From the Associate Rector

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. –Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, Book of Common Prayer p. 211

Advent faces into death and looks beyond it to the coming judgment of God upon all that deceives, twists, undermines, pollutes, contaminates, and kills his beloved creation. There can be no community of the resurrection without the conquest of death and the consummation of the kingdom of God. In those assurances lies the hope of the world. –Fleming Rutledge. Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ (p. 22).

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your 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 living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, Book of Common Prayer 1979 p. 159

We often think of Advent as a season of preparation for Christmas, a kind of communal delayed gratification until we can finally belt out our “glorias” and our “go tell it on the mountains.” And there is some truth to that, but there is so much more to Advent. Fleming Rutledge, Episcopal priest and theologian, has argued that Advent is a special season in the life of the church. All other feasts and seasons, except for Trinity Sunday, commemorate specific events in the life of Christ or the life of the early Church.

Dear Friends,

Judgment especially as an adjective (i.e. judgmental) has gotten a bad rap. And let me be clear, often deservedly so. Judgment or more properly condemnation has been used a cudgel by the power brokers of society and the church (often one and the same) to control the lives of women, sexual minorities, and those ethnic and racial groups deemed lesser. Furthermore, God has been used as a tool of control to instill fear in the young to keep them in line, often with good intentions though not always. And many of us still bear the scars of the religious trauma caused by turn or burn religious rhetoric and an over individualistic conception of sin and judgment.

However, abusus non tollit usum, abuse doesn’t take away proper use. God’s judgment to our forebearers in the faith was part of the good news. And we must recall that for the most part they were people on the margins, the poor and the downtrodden, and not those who reaped the benefits of the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome that Caesar brought. So, what might it mean for us to redeem and reclaim the language of God’s judgment?

Perhaps a good place to begin would be to explore the connection between God’s justice or righteousness and the virtue of Christian hope that is at the heart of the Advent season. In the Hebrew and Greek of the Scriptures justice and righteousness are the same word, and these roots are used both as nouns and verbs. So, God’s justice is intimately related to God’s making right .

Furthermore, as Fleming Rutledge points out in her book, Advent, “The Christian hope is founded in the promise of God that all things will be made new according to his righteousness. All the references to judgment in the Bible should be understood in the context of God’s righteousness—not just his being righteous (noun) but his ‘making right’ (verb) all that has been wrong.” Our hope as Christians is founded not on human justice but on the promise inherent in God’s rectification of all things in the day of judgment.

This promise can indeed fill us with both hope and joy as it did our forebears in the faith if the character of the promised judge is clear to us. “He (our Lord Jesus Christ) will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” The one who is to come is no stranger but is our Lord and Teacher, Jesus the Christ who gave himself to liberate us from sin and death. He is the one who comes not to condemn the world but to heal it and us.

So, at the turning point of Advent when Christmas is soon approaching. We remember that the Holy Child in the manger and the Judge that is to come are one and the same.

Peace and love,

The Rev. J. Antonio Álvarez
Associate Rector