Reflection for Advent II
By the Rev’d. Allison K. Dean
Read/listen to last week’s reflection here.
If you prefer to listen to this week’s reflection, click here.
The collect for the Second Sunday of Advent reads,
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
This week I want us to reflect on the collect in three parts:
- The acknowledgement of God’s action
- The petition (that is, the thing for which we are praying)
- The reason for which we are praying
The first thing this collect does is tell us something about God and how he has acted in the world, saying, “…[God] sent [his] messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation“.
We don’t have to look too hard to see the truth of this statement: Nathan to David when David’s lust for Bathsheba led him down the path to having her husband Uriah killed; Jonah to the people of Nineveh – “forty days and Nineveh shall be no more”; John the Baptist – “you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come”? Bear fruit worthy of repentance”. Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted from the book of the prophet Amos as he called for racial equality in the United States: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a ever-flowing stream” (5:24). In Isaiah 5 the destruction of Israel is foretold because “[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” We find the same type of messages in Hosea, Malachi, and all of the prophets. For the call to repentance, the call to righteousness and holiness, is, in fact, the principal feature of biblical prophecy, not fortune telling or predicting the future. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes, “It has also been generally recognized that the prophets were the inspired deliverers of God’s message not only about the future, but to their contemporaries, to whom they declared His will, and whom they recalled to His righteousness.“1
It is a sign of God’s love/care/concern that he sent messenger after messenger to his people. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother. But he looked on humanity and saw that if left to our own devices we would never find the straight and narrow path. The fact that so many messengers had to come tells us that there is a level at which we are unable to help ourselves. It calls to mind Paul’s words in Romans 7:18-19 (REB) “…I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” And so, in the end, even the messages through the prophets were not enough. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that God once spoke in various ways through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken through a Son. God’s love and desire for relationship took on a new dimension in Jesus, who came into the world not to condemn it, but to save it from its sinful self.
Yet we see that God’s people are still plagued by sin, which our catechism (p. 393) defines as “…our refusal or failure to do God’s will, either by disobedience or by omission”. The continuing presence of sin is seen clearly in 1 Corinthians, where Paul addresses divisions in the church, sexual immorality, the worship of idols, and gives a warning to not be like their ancestors who all perished in the wilderness because of their unfaithfulness. He urges the Corinthians to pursue love and strive for spiritual gifts. It’s been two thousand years, and if he were here today Paul would have to write similar messages to us. Different times, different cultures, different languages, same problems.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us utterly, totally, and completely dependent on God and his grace. Thus, the actual petition or request in the collect says, “Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins…“
To be sure, there must be a desire to do right, a desire to choose right, a thirst for righteousness and holiness on our part. And once upon a time I thought that that desire was enough, that choosing and doing the right thing was simply a matter of personal discipline. But the older I get, the more I realize that there are some times and situations where, if God doesn’t help us, then we will not make it; where, if he doesn’t do it, then it will not be done. So, we need God’s grace.
This is not a cop out or an attempt to avoid responsibility. Rather, it is recognition of the limitations of human will and the absolute necessity of divine help and support. It is the knowledge of our need for God to help us that led the psalmist to say, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (51:10/11). Such expressions say to God that we want to do better, want to be better, and believe that he can and will help us if we ask.
The challenge in all of this is that so often we don’t have a desire to do or be better. We are comfortable in our sin, even happy in our sin, seeing no need for change. But the ending of the collect should give us a sense of urgency for recommitting ourselves to God. We ask for grace to hear the prophets’ warnings and forsake our sins so “…that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.”
There is coming a day when we will be judged or evaluated for our faithfulness to God’s call to live in righteousness and holiness. We say it all the time in our creeds: “Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead”. In Matthew 25 Jesus tells us that when he comes again, he will separate the sheep from the goats, the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left. The sheep (the righteous) will go into eternal life and the goats (the unrighteous) will go into eternal punishment.
For many, these are uncomfortable, maybe even offensive words. But judgement is only “bad” when we don’t know what we’re being judged on. It would be like taking an exam in school for a subject we didn’t even take. But as the collect reminds us, God has sent his prophets to tell us exactly what he wants. If we want to be found faithful, if we want to inherit eternal life, we need only hear the words of prophets and obey. If we want to obey, we need only pray for grace, for by grace “God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (catechism p. 409).
As we continue our Advent journey, and reflect on the call to live lives of righteousness and holiness, I leave us with words from the prophet Micah, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8)
1. Cross, F. L., & Livingstone, E. A., eds. (2005). “Prophecy” In The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed. rev., p. 1345). Oxford University Press.