A Sermon Preached on The First Sunday of Advent
at The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
on the Third of December 2023, 11:00 am.

The readings were Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-8, 18-20, and Mark 13:24-37.

In the past the tradition in Roman Catholic churches as well as in many Anglo-Catholic parishes, was, on the four Sundays of Advent, to preach about the Four Last Things. The Four Last Things are: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell – just the kind of things you want to hear about while in preparation for Christmas. Of course, if you’ve already heard Mariah Carey sing Santa Baby once too many times, or Last Christmas by George Michael for the hundredth time, you may feel that anything would be preferable. Now, I preached about Death two weeks ago, so perhaps I will get a jump on things and talk about Judgement today as I’m going to miss out on one Sunday’s opportunity for preaching because of the Carol Service on the 17^th. Y’all want to hear a sermon about Judgement, don’t you?

A few considerations.

First, we are all judged, for we all have sinned and we all fall short of the glory of God. That’s a simple statement of Christian doctrine, derived from Paul in his Letter to the Romans but part of Christian teaching from the very beginning. It is rooted in the Hebrew Bible – God calls us to be faithful and obedient, and we all fail. Only in Christ do we see someone who was faithful and obedient, even unto death.

The Good News, and I really mean the Good News, evangelion, is that God has already forgiven us. When the Divine looks upon us, God sees us as the Body of Christ. I would disagree with the strict Calvinists and say that this is not just imputed to us, but by God’s free gift the Holy Spirit is working in us, making us ever more like Jesus. Thus, however you see yourself in relationship to the Divine, if you are in Christ you are forgiven. That begs the question about what it means to be in Christ, of course. For evangelicals it is having faith in Christ. For Catholics and Orthodox it is about being part of the Church and progressing in sanctification and theosis. Universalists would say that God’s love and grace are even more indiscriminate, and offered outside of the bounds of the Church. The point I would make is that the Church teaches that we are all somewhat depraved, and need God’s grace. Whether some of us are so depraved that God’s love cannot redeem us is a question I will leave for another time.

A second consideration. God’s love and mercy does not allow us to escape the consequences of our actions in this life. By the Holy Spirit we may indeed experience healing and reconciliation, and the new life of the resurrection, all of which are foretastes of what we are to become. We might even develop a kind of stoic dispassion towards illness, chaos, and violence. But this does not mean that we do not encounter it, any more than Jesus avoided his Passion and own Death. We live in a broken and fallen world, lovely yet fragile.

We see this personally. Too often we refuse to accept responsibility, we seek to control those whom we love, and we are blind to our own motivations. We reject the need to change and repent and place ourselves in the hand of God instead relying on or own limited knowledge, our compromised power, and our arrogance.

We see this collectively in the consequences of industrialization and globalization. A pandemic like Covid-19 went around the world in a matter of weeks, not months or years as with previous plagues. Climate change affects us here in Greece, where one olive picker noted that this year was the first he’d ever harvested the trees in a heat wave. The olive harvest was earlier, shorter, and hotter. In the Holy Land people became inured to the daily violence of everyday life. For the recent right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu it meant ignoring a long-term settlement with the Palestinians, assuming that the periodic low-grade violence of “mowing the grass” was preferable. For the radical terrorist group of Hamas violence against civilians, feeding on the despair of Palestinians, and preaching a vision of hate and genocide is preferable to making a compromise with Israelis. Neither side was willing to engage in a discussion around a two-state solution and the establishment of real peace, and the result has been a greater escalation of violence.

A final point may be the most important. We are called to heal and reconcile. Jesus calls us not to judge, lest we be judge, to forgive as we have been forgiven. While sometimes some of us must act on behalf of the common good, we should be wary of judging, and prompt to bite our tongue. We do not judge another in gossip or out of unreflective reaction, but only according to commonly agreed upon processes.

This is hard, but sometimes it is hard to stay awake. As we prepare to welcome the birth of Jesus among us, let us also prepare to welcome his return, and his judgement of us. Let us awaken to our call to healing and reconciliation, to our need to face up to the consequences of our actions both personally and collectively, to be faithful and obedient, even as Christ was for us.

For my reflections on George Herbert’s poem “Judgement”, click here.
For my thoughts on Judgement in the Book of Revelation, click here.