L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The First Sunday in Lent—November 28, 2004

Advent Judgment

“…Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we [first] believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Romans 13:11-12).

My friend and colleague Dr. Peter Toon recently observed in an essay described as “a conversation starter for Advent” that religion has come to be understood by many middle-class people as primarily a “leisure activity.” Religion may be important to them in a variety of ways, but it is something that belongs to their “spare time”—to the time left over, after the essential work of their lives is accomplished.

In support of this thesis, Dr. Toon points out that people tend to dress according to their understanding of the relative importance of whatever it is that they are dressing to do. Casual clothes go with casual activities, whether those activities are a trip to the Mall, dropping the children off at dance lessons, or leisure-time religion. In much the same way, worship services themselves and the sort of music that accompanies them are shaped not so much by an explicit theology as they are by the casual attitudes of ministers and the members of their congregations.

It needs to be clear that the question at hand has nothing to do with looking down on people who simply wear the clothing that they have to church. St. James, in his Epistle General and at the very beginning of the practice of the Christian religion, warned us against treating Sunday mornings as a fashion competition (see chapter 2). Nevertheless, there is something odd about wearing a fine suit or dress clothes to work and wearing jeans and a tee-shirt to church.

This practice of dressing-down for God, wittingly or not, is an effort to exercise power over God, reversing the natural relation between God and man. Man decides the relative importance of God in the scheme of things, and if man decides that he only has time for God in his leisure, then God is expected to be satisfied with the time and the honor that man is willing to apportion him. God, perhaps, is expected to be grateful that any attention is being paid to him at all.

I would, however, add two more elements to my friend’s observations. The first is that leisure-time religion is not limited to casual congregations, so that many congregations that continue the outward practice of traditional, formal religion have also succumbed to the idea of religion as a part-time, spare-time activity. Patterns of attendance speak volumes, and it is worth remembering that the only traditional justifications for non-attendance at the church on Sundays and other holy days, based on the Bible, are incapacitating illness, travel, and the duties of charity, such as the duty to care for the sick at home or the duties that oblige firemen, policemen, nurses, and members of certain other professions to be at their posts, rather than in church.

Thanksgiving Day is a perfect example of the inroads that have been made by leisure-time religion. All across America, churches are almost completely empty on Thanksgiving Day. Those empty pews are absurd, when one remembers that Thanksgiving Day is first and foremost a day dedicated to thanking God for every good thing in our lives as his particular and personal gift to us. Furthermore, as George Washington pointed out in his First Proclamation of Thanksgiving Day in 1789, this national day is for the public honoring of God, and there is no way for God’s people to honor him publicly if they are not to be seen by the world leaving their homes and gathering in God’s house to honor his Name.

Complicating matters for those of us who are Anglicans is the additional fact that Thanksgiving Day is one of the Prayer Book holy days, all of which we are required to keep, allowing for the usual exceptions, and all of which we have given our word to keep by our membership in this household of Jesus Christ’s Church.

One thinks, then, of earlier times when Christian men, fathers and sons, had to bear arms in order to protect their families on their way to church on Thanksgiving Day, times when the churches were full. One thinks, too, of the loyal Christian women of the past who produced great Thanksgiving feasts without a single modern convenience, perhaps without so much as a wood-burning stove, who also made sure that their families were in church to give thanks before a single morsel of those feasts passed their lips.

If there is no time to worship God on Thanksgiving Day, then God has been reduced to one leisure-time interest among many, and God has ceased to be understood as the Sovereign Lord who is to be worshipped with whole hearts, whole souls, and whole minds. If God is not worshipped first, then God has been denied as the Lord and Protector of our nation, and our nation has no right to expect God to intercede on its behalf or to show it any special favor among all the nations of the world. If God is not worshipped first, then God has been denied as the special Protector and Benefactor of our families, and our families have no right to look to him for aid, for sustenance, or for salvation.

We can see, if we look to the Bible, that this sort of wholesale abandonment of God, relegating him to the barest leftovers of time and effort, has all happened before. It happened in the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when the Old Israel turned away from God to its own devices. Despite all of the warnings of the Prophets, Israel ceased to thank, worship, and honor God, and the kingdom of Israel ceased to be. The family of Israel was scattered to the four corners of the world, so that it was essentially in ruins and a mere possession of the Roman Empire by the time our Lord Jesus Christ was born.

This collapse of a once godly people is the reason that I would add a second element to my friend Dr. Toon’s analysis, and it has to do with the modern middle class. When we read the Prophets’, the Apostles’, and our Lord’s warnings to the rich, to rulers, and to those in any way encumbered and possessed by the material concerns of this world, it is easy for us to think that these warnings have nothing to do with us. We are not like that, we tell ourselves; we’re just ordinary middle-class Americans. But by Biblical standards, and by the standard of living of world history, we are the rich, we are the rulers, and we are those tempted to burden ourselves with the cares of this world to the point where we are possessed by them and lose sight of God, who ought always to be our first love and our first concern.

We are well on our way to living the bad dream of materialism. We are well on our way to removing ourselves from God’s protection, by treating him as the God of our spare-time, rather than as the God and Ruler of all time and all things. The only way to avoid our being owned by these faults and temptations is to follow the advice given by St. Paul this morning: “Now it is high time to awake out of sleep.” We must awake from our bad dreams before they become our living nightmares, “for now is our salvation nearer than when we [first] believed.”

The Second Coming of our Lord, when a reckoning of our lives and of our faithfulness must be made, is closer than when we first professed the Christian faith. The Last Judgment is coming, and if we cannot conceive of that final judgment, then we must consider the judgment that concludes every human life. The conclusion of our lives in this world and the end of our connection with the material concerns of this world are closer now than when we first professed belief in Jesus Christ as our only Lord and Savior.

As St. Paul writes, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” Our life in this world is far spent, no matter what our age, and the day of the Lord, of our encounter with the Lord face to face, is drawing closer, moment by moment. We can succumb to the foolishness of leisure-time religion, or we can honestly evaluate our lives, admit our neediness before the Lord, and let him fill our lives with the light of his presence, driving out the darkness and death of the material cares of this world. We can play at Christianity, as one kind of leisure activity among many, or we can strap on the armor of light—the equipment of a soldier of God, prepared to fight this world and its demands, prepared to war against anything that might come between us and our proper worship and service to God.

I have always thought that Advent is a more frightening time of year than even Lent. In Lent, at least, when we have confessed our sins and mortified our bodies, we have before us the visible signs of the remission of our sins—the Cross of Jesus Christ and the Empty Tomb. In Advent, on the other hand, we are called upon to look forward to God’s judgment of each one of us, and the visible sign before us is an innocent child, the Son of God, born in Bethlehem.

That child, however, was conceived and born to fight the entire world around us for the salvation of our souls. He was conceived and born without a second of his life set aside for any purpose but the will of his Father in heaven. And if we, by grace and adoption, have become the children of that same heavenly Father, then our lives in this world must become the same as his—innocent and dedicated to our Father’s will. That child’s life, that child’s blood, that child’s innocence, and that child’s dedication will be the terms of the judgment we must face, and if we try to face our judgment on any other basis, we will find that we have wasted our lives, our hope, our opportunity, and the eternity that Jesus Christ died to share with us in the kingdom of his Father.

And so, Advent is a time of judgment, beginning with this judgment of ourselves: will we die, the slaves of this world, or will we live as the heirs of the kingdom of God? Our answer to this question will determine the answer to every other question there is or ever will be.