So this is a Sunday of transition in the Church Year, a day with something
of an “identity crisis,” with several titles, as you see on the cover of the
leaflet. First, and this is the official
name of the day on our Episcopal Church calendar, simply the “last Sunday” of
the Church Year, this long season of Ordinary Time after Pentecost and Trinity
Sunday. Next Sunday, December 3, is
Advent, a new year, and our annual retelling of the Holy Story will begin again
with the ancient Prophets. So the last page of the book, the final scene
of the play. Winding things up.
On the other hand, in the Church Calendar of the Anglican world, ours
also in the Episcopal Church until the 1979 Calendar revision, this Sunday is and was set aside not as an
ending, but as a prelude. Not the last
page of the old book, but the preface of new, not the final scene, but the
overture—that moment when we lean forward with anticipation, as the curtain is
about to come up for the story to begin.
The Book of Common Prayer Collect for this Sunday next before Advent, was “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord,
the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing fort the
fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded.” The Collect to remind us in prayer that we
are capable of no good work, until God stirs up the capacity for, the desire
for good within us, and that we deserve nothing, that we have earned ourselves
no reward, except for the reward that he gives to those who call upon his
Name. What the theologians call
“prevenient grace.” That we love him
only because first he loves us. That
we desire the good only because he first plants that desire in our hearts and
minds and imaginations. “Stir up, we
beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.” So the day is “Stir up Sunday”—though I
didn’t have Michelle put that title on the leaflet also. As a footnote, in Victorian times the custom
began to have this “Stir up Sunday” mark the beginnings of preparation of the
Christmas Pudding. Which needed to be
stirred in a big bowl. I guess we might
think of it as something like the Christmas fruitcake.
We also have in the deeper texture of this Sunday—and actually
also for the last two Sundays--the earlier practice in the Church of the Middle
Ages that was called St. Martin’s Lent. November 11 is the feast day for St. Martin of
Tours, and the three Sundays then before what we now call Advent and the four
Advent Sundays were a season of penitential prayer and fasting parallel to the
40 days of Lent from Ash Wednesday through Easter. If we’ve been listening to the epistle and especially
the gospel readings for the past couple of Sundays we have been alerted to this
with the increasing focus on “getting ready for the end, for the final
accounting”—all of that to set the table for us as we prepare to encounter the
four great themes traditionally associated with Advent, the “Four Last Things:”
Death and Judgment, Heaven and Hell.
The wide world outside the
Church of course prefers a somewhat different focus for the Holiday
Season. But in the church along with the
gentler customs of Advent and our preparation for the annual celebration of the
Birth in Bethlehem, we pause perhaps not with the fasting of St. Martin’s Lent,
but even so on the Sunday next before Advent, to remind ourselves that the
reason Jesus was born for us is that we who are lost, we who are condemned, we who
are without any grounds for appeal or to request mitigation of sentence—we
really do need a savior. That’s the
foundation of Christianity, the theological convergence of theology and
anthropology. That’s what Advent is
supposed to remind us, and in a way that would simultaneously wake us up and
flood our hearts with gratitude. Christmas
and Good Friday and Easter are essentially meaningless unless we begin
here. So the Pre-Advent Little Lent of
St. Martin. We really do need a savior.
In any event, finally, the third title for this morning, the
Feast of Christ the King, is not actually on the Episcopal Church calendar,
although it obviously informs the Collect of the Day. The feast was first put on the Roman Catholic
liturgical calendar at the last Sunday of October in 1925, particularly as a
counterpoint to the rising tide of state-sponsored atheism in the new Soviet
Union--and later when the new post-Vatican II calendar was published in 1970 it
was moved to the Last Sunday in Ordinary Time.
The pre-Advent focus on Last Things is of course still very strong in
our readings, and especially in this Parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25
this morning, but it is framed for us at the same time in the Collect and the
hymns and anthems of the day by the acknowledgment and acclamation of the eternal
Lordship of Christ, the One above all others, King of kings and Lord of lords.
Just briefly: the Parable of the Last Judgment, the Sheep and
the Goats, is the third and last in the sequence of the Parables of the Kingdom
in Matthew 25. Two weeks ago we heard
the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Maidens.
The contrast between those who kept their lamps full and at the ready
for the Bridegroom’s return and those who slept thoughtlessly and were caught
unprepared. Then last week the gospel
reading was the Parable of the Five Talents.
The contrast between the three Stewards, the two who took the resources
the Master had left for them to manage and fearlessly invested them for the
Master’s benefit, and the one who was more concerned about his own skin than
about the Master’s welfare, who fearfully hid in the ground what the Master had
put in his care. And this morning the
Sheep and the Goats. Those who were so
deeply attuned in their faith that even when they didn’t see Jesus directly with
their eyes, still served him day by day, in every encounter and opportunity, and
those who were so caught up in
themselves that they didn’t notice Jesus as he made himself known to them in
the lives of the hungry, the naked, those in prison.
In this context I love the Thursday Collect in the 1979 Prayer
Book service of Evening Prayer. There’s
an evocation of the Easter Evening story of the Disciples and Jesus on the Road
to Emmaus, which seems just right for us as a prayer at the end of the year, as
we gather ourselves to prepare to kneel once again in just a few weeks at his
manger throne: “Lord Jesus, stay with
us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way,
kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know thee as thou art revealed
in Scripture and the breaking of bread.” A prayer to see Jesus, to know him. At the end of the old year, leaning forward to
welcome the new year, to honor Christ
our King. In the Word and the Breaking of Bread. In the face of the poor, the suffering, the
lost. That we might see you, Jesus, where
you choose to be, even when those places may not be the ones where we expected
to find you. Kindle our hearts, and
awaken hope.
Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for
us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.
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