First Sunday of Advent 2008

There are those today who would say that the first step towards loss of faith in God is the loss of a sense of sin. Certainly the author of the first reading this week, the anonymous prophet of the Exile in Babylon, would have agreed with that. The passage we heard was written in Jerusalem shortly after the people had returned there from Babylon in the year 538BC, and, looking back over the whole episode, the author sees sin as the root cause of it all. ‘We were all like men unclean’ he writes, ‘all that integrity of ours like filthy clothing. For you hid your face from us and gave us up to the power of our sins’ But now he is filled with wonder and amazement. What had happened at the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar years earlier had seemed like the end of the world. And yet, forty two years on, against all the odds, the people are home again. And you can hear the prophet’s amazement. ‘No ear has heard, no eye has seen any God but you act like this’ he cries. We had long been rebels against you, we were like men unclean... and yet, Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, you the potter, we are all the work of your hands.’ They had met God, not in their strength but in their weakness, a pattern repeated all through history.

And we see it in the gospels. It was the prostitutes and sinners who welcomed Jesus. The religious leaders of the day did not. And as Advent begins it’s important to understand why that was. Advent, we know, is a period of preparation for Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus as the Saviour of the World. But what do those words mean? In what sense is Jesus the Saviour of the World? Why has he saved us and what has he saved us from? These are crucial questions and only those who know what sin is can even begin to answer them. ‘If we say we have no sin in us, St John says in one of his letters, ‘then we deceive ourselves.’ And it was those who did deceive themselves, those who had no sense of their own sin, the religious leaders of the day, who rejected Jesus, while the prostitutes and sinners welcomed him. In other words – returning to where we began – a sense of sin, both personal and shared with the rest of humanity is one of the pillars on which faith rests, and it’s for that reason that I invite you to reflect a little today on the nature of sin so that, as Christmas approaches, we can have some sense of what it means to say that Jesus is Saviour.

Sin, of course, comes in all shapes and sizes. But for our reflection today I would like to take you back to something St Thomas Aquinas said about it more than seven hundred years ago. If we can understand it, then not only will we have a better awareness of what sin is, but we will also have an insight into why God loves a sinful world so much. And it may even help us see that same world through more compassionate eyes than we sometimes do. So what did he say? Well, it was very simple really. He said that man is not attracted by evil, only by apparent good, a truth reflected beautifully in the Genesis myth of the Fall where the man and the woman are conned by the Serpent into doing something which seems to promise so much – you will be like Gods – but is no sooner done that it turns to dust in their hands. And at the heart of all sin lies this same deception.

Take, for example, the materialism that lie at the root of our modern culture. The Western world is not filled with evil people set on a path of self-destruction. It’s filled with good people who have been conned into thinking that happiness lies in acquiring more and more things. The desire for happiness is deep within us. We long for it, and since only God can ultimately satisfy such a desire, every searching for it, even when we are searching in entirely the wrong place, is, deep down, a searching for God. And those whom Church-going people today would consider sexually permissive are not bad people either. At the heart of this is a perfectly legitimate rejection of old anti-the body attitudes and a determination to enjoy to the full an aspect of being human that is thoroughly good and, for people of faith, thoroughly Godly too. The fact that this basically healthy reaction to what went before so easily degenerates into something less good is simply par for the course. And even when we look at the destruction and violence going on around the world, the vast bulk of those perpetrating it, including our own government, believe it is justified. Historically, one man’s terrorist has always been another man’s freedom fighter and people who blow themselves up in crowded streets or fly planes into buildings, are not doing so because they think what they are doing is bad. To even contemplate such actions requires a profound belief in their rightness, even their Godliness, and I have no doubt that those who do such things are totally convinced of this.

And into all this comes Jesus. In his own person, symbolized by the story of the temptations in the wilderness, Jesus confronts humanity’s illusions about where happiness lies and rejects them. ‘Man does not live on bread alone’ he tells us, ‘but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ In everything he says and does he shows us that true happiness and true freedom lie; not in self-indulgence, but in love and service and the seeking of the Kingdom above all other things. He saves us from our own foolishness by showing us how to live fully human lives and by remaining faithful to this through death to resurrection, demonstrates that good is greater than evil and truth more powerful than the lie that is the root of all sin.

But the serpent is the most subtle of all the beasts,Genesis tells, and so we continue to be easily deceived. The basic problem, however, is not badness but foolishness. And so, as Jesus tells us today, we must always be alert and on our guard lest we be seduced and fooled again by some new, more subtle form of the same old lie. But as we struggle with this personally and contemplate a world engaged in the same struggle, sometimes with very critical eyes, our model is the Jesus, who, from the cross, cried out: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

BIDDING PRAYERS

A sense of sin is only healthy if it leads us to God and deepens our awareness of his immense love for the world. It is not about feeling guilty or sitting in judgement on the world. It is about coming to know ourselves as loved sinners. It is about learning to see the world and everyone in it as God sees them; in other words, through compassionate and loving eyes. And so we ask the God who loves us more than we could ever imagine to help us understand this...................Lord hear us

And so we pray in a very special way today for people everywhere who are crushed by their own sin: those who, having made serious mistakes in their lives, see no way back: those who think they are beyond even God’s love and God’s forgiveness: those who feel so bad about themselves and what they have done that they are unable to receive or accept the love of others: that, with God’s help and the support of other people, they will come to see themselves as God sees them.....................Lord hear us

St John tells us that, if we say we have no sin in us we are deceiving ourselves. And so we ask God for a deep sense of our own personal sin as it has manifested itself throughout our lives. We pray for the grace we need to see the effect our sin has had on others, to recognize the people who have been hurt and damaged by it, so that, wherever possible, we can seek forgiveness and healing from them while there is still time.............Lord hear us

We have reflected many times over the years on the tendency to see the world as a terrible place, filled with nasty and evil people doing nasty and evil things. But as Jesus hung on the cross, this is not what he saw at all. Jesus saw a world filled, not with nasty, evil people, but confused and hurt people. He saw the crowds as sheep without a shepherd, searching for God but not knowing where to start looking, and we pray for the grace to see today’s world through his eyes......................Lord hear us

For the author of the first reading this week, the Exile in Babylon, and all that went with it, was the result of the people’s sin. No-one else had done it to them. King Nebuchadnezzar had been the immediate cause but, ultimately they had done it to themselves and brought about their own downfall. And so we pray for the world at this time so that, whether it be the environment or the financial crisis, we may see what we are doing to ourselves before it is too late....................Lord hear us

Advent begins today, but before we know where we are it will be Christmas. Between now and then we will have to live through the period of consumer-driven madness which afflicts the world every year at this time. And so we pray for the grace we need to make our way through it in a faith-filled and discerning way, enjoying what is good and wholesome about it, but, with God’s help resisting the extremes to which it can so often drive us.....................Lord hear us