pantry or a resident at The Point. If you value what’s happening at St. Mark’s, pledging is how you can live out that value. A pledge of whatever size is a commitment to support God’s work in and through this parish. In addition to our total stewardship goal of $500,000, our hope this year is to gather pledges from 100 different households. Last year 83 families and individuals pledged, and with the rich blessing of many new faces among us in the past year, I know we can do it. 

So prepare the way of the Lord! It’s the season of getting ready to come close to the one who has come close to us, and the kingdom is already very near. Hallelujah!