Love? Yes. Judge? Yes.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
 
If you have looked through the December Messenger, maybe you know that I spoke about this prayer, the collect for today, in my letter to the parish this month. As we enter a new liturgical year on the first Sunday of Advent, the church always gives us these same words. They were written by Thomas Cranmer, the 16th century English archbishop who put together much of the Prayer Book that we still use (in an updated form). Cranmer drew on all kinds of ancient sources, for the most part reframing Catholic materials and traditions, but bringing in some fresh reforming theology as well.
 
On your lectionary insert, which I’m going to ask you to take out right now, you’ll see up top this week (and every week) the very first section which says Collect. That’s the prayer for the day. Many, many weeks the collect is something Thomas Cranmer translated from older Latin Mass-books. But this day, the first Sunday of Advent, it isn’t. It’s something he composed completely fresh, because he thought Advent, and what it meant, was that important.

---

Can we read it together, from your insert?
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Of course, it’s a literary masterpiece. Let’s just get that comment out of the way right now. The contrasts: works of darkness versus armor of light. Mortal life versus life immortal. Great humility versus glorious majesty. We could just admire its artistry all day. We could also admire its wideness. This prayer sweeps through history. Do you see how it touches past, present and future? It starts by asking for grace in the present, then reminds us that in the past Jesus addressed our human life by taking up residence with us in it, and finally it gets to the heart of the request: that when he comes again in the future we may be prepared for God’s judgment. First “Give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness… now.” Second “your son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.” And third: “in the last day when he shall come again to judge both the quick and the dead.”
 
Advent is about all three of those things, past present and future. Three ways Jesus Christ confronts us. He did it by coming into our world in person, beginning at Christmas. He will do it by coming to judge the world at the end of time. And he does it even now – coming through the sacraments, in the face of our neighbor, through his acting on us as we read the Bible or pray. Jesus Christ confronts us in all those ways, and as we go through the Advent season, our liturgy highlights each of them at different times.
 
My guess, though, is that of these three Advent confrontations in past, present, and future, the coming of Christ at the final climax of history is the one most of us have thought least about. And yet it’s the main request in this great prayer today, and it’s what the readings for today major on too. The story Scripture tells about what God is doing with the universe makes no sense without it. In fact, a couple of our readings are actually crying out for this final judgment: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! That’s what Isaiah said. Stir up your strength and come to help us! That’s what the Psalmist said. The cry of longing for the day of judgment is even how the whole Bible ends: Even so, come Lord Jesus.
 
In his great book Surprised by Hope, the Biblical scholar NT Wright points out that “the picture of Jesus as the coming judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and nonnegotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. {But} We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible… God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world… full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.”
 
This hope for the world to be “set right once and for all” is the hope on which Advent is built. This conviction that God is Judge and that his judgment is a good thing. And it’s a good thing not just on the cosmic and historical level that NT Wright is talking about, but in our own lives. However you react to the word judgment at first blush, we need a God who judges. We may think we only want a one-sided affirming God, but without a God of justice, there’s no such thing. Let me unpack that a little.
 
The unusual and shocking Christian idea – almost unique among world religions – that God is love has trickled down across our post-Christian American society, getting vaguer and vaguer until the real meaning of love – the urgent will to good, the passionate fire, the rock solid commitment, the costly sacrifice– has been lost. When that sentence has been filtered all the way down through our culture’s post-Christian outlook, it often comes out in completely diluted, sentimental form as: God just smiles benevolently, through a sort of warm fog, and affirms the world in all its choices. God doesn’t really care one way or the other. God merely likes everybody to feel comfortable with themselves, in whatever way they choose to define that.
 
What a cruel and pathetic God that would be. A God who just benignly affirms everything? Who sits by, radiating vague non-threatening positive vibes while his creations wreak destruction on each other? Beaming ineffectually at attacks based on race or religion, at governments robbing their citizens, at case after case of sexual harassment, at mass shootings every few weeks? A God who has no answer other than a doting smile to your and my chronic habit of ignoring other people’s pain or causing pain to ourselves and others? Good Lord deliver us from that kind of God!
 
Any God who is love, as the Bible clearly tells us our God is, must also be a God who can and will say no. If you have ever felt love for another human being, a child, a spouse, you know what it is to see them hurt and for your whole being to scream No. No lover can lounge idly on the sidelines with an indifferent smile while their beloved harms themselves or is harmed. And for God you’re the beloved, right? I’m the beloved. We all are. God loves absolutely everybody, no exceptions, and because of that God judges absolutely everybody, no exceptions.
 
I said, and quoted NT Wright saying, that in the Bible this fact is good news, something to be rejoiced over and longed for. And if you’ve sort of settled yourself once and for all inside the Biblical way of telling the story of the universe, it is.
Sure, if you take comfort in God saying a final no to evil and you have any self-knowledge at all, you know that he has no’s to say to you. You know all the ways you fall short, all the things you’ve done that a loving God regrets on your behalf.  You know all the efforts you’ve made at self-improvement and how over and over you yourself have sabotaged them. You know the hopes you once had that are never going to be fulfilled, and the failures it’s too late for you to fix. But once you’ve settled yourself for good inside the Biblical story, none of that can defeat you. None of it can bring you to despair. You don’t have to cover it up or pretend it was no big deal or embark on the delusional project of trying to fix your world yourself. You can rely on God to speak his truth over all of it in a final and full rectification. All will be rectified, and not by you or me.
 
This is the freedom and the security of knowing that God is love and God is judge. This is the freedom and the security of relying, in the words of today’s collect, on our Lord Jesus Christ who has come to visit us in great humility and will be standing with us when the whole truth is spoken. Relying on his loving determination to judge both the living and the dead in a way that makes all things right. Rectification. The freedom and security of not depending on yourself, but just betting it all on Jesus Christ and his love and his justice.
 
Several of us this morning probably aren’t actually living inside that freedom and security hour by hour. Maybe the script you’re living out makes you shrug your shoulders or roll your eyes or seek some distraction from having to think about God judging the living and the dead. Or maybe the script you’re living out makes you react to the concept with anxious fear or uncertainty. In either case, I would respectfully suggest that there’s a better story to live by. We tell it here every year, starting the first Sunday of Advent. It is intellectually coherent and personally satisfying, and it has a great deal of explanatory power once you learn it and start testing it out in your daily life. Nobody at Emmanuel will make you live by it, or even make you test it out. But we will tell it to you, repeatedly and deliberately, because it’s all we’ve got. As Emmanuel goes through this new year, we will just keep offering you week by week the great story of a great God who loves so deeply that he does everything Cranmer tells us about in today’s collect. Pray it with me again, will you, from the top of your insert.
 
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.




The NT Wright reference is found on p 137 of Surprised by Hope (Harper One, 2008). The term "rectification" is borrowed from Fleming Rutledge in her 2015 book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.