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

The Second Sunday in Advent—December 5, 2004

Hearing God’s Word

“Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen” (Collect for Advent II, BCP 92).

The choice of today’s Epistle and Gospel to be read on the Second Sunday in Advent is much older than the Collect that I just quoted. It has always been a Christian concern, from the very beginning, as St. Paul lays it out in his Epistle to the Romans (15:4ff), that the members of the Church, as the Body of Christ on earth, should live in obedience, fellowship, and internal peace until the Lord’s return. And the Church has been looking forward to that return, to the fulfillment of the twin prophecies of the end of this world and of the arrival of the kingdom of God in all its glory, delivered by Christ in today’s Gospel, since the Lord ascended into the cloud of his Father’s glory forty days after the first Easter.

Since the Reformation, we pray the old Collect for this day on the Sunday before Advent. We heard it just two weeks ago: “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord” (BCP 225). And it is a good thing to be reminded that the good works that we do in this life are entirely the fruits of God’s grace at work in us, so that if we are faithful and loyal to him by his grace, God’s grace itself will answer for us on the Last Day.

But the Reformation presented additional challenges to that state of godliness that St. Paul advises in the Epistle. Furthermore, many who called themselves “Christians” were grossly unprepared to face the final judgment, which Jesus Christ declares will come, on the strength of God’s grace alone. The end of the world was for them a matter of superstitious dread, rather than an occasion of joy at the Lord’s return. They were attracted to every crazy preacher and crack-brained theory that offered them a supposedly fool-proof gimmick to survive the end of the world. Rather like today’s dieting crazes, in which people will do or buy almost anything imaginable to lose a few pounds, those poor souls would do or buy almost anything in order to purchase a place in heaven for themselves, despite the alternative of the simple, gracious, merciful invitation to life offered in the Holy Scriptures.

Thus, a new Collect was written for this Sunday in 1549, based on a key passage from this morning’s Epistle: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning [that is, for our “instruction”], that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” (Romans 15:4). The only life that is eternal is the life that Jesus Christ offers, according to the pattern and reality of his own life. The only way to prepare for the Second Coming is in Jesus Christ’s way. The only way to have peace and fellowship in the Church, as we await the Lord, is according to God’s Word, who became incarnate as the same Lord Jesus Christ. And the only way that we can know with a certainty the will of our Father in heaven and the Gospel of his Son Jesus Christ is by the Holy Scriptures, God’s Word Written and inspired by the Holy Ghost.

This “new” Collect, then, offers us both a wise prayer for God’s own instruction of our lives and an applied, Biblical doctrine for the proper understanding of the Scriptures. For example, following the inspired St. Paul, the Collect asserts that “all holy Scriptures [were] written for our learning.” The Scriptures themselves do not permit us to pick and choose among them, let alone and God forbid, that we set one portion of Scripture against another. Thus it is that the Old and New Testaments are, together, a single Bible. Those who set the Old Testament against the New Testament, or vice versa, have already denied the Word of God before they say anything else.

Similarly, while I have a “red letter” Bible that I received as a gift from a friend, and while it is a pretty thing, and it does make it easier to find particular sayings of our Lord in the Four Gospels, all of the words of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, are “the words of the Lord,” and not just the direct quotations from Christ’s preaching in the Gospels. Jesus Christ is the Living Word of God, and every Word of the Scripture comes from God the Father, through God the Son, and by the Holy Ghost. The Commandments, the Psalms, and the Prophets are just as much the “words of Christ” as is the Sermon on the Mount.

We should also note that the first request concerning the Scriptures that we make of God the Father in the Reformation Collect is that he will grant that we “hear them.” Many people today think that everyone with a copy of the Bible is prepared to study the Bible, but they are wrong. First of all, God by his grace must open our hearts and mind to hear his Word. As our Lord told his faithful disciples, “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4:11-12).

“Hearing the Scriptures” is a gift of God, necessarily tied to the gift of salvation. As St. Paul declares, “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). And faith is absolutely necessary since, as St. Paul also teaches, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). The Scriptures can only be understood, then, in gracious fellowship with God: and when we choose to disobey God, or worse yet search the Scriptures for passages to warp into conformity to our disobedience, we stop our ears against the voice of Jesus Christ.

“Hearing” is first, furthermore, because the study of the Scriptures does not begin with the private reading of them, let alone with any private opinions about them, but with hearing them in and from Jesus Christ’s Church. As St. Peter explains, “[Know] this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:20-21). This “hearing” of the Scriptures includes not only the general witness of all faithful Christians to the Scriptures, but especially and particularly the authoritative reading and preaching of the Scriptures in the faithful Church.

No one is wise enough to know or to understand the Scriptures on his own, at least as far as God and the Scriptures themselves are concerned. Private study only has value when it is guided and shaped by the continuous teaching and understanding of the whole Church, as the whole Church is indwelt by God the Holy Ghost. As St. Paul teaches, it is the Holy Ghost who forms the “mind of the Church,” and not the intelligence of human scholars and pastors: “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Corinthians 1:20-21).

St. Paul is not recommending foolish preaching, but he is making this case: “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). All the clever arguments in the world about “other means” to be saved or “other lifestyles” or “other moralities” fall before the cross of Jesus Christ. And it is in the same sacrificial obedience to the Father, by our own bearing of the cross of the givens of the Christian faith, that we stand with Jesus Christ, rather than standing against him.

Only after we have accounted all of the Scriptures to be the Word of God and heard them all by God’s grace in God’s Church are we truly ready to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” And then, when our own diligent study within the fellowship of the Church is firmly established, we can truly say that we are nourished by the Word of God—fed with the Truth by our Master Jesus Christ. Then, too, we can say with the help of God’s grace, by the action of his Son and of the Holy Ghost, that we have “held fast” to “the blessed hope of everlasting life,” which the Father has given us in Jesus Christ.

Whether, then, it is the obedient peace of the Church that we seek or our right preparation for the Second Coming of our Lord, it is to the Holy Scriptures that we must turn for “our learning,” for God’s own instruction in eternal life. This absolute dependence on God is not only the heart of the Biblical doctrine of the Scripture itself, recovered in the Reformation; it is the heart of the Christian life and the heart of the Reformation’s efforts to free us from the folly of men, and from the fears and terrors that must always follow from men’s folly. Trusting only in God, we are free indeed—free from the deadly power of sin and error. Trusting only in God, and hearing his Word by his grace, we are secure in his kingdom as his redeemed, instructed, and obedient sons and daughters. From within such divine security, the end of this world is a trivial thing.