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This past Sunday I visited an Episcopal church, the first time for this particular church.  For those of you who aren’t of the liturgical persuasion, when you go to an Episcopal, Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox church, you go for the liturgy, not for the sermon.  The sermon - which is usually and refreshingly quite brief by Evangelical standards - is somewhat of a bonus, especially if it’s good, although it is still is important in the whole worship context.  I was very pleased on Sunday to leave the worship service impressed with not only the liturgy (standard Book of Common Prayer)  and the quality of the music (which was incredible), but also with the quality of the sermon. It was almost like listening to N.T. Wright, without the British accent.

In the sermon, we were reminded and encouraged that John the Baptist, whose assignment was to announce the advent, as it were, of the public ministry of the Messiah, operated in the wilderness.  He was neither a TV personality nor a street-corner prophet; he was, if you will, an oracle, and people had to go out to the wilderness to find him. In other words, he was inconvenient. And, if you believe at all that the medium is the message, and I think it does, it tells us that the Gospel is inconvenient. It’s not necessarily easy to find, and many of us have to walk a difficult road to access it. As is confirmed again and again in the Bible, God is revealed in the wilderness, in the desert, in exile, in prison; he is revealed in all kinds of very inconvenient places. The Good News is that in the midst of our trials - which I can relate to at the moment, as I’m currently out of a job and fairly stressed - God is revealed. The Advent season celebrates, among other things, the trials and tribulations of a pregnant woman forced to travel as her due date arrives. It’s all so inconvenient, but God will be revealed.

We were also reminded that Advent, the celebration of the incarnation and the revelation of the Christ, is also the advent of the New Creation. With the incarnation, God entering Creation in a new and very personal way, the New Creation was initiated. Advent is the celebration of creation and re-creation, it is the season of hope and new life. God has become incarnate, and is about to be revealed. Christmas is more than just a birthday, where we stand around the manger and think, “isn’t he cute?” Christmas is the acknowledgment that God has set the wheels in motion; the New Creation is underway, and we are a part of it.

These are some of my thoughts, loosely based on Sunday’s sermon. I know there were good points made that I’ve forgotten; this is one sermon where I wished I had taken notes. However, I’ve grasped the essence of the message, and I thnk it will have a lingering impact on my understanding and appreciation for Advent.

The Incarnation - the Word become flesh, God become man, the Heavenly become Earthly - is without a doubt the one theological aspect which has gripped me over the years.  Just think, the Creator of Heaven and Earth entering Creation, entering created Time itself, without causing the nuclear meltdown of the whole universe, it really incomprehensible.  And not only that;  that God throughout history has chosen to reveal Himself through the more common elements of his creation.  God born in a stable (imagine the smell… and it wasn’t cinnamon or incense); baptism in dirty rivers; God nailed naked to a tree; partaking of the divine through wine and broken bread.  That nothing in Creation, no matter how lowly or crude, is unfit for the presence of God to fill, convert and use - this is amazing. This is the Incarnation. This is why I love Advent - the prime time of the Christian calendar in which to focus on this inexplicable reality.

For more thoughts on the Incarnation, I will direct you to an article by NT Wright in Christianity Today, What is this word?

Many years ago, concerned by friends leaving our church, I preached a sermon on the topic, “what is the church?”  I could not find a copy of my notes, but I am guessing that I probably would not agree with much of what I said back then.  After a few years as a church elder and dealing with a vast array of problems, I significanly revised my thinking on the church. If you looked back at some of my writing from this period, you’d note that I sounded quite emergent, before emergent existed. However, that, too, has passed. After many years of thinking, reading and writing about ecclesiological issues, I find myself almost full circle, coming back to a more traditional view of the church.

David Hayward has written recently about the nature of church, saying, “The truth is that it is basically a group of people in relationship with one another and with the spirit of Jesus.“  I would have to agree that this definition follows Jesus’ promise in Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.“  There is an element of church that exists wherever Christians are in relationship, even if  no prior relationship existed between the individuals; our connection to Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit is sufficient for relationship, and church, to happen. However, I suspect that in many cases church relationships have become predominantly horizontal; that is, we no longer see our connection to the local church as based in Christ, but rather upon any number of extrinsic elements.  The invisible, universal Church is one thing; the local church is quite another.

One of the unfortunate results from Martin Luther’s rediscovery of the priesthood of all believers is that we see ourselves as somewhat independent and self-sufficient; it’s truly “me and Jesus.” However, what we fail to realize is that we are priests not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of others, the local community of believers. We are truly dependent upon each other. This is seen most clearly in the administration of the sacraments - baptism and communion - something which evangelicalism has also lost. The sacraments, having lost any sense of incarnational theology, have been reduced to rituals, memorials or testimonies, rather than a true expressions of the work of Christ. When attempts are made to “spiritualize” them, the result is often akin to superstition.

For Luther, the church was an expression of the Gospel, and was in fact founded on the Gospel, that we are justified sola gratia, by grace alone. The church, in Luther’s mind, is also seen as a communal version of his anthropology, that we are simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously saint and sinner. That is, in Christ we are, as is often phrased today, in the “already and not yet,” sinners who have been undone and condemned by the Law, but remade and are being sanctified by Christ.

The Church is expressed locally when Christians gather in faith, with the common belief that we are simul iustus et peccator, sinners dependent upon the cross. There is no other basis for communion.  When we corporately respond to the preaching of the Gospel and respond in faith, the church itself is undone and reacreated. Therefore, “unity” is only possible through the work of grace in the corporate gathering. There is, therefore, no need for pastors to exhort followers to “get on the same page” or do anything else to create or preserve unity in the church; whatever these issues are, they are immaterial. Unity and the corporate expression of the Church is solely based in the Gospel and our shared faith in the Cross.

This does not necessarily make finding a local church easy; even within the various liturgical church denominations, there are varying expressions, ranging from “low” church expressions with modified liturgies to “high” church expressions with all the bells and smells. Style and personalities are a factor; however, when all is said and done, we are made a church not by any of these things, but because we are all simul iustus et peccator.