(Preached December 1, 2019, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, La Porte, Indiana)
+In
the Name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. Amen.
As we begin our
second Advent season together, it seems to me natural to think about
the cycles of the year that bring us back to this point. Indeed, I
believe we tend to do so at all the different forms of new
year—here at Advent, at the civil New Year in January, at the
beginning of a new school year, at our birthdays and anniversaries.
All of these days, though more or less arbitrary in themselves,
encourage us not only to think back and to look forward, but also to
reflect on how the revolving year has brought us back around to the
same place again. Back in the 60s, we had a Joni Mitchell song—one
which seems to have been covered by nearly everybody else who could
get to a microphone—on this very subject. The title of it is “The
Circle Game,” and the chorus, which has one of those tunes that
gets stuck in your head very easily, goes like this:
And
the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return--we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return--we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
It’s
not great poetry, I suppose, but people are
still recording it. The thing is, though, even though Advent as
a season
is capable of giving us exactly this feeling about the “carousel of
time,” the actual content
of Advent is precisely the opposite. Advent is our regularly
recurring, seasonally cycling, reminder that time is not in
fact
cyclical, that history does not
recur, but rather is
headed toward something—that it was headed to the birth, death and
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the first instance, and
that it is even
now
headed toward the great Day of the Lord and the recreation of the
universe as the visible kingdom of God. As you may remember, the
traditional themes of sermons for Advent were the Four Last
Things—death, judgment, heaven and hell—and those are not exactly
the set of ideas, it seems to me, that would lead us to think about
time as just running pointlessly around in a big circle.
This
idea that history is going somewhere, that it is moving toward a
purpose, is one of the common elements of Judaism and Christianity
and Islam, and so it is to some degree baked into the way that our
Western world looks at things. Other world cultures have had other
ideas. The great religions of India, to take just one contrasting
example, start from an assumption that time itself does
keep recurring in vast cycles, and that individuals are reincarnated
even within
each cycle. In one sense, the great impulse of some sorts of Hinduism
and of Buddhism is to find a way out of that cycle of rebirth. For
some schools of Hinduism like the one which produced the Hare Krishna
movement, those folks we used to see in airports, the way out is to
realize that the soul is one with god. If that is true, the theory
goes, then the soul in the body is like a driver in a car. Thus the
soul
shouldn’t allow itself to be influenced by things that happen to
the body,
any more than a driver would limp because of a flat on her car.
Buddhism, on the other hand, takes almost the opposite way out,
saying that the self is only a passing phenomenon, like a whirlpool
in a river, and that the way out of the cycles of time is to stop
clinging to things and people in the world as if the self had a
substantial existence.
Obviously,
I am just sketching these other religions or philosophies in broad
and general strokes: but even in these generalities, we see the
radical difference from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim idea that
there is a transcendent Creator, outside all things and above all
being, who brings the universe into existence with
a goal in mind.
Indeed, more than that, these three religions of Abraham say that God
creates the world with no lesser
goal in mind than God himself. And I want to say a bit more just
about that—about God as the goal of creation—but I need to back
up a bit to a different theological question to get there.
One
of the things that Jewish and Christian and Muslim thinkers spent a
lot of time on in the Middle Ages (and today as well, for that
matter) was the question of how God knows things. The Greeks and
Romans had thought of their deities watching the events of human
history as those events unfolded, like someone watching from a
distance—through a telescope, they might have said, if they had had
such things. But that sort of direct observation wouldn’t really
work for the God of Abraham, who claims, after all, to know the
future just as much as he knows the present and the past. After
several further stages of development that we don’t need to get
into, the 13th
century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides taught that observation
just isn’t a good analogy for God’s knowledge at all, because God
knows the world as its creator before there even is
something to be observed, the way a builder knows a house before it’s
built, or a painter knows a painting before it’s painted. Following
up on Maimonides, the Christian theologian St. Thomas Aquinas went on
to say that even
the analogy of God as an artistic creator still
had a weakness.
Aquinas
pointed out that the most important thing we want to say about God is
that God is, even as the Holy Trinity, absolutely, transcendently,
one.
And, Aquinas went on, the more we stress God’s absolute simplicity,
God’s perfect unity, the harder it is to say that God can really
know anything but God’s own absolutely simple self. Philosophers
and theologians had reached that conclusion before, but no one had
ever been able to connect that
line of reasoning with any of the arguments about God’s knowledge
of the created world. Aquinas, though, makes a breakthrough. If, he
says, God knows everything there is to know about God, then, among
other things, God knows every single way in which God can be known
and loved and worshipped by a creature. God knows all the ways that
creatures might come to find their ultimate fulfillment in him. And
God knows all of these various ways separately and in perfect
detail—not just how archangels in general might
come to know God, but how Michael’s
experience of God would be different from Gabriel’s
experience. And so, Aquinas says, knowing all the ways in which
creatures could
come to the knowledge and love of God, God creates some, or possibly
all, of those creatures. Out of his own simple self-knowledge, God
creates a universe of creatures which have the ability,
each following its own individual path, to finally be gathered in
worship around his throne of glory in heaven.
What
that means in terms of Advent and the cycles of time is that history
is not just
headed toward something. It’s not just that the Universe somehow
happens
to be aimed at God, but rather that this exact Universe is
created precisely because it is
capable
of being aimed at God. God chooses to create this
Universe, and us in it, specifically because this Universe is, and
we are,
capable of knowing and loving God, in all of its, and
of our,
myriad ways.
And
when we
turned away from God, and marred the Universe itself by our
disobedience, God did not simply reset the creation to its original
conditions, but rather became incarnate as one of us. God took our
nature up into the mysterious interior life of the Trinity, so that,
having forfeited the ability to reach our natural
goal on our own, we are brought to a higher
goal in Christ. As I have said here before, Aquinas teaches that we
are sticks by nature but that in Christ we become arrows, aimed at
the golden dot in a target we could never have dreamed of reaching on
our own.
Jesus
Christ is, as the Book of Revelation says, the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end; and in him and through him, by the power
of the Holy Spirit, and the eternal will of the Father, we alone of
all creatures share in the knowledge and love and life of the Blessed
Trinity. Through all the cycling years, this, and nothing less, is
the goal of history and the purpose of the Universe. Amen.
--John Wm. Houghton
