As the beginning of Advent, the lesson each year is to watch, the question is, Watch for what? To cut to the chase, to be as brief and simple as possible, the question the Church asks this first Sunday of Advent is always something like that.
What do you want? For what do you hope? What do you desire? What are you looking for? In essence, these questions are basically the same question, a question—maybe the first question we humans ever asked—that is always in some sense a spiritual question, even when it’s a matter of the simplest, most earthly desires. But that is to get too mystical about the subject too quickly; but perhaps we can’t help it.
The first instance of desire found in the Bible is of man for woman, a desire set up by God himself; it was a desire manifest as love at first sight, when he first saw her. “This one, at last…this one…this one,” the man says enraptured by the woman.[1] What do you want? The first answer to that question seems to have been, “I want her.” The desire of love—woman for man and man for woman—is at the beginning of all desires it seems. Here we are not far from Plato’s eros. Whatever we want, in some way it’s related to desire for the union of love. This, of course, is where marriage and family and friendship and community and good politics come from; this also explains much of our contemporary worry and fear of civilizational collapse, from the fear that we have forgotten these things—but that is another discussion.
What we want, then, is love—to love and to be loved. That is what we seek in those we dare to love; and it is, the Bible suggests, something we were created to seek. But this is not just a biological or anthropological truth; it’s a spiritual truth, a theological truth. That is, very simply: since we are created in God’s “image and likeness,” when love each other, that love is always in some sense an encounter with God.[2] I love my wife who is made in the image and likeness of God, and so my loving her is also love for God; and the quality of my love is measured by how much I honor that fact. The point is that human love is always a door to the love of God, a sacrament of the love of God—all earthly loves, especially love for another person, can open you to the love of God.
This is why in the Scripture human love has always served as a metaphor for the soul’s love for God. “On my bed I sought him whom my soul loves;” that’s in the Bible.[3] It’s an almost scandalous way to describe the soul’s search for God. But that’s what in fact it is—the love of God described in the terms of human love—because human love and divine love are woven together, mysteriously connected; they are the same thing. This is a truth saints see best, what you and I can see if we have purified ourselves. It just all depends on whether you truly know and honor the person you love. Do you really see how beautiful she is as a creature of God? Or do you just see her physically? Do you honor him as a child of God? Or do you value everything but his soul? Do you recognize the child as the “one flesh,” the fruit of the love ordained by God?[4] Or do you see your child un-spiritually, as the product of your choice? Do you just use each other—your spouse, your children, your friends—in a manner unworthy of the word “love”?
Now I understand my preaching here may be too mystical for some. It’s difficult because I am trying to talk about how God is present in the most everyday things of our lives—in our children, our spouses, our friends. What I am trying to say is that the Bible teaches us that God is in these intimacies—in the embraces of love, in the flesh of wives and husbands and the children we hold in our arms, in the dear friends we hug tight, in the stranger’s hand we hold with care. And I guess my point is that when the Church tells us each Advent to watch—and I wonder Watch what?—what she is asking me to do is to seek Christ not only in worship and in the sacraments (where Christ certainly is always assuredly present; and you cannot see Christ in the world without the light that comes from the sacraments!) but also in the loves we’ve recognized as holy and as gifts from God—which, of course, should be all our loves if we are Christians.
The prophet Jeremiah talked about the fulfilment of the promise, the offspring of David and the advent of justice.[5] Jesus told his disciples to the watch for the Son of Man and to fear not the frightening signs of tribulation.[6] These things we hope for; it is the stuff of our prayer, what we sing about and dream of in worship—the final advent of God and the judgment of the wicked and the destruction of evil; which will come, so choose where you stand as soon as you can.
But it is Paul who has taught me this year to look for Christ not just at the ends of the earth, at the end of time, but now in the loves that have blessed me—in my family, in the Church, in my friends, in you. “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all,” Paul wrote, “so as to strengthen your hearts, to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones. Amen.”[7] That’s what that means, I think: that we are to love each other as fully and as purely as possible until Christ comes, that that is how we can watch for Christ, that we are to seek Christ, yes, in the sacraments of the Church, but in each other too—in the sacraments of our brothers and sisters, if that’s not too scandalous a thing to say.
I don’t know. I just think you should go home and hug your wife, give her a kiss, tell her you love her; wives, you do the same. Go hug your kids; go get a coffee with a friend; call your mom; volunteer; serve the poor; find a human face, eyes you can look into; find hands you can touch. Abound in love for all is what I am trying say. Because that’s where we can find God. It’s how he’s hidden himself. And isn’t that beautiful? Amen.
[1] Genesis 2:23
[2] Genesis 1:26-27
[3] Song of Songs 3:1
[4] Genesis 2:24
[5] Jeremiah 33:14-16
[6] Luke 21:25-36
[7] 1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
