Once every five or six years, or sometimes not for 11 or 12 years, depending on leap years, we encounter today’s situation where the last Sunday in Advent also happens to be Christmas Eve. The temptation for a preacher when such occurs is to stray from Advent themes into that of Christmas. The tendency to so do is further exacerbated by the Gospel reading. Although it once again, just as last Sunday, involves John the Baptist, the forerunner of our Lord, with his specific ministry to “prepare the way.” But it ends with those words that we repeat at celebrations of the Eucharist, just before the faithful receive the precious Body and Blood of our Saviour, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Obviously those concluding words are a bridge between the Advent theme of preparation, and the actual realization of our Lord’s Incarnation.
I should like to attempt to dwell, as it were, on
that bridge. I am prompted to do so by a
wonderfully thought-provoking series of articles in the Ottawa Citizen over the
past few days by Robert Sibley. There
are three articles; today’s will be the third and last in the series, so I
shall not have read it prior to preparing this sermon.
There is a definite link, in one tremendously important
sense, between his articles and today’s Gospel reading. In the Gospel, there is no doubt as to the
clearly accepted belief in God, and the anticipated coming of the Messiah, by
the Israelites. John is undergoing his
interrogation, “Who art thou? Art thou
Elijah? Art thou the Prophet?” by the
leading figures of the Jews. There is
not even the slightest indication that disbelief was a part of the Jewish
society of the day.
Robert Sibley’s articles - and I would highly
recommend that everyone read them - among other things deal with lack of faith
and belief. The first in the series was
entitled, “A Crisis of Faith,” with the subheading, “We tend to stumble over
notions of spiritual faith nowadays, as though its very expression is an
embarrassment. It’s understandable. The modern age has been defined by its
marginalization and discrediting of religious faith,” followed by the
Scriptural quotation from Luke that looks forward to our Lord’s Second Coming,
“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (Luke 18.8).
The second article in the series is entitled,
“Coolness as self-defence” under the supra-heading, “Faith, Nihilism and
Wonder.” Where the first article spent
time dwelling on the conversions of such notables as George Grant, Simone Weil,
C. S. Lewis and St. Augustine of Hippo - all of whom were what might be
classified as intelligent agnostics or even atheists prior to their conversion
- the second makes the point that the real opposite of faith, especially for
the average person today is not intelligent agnosticism or even atheism, but
rather nihilism - which is to say belief in nothing.
In paraphrasing Dostoyevsky, Sibley states “At the core of nihilism is not only the denial of a divine reality against which and by which men are judged, but also the corollary denial of man as a spiritual being. For Dostoyevsky and many of his contemporaries, such a notion was horrific. It meant there was no ultimate meaning or purpose to life, no life after death, no divine accounting or forgiveness for the horrors of this world. Man was utterly, unbearably alone. If ‘everything is permitted,’ then, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘values’ are merely claims of power by those who wield social and political control. Without God, might is right.”
He then moves ahead from Dostoyevsky to the current historian Jacques Barzun who makes the damning and irrefutable observation of western society that, “despite its technological prowess and prosperity, ours is another Alexandrian era: a period of cultural decline, moral incoherence and waning intellectual rigour.” This against the loss of faith, replaced by what Sibley calls “devouring nihilism”, characterized by “conspicuous consumerism” - on this temporal plane of earthly life, God has been replaced by toys and things, and from an eternal perspective, He has been replaced by fatalistic nothingness. I daresay that, if many funerals are indicative today of the general population’s belief (or lack of belief) system, they don’t really spend any time at all thinking about their existence, either temporal or eternal. When they are suddenly faced with the death of a loved one, their nihilism - belief in nothing - results in a sudden jolt characterized by a vast array of emotions: anger, anguish, grasping at pleasant memories of the dear departed as if somehow the bits of “goodness” have guaranteed them a better place - in which they didn’t believe while they were alive. It is truly a challenge to minister to such people.
As to the perhaps curious heading, “Coolness as self-defence” Sibley muses about the odd practices that characterize our nihilistic lifestyle such as “children of supposedly safe suburban streets emulating ghetto dwellers”, making the observation that, while such kids think that they are rejecting materialistic consumer society, they are in actual fact the “consummate consumer”. But you should read that for yourselves.
I am very much looking forward to what should be a
more uplifting final article in today’s paper (perhaps some of you have read it
already) in which I understand that he ponders whether the sense of wonder that
characterizes the human psyche will be a route to the recovery of faith.
“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on
earth?”
There was no apparent crisis of faith in first
century Palestine in terms of accepting the existence of God, and His plan, and
His prophesied Coming; however, as we know, God did not fulfill the
expectations of the religious elite of the day.
They didn’t recognize Emmanuel, God with us, so there was certainly a
crisis of belief when our Lord did indeed appear in His First Coming.
Which therefore begs us, those of us who do have faith today, as we make our final few hours of preparation for the annual celebration of the Birth of Jesus Christ, Whom we believe was indeed “God with us”, will we recognize Him when He returns?
ANNUNCIATION OTTAWA 2006 CLRK