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December 11, 2005, Advent Three,  All Souls’ Episcopal Church         

      This is the third Sunday in the season of Advent, and it is a time of year as confusing as it is difficult and painful. For many, this season is difficult and painful because all the emphasis on happiness and being merry makes it a time when, to quote Dickens in A Christmas Carol, “want is most keenly felt.” And by want, he refers not only to a lack of material things, but also to the absence of loved ones and to all those other losses which bring sorrow to our hearts.

     Advent is a confusing season to many within the church because as the world around us already celebrates Christmas, we observe a penitential season which calls us to prepare for the end of the world. The Gospel readings for the past several Sundays, including the Sunday before Advent, dwell upon the themes of repentance and the final judgment. I’d like to comment on this in three brief observations.

     1)  The Advent theme of repentance, focusing upon John the Baptist, is tied to and the result of the larger theme of judgment. The Bible is clear about the fact that there shall be a final judgment. What we do matters. We are accountable. However, if we are accountable and if there is a judgment, it means that our lives have a purpose. If there is no purpose, then there can be no judgment because there is no criterion or agenda by which to judge. If there is a judgment, then we have a purpose.

     The Bible sums up our responsibilities this way. We are to love God and love others as we love ourselves. Our duty cannot be self-justification. God has justified us once and for all in our Lord Jesus Christ. Our duty cannot be to earn the favor and merit the acceptance of a divine being, since the divine being Himself – God – has come to us in Christ and reconciled us to Himself in Christ out of the same love in which He created the worlds.

     Our duty is to love God and to love others as ourselves. Were I to reconstruct this is purely secular terms, I’d out it this way. True happiness is found not in our attempts at self-justification or self-promotion, but in turning around from all that and learning to derive your chief joy in deliberately willing, contributing to, and rejoicing in the good of others. Or in other words, love.

     2) At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the one who is the very incarnation of love, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He not only is the reason for this season, he is the very incarnate expression of this season. He shows us the meaning and purpose of our lives. He shows us the path to true and eternal joy. And in the season of gift giving, he himself is the ultimate and eternal gift.

     3) The Advent season of repentance sounds like a negative thing to most of us. But, repentance doesn’t mean giving up everything that’s fun. Repentance means turning around and discerning what makes us truly and eternally happy. We can think of our lives as a mere allotment of time that we try to arrange in such a way that there is as much pleasure and as little pain as possible without subtracting from our number of days. Living this way can make us like the man in the parable who buried his treasure instead of investing it because he was afraid of losing it. We can live this way, or we can repent – turn around – and invest ourselves in the good of others. We can seek our chief joy and delight in seeking the joy and delight of others. To again quote Dickens, we can “make mankind our business.”

     Jesus said that he who tries to save his own life shall lose it, but he who loses his life for the sake of Christ shall find life. We can try to save our life, hording it, storing it up, pinching every penny of time, or we can invest our lives in others and in the joy of giving. If we do that, we will know joy, we will discover the real meaning of the season, and we shall find life itself.

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