Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge

Author:Fleming Rutledge [Rutledge, Fleming]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

God’s Apocalyptic War

(The Feast of Saint Michael)

Silver and Gold on the Last Day*

Grace Church, New York City

November 20, 1990

ZEPHANIAH 1:14–18; MATTHEW 25:14–30

Every year, as the last leaves drop from the trees and we start hunkering down for winter, the church’s theological clock starts to tick faster. Beginning after All Saints’ Day, the Scripture readings build to a tremendous crescendo. There is nothing else like it in the church calendar. We might imagine a movie camera mounted on a crane; at first the lens is focused on a small local happening in the streets of first-century Jerusalem; then the camera pulls back and the crane swings away so that the scene before us becomes all Jerusalem, then all Judea, the entire Mediterranean, and finally the whole world, seen through the lens of scriptural prophecy. That is what happens in the church’s liturgy in November, in the readings on the Sundays just before Advent. In the oracles of the Hebrew prophets, in the letters of Saint Paul, in the parables told by Jesus in the week before his death, the message is the same: the last things are at hand.

“The dreadful day of judgment” . . . do you who are over fifty remember that phrase? It used to be the first thing that the minister said to the man and woman in the marriage ceremony, if you can imagine it. “I require and charge you both as you shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed. . . .” Those words were said at our wedding, and it never occurred to us that there was anything we should change.

God has had a little joke on the Episcopal Church. In 1976, we adopted a new Prayer Book from which all phrases like “dreadful day of judgment” were diligently expunged. At the same time, however, we also adopted a new lectionary. I don’t know how many of you remember the old lectionary, but it was the exact same every year, year in and year out, so that we were reading very much less Scripture than we are now. The joke is that while the Prayer Book revisers were busy pushing the dreadful day of judgment out of camera range, the lectionary committees were bringing it back in by many degrees of magnification, through the lens of God’s Word.

The great challenge of the season of Advent and the theme of the last judgment is to show why, in light of the promises of God, the coming of the Lord in judgment is not bad news but the best possible news. This is not the easiest thing in the world to explain, but it is that time of year, and we are looking at the world through a wide, wide-angle lens. In the words of the prophet Zephaniah, appointed for today, we are seeing nothing less than the end of the world as we know it.

Be silent before the Lord God!

For the day of the Lord is at hand.

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