Put on Jesus: The First Sunday in Advent (December 3, 2023)

“But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

A few weeks ago, I got to go to New York City for a few days to attend a conference on preaching. The conference was held at a very old, very large, very wealthy Episcopal Church that had been the home parish of J.P. Morgan back in the day. While we were there, another priest told me a story that at one point in the late-1800s or early-1900s, this parish had invited the great evangelist Billy Sunday to preach for them on a Sunday. Before the service, Billy Sunday sat down in the front pew and thumbed through the Book of Common Prayer (which would have been the version of the Book of Common Prayer that we use). Being so impressed with the substance of our liturgy, Sunday remarked, “Heaven help the Devil if the Episcopalians ever wake up.” Indeed, this is the great struggle that every Christian tradition has, but that Anglicans and Episcopalians in particular have struggled with: we have to wake up. Today is the First Sunday in Advent and I’m here to tell you it’s a great Sunday to wake up. Our culture would have us move straight from feasting on Thanksgiving to feasting on Christmas. Indeed, in the minds of many American consumers, the Christmas season has already begun. It began on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, days where we gorge ourselves on material goods after we’ve spend the preceding Thursday gorging ourselves on food. Sadly, the great season of Advent is lost in the shuffle of our cultural liturgies precisely because it doesn’t fit very well; it’s a season of preparation, a season of self-examination, a season to clear away the cob webs, a season to drive out the idols we have constructed and to embrace love in the person of Jesus Christ.

There is a fundamental truth that I want us to understand this Advent season. Our hearts are temples, places of worship. The question is, what do we we worship in this intimate chamber deep within ourselves? Philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith calls us not homo sapiens but homo liturgicus—we are always worshipping, but what are we worshipping? This question is picked up by our Malachi reading this morning as the prophet looks forward to a day when Israel’s worship would be acceptable. And of course, if you read the Old Testament, it doesn’t take long to see that Israel’s worship was often corrupted by the explicit and idolatrous worship of other gods or a more hidden internal idolatry of the self that manifested itself in hypocrisy. In external forms of idolatry, we put other things ahead of God, we mistake temporal things for our ultimate end, whether those things are wealth, pleasure, power, politics, relationships, or whatever. But hypocrisy is also a form of idolatry, a form of idolatry of the self because at its heart, is an act of pride that puts oneself over others and God. Idolatry of any sort is not freedom; it’s the ultimate bondage of our own making. In fact, St. Paul gets at this in Galatians 4 when he goes after some of the Galatians for potentially lapsing back into idolatry: “Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” Idolatry dehumanizes, devastates, and enslaves us and yet we keep chasing it.

The solution to this problem is that the temple of our heart has to be cleansed by God’s presence. Malachi describes this when he talks about the great and terrible day of the Lord who will appear “like a refiner’s fire, and like a fuller’s soap.” The refiner’s fire cleansed metals and the fuller’s soap removed stains from garments. Our Gospel illustrates this principle. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem on the original Palm Sunday to great fanfare but the residents of Jerusalem are suspicious of him. So what does he do? Rather than making nice, being diplomatic, or handing his resume and CV, he goes straight to the Temple where he drives out the moneychangers: “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” The Church Father Origen reads this text spiritually saying that the Temple stands for our human hearts and when Jesus clears the money changers, it’s a picture of the person being freed from their love of earthly things, from their idolatry. This is what Paul is describing this morning in Romans 13: “The night is far spend, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” which is parallel to the exhortation of verse 14, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.” John Wesley said that our whole whole salvation is contained in that phrase “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” And so we are invited here, on the First Sunday in Advent, to allow the presence of God into the deep recesses of our hearts where he purifies us with his purifying fire and cleanses us by banishing those money changers—all the vices and all the sin—from us so that our hearts are liberated to worship him.

It’s very important for us to remember that Christians are not a people freed from; we’re a people that have been freed to; freed to love the Lord our God with all of our hearts, with all of our souls, and with all of our minds. The idols of our hearts divide our souls; the great medieval theologian Hugh of Saint Victor says that after the Fall, our hearts are divided into as many pieces as things we crave. Our idolatry disintegrates us and the only solution is learning to love God singularly and above all things, which unites those varied pieces of our hearts and brings us back into alignment. And this is what lies behind Paul’s words in Romans 13, a passage known as the Law of Love. “Love is the fulfilling of the Law. Love and do what you want because love corrects us and orients us towards the good.

But here’s the important thing for us to be aware of this Advent season: right now is the time to cast off the works of darkness and put on Jesus Christ. As you know, we’ve been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy as our study on Fridays and this past week, we discussed Dante’s arrival in Purgatory. When he arrives on the beach, he sees an old friend of his who was a musician. Dante nostalgically asks his friend to sing and he really enjoys it but then the guardian of Purgatory chides them: you’re sitting here singing but you must be moving because you have heaven to attain! The same is true for you, Christian souls. The work of purging the idols of hearts and acquiring love for God is the mort important thing you can be doing. What idols lurk in your heart looking to ruin your soul? Get rid of them; “the night is far spent, the day is at hand.” Put on Jesus!

Remember, Christian Soul, that thou hast this day, and every day of thy life, God to glorify Jesus to imitate. A soul to save. A body to mortify. Sins to repent of. Virtues to acquire. Hell to avoid. Heaven to gain. Eternity to prepare for. Time to profit by. Neighbors to edify. The world to despise. Devils to combat. Passions to subdue. Death, perhaps, to suffer. Judgment to undergo.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.