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It was only at the end, in jail awaiting execution, that it became clear to him, the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s famous novel, The Power and the Glory.

Hunted in Mexico, this faithful but plainly bad priest, a weak man of drink and flesh: it was only once he was caged and facing death that he saw clearly how easy it would have been, how little effort it would have taken. “O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins,” he prayed; he was confused, and it’s all he could think to say. As Greene writes it in the novel: “He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.” That’s what he sensed at his end, this whiskey priest, the sadness of never having taken holiness seriously, realizing only too late that “there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.”[1] It is the tragedy of the novel.

And, of course, it’s a human and, I should think, a very common tragedy, not taking holiness seriously, not taking anything seriously, really, but holiness certainly not seriously at all. It is haunting how much we’ve become like the Nietzsche’s “Last Men” who say they’ve discovered happiness but can only blink and find comfort in flesh and leisure, spiritually dead but content because they “have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night.”[2] C. S. Lewis called it “contented subhumanity,” the shallow life of mere fleshly, worldly comfort, our ethics informed only by earthly calculations, nothing transcendent, nothing even heroic.[3] If you read Walker Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, the main character, Binx Bolling, struggles but never achieves genuine human depth, though he knows he should. A young New Orleans stockbroker, he spends his life going from one shallow relationship to another and watching movies. He sees the world, values it, only reflected by the screen. His disabled brother, a devout Catholic whom no one really understands or pays much mind, reminds him of the depths, of real love, but he can’t quite get there himself. He called it “the search,” the search for genuine humanity, genuine depth, what his Catholic disabled brother had. “The search,” he said, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”[4] Again, it’s the tragedy of this novel too—the tragedy of knowing what matters but not acting like it matters. Because we’re lost in “everydayness,” our screens seducing our flesh, leaving us in the end with nothing, with loneliness, which, of course, is the devilish plan of it all.[5]

But which also brings us to the human and spiritual urgency of today, this first Sunday of Advent. You must “be prepared,” Jesus said.[6] Not like the fools in Noah’s day who just couldn’t believe it, who just couldn’t keep from laughing at him, Jesus asked his discipled to be more alert, more serious, not lost in the everydayness which leads to casual immorality and cruelty and ridicule. It’s the same thing Paul is saying: now is the time to wake up from your sleep, from worldly shallowness, from the cult conventional thinking of the people around you, because believers ought to think and live differently. Christians shouldn’t want to live like the world lives; they shouldn’t want the Church to bend to the ways of the world; rather, we should throw off darkness and put on, as Paul said, the “armor of light.”[7] Our ethics should be high and demanding; the world will laugh at it, think it crazy; don’t be surprised. The grace of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the ministry of the Church is not meant to make you conform to the world, put you at ease in the world or in the workplace or among your friends; it’s not meant to let you off the hook or affirm you in your sin. It’s meant to call you out of it, to give you the grace of forgiveness and the power to change. To suggest anything else is to get grace backwards and to misunderstand God and his word completely. We are in the days of Noah. We are lost in everydayness, foolishly content in our subhumanity, blinking like Nietzsche said we would at the end of human civilization. Which is why, as I said, what the Church says to us today—to wake up and be prepared—is the most important thing you’ll hear today. That is, if you’ll hear it, if you’ve not already zoned out.

The invitation, friends, is to let the Holy Spirit and the word of God change you, to believe God can change you and then to welcome it. But first you have to believe it’s possible. Today’s reading from Romans was the passage with which God changed Saint Augustine. One of our greatest saints, a doctor of the Church: there was a time in his life you wouldn’t have thought he would ever change, become what he became. But then one day he stepped out of everydayness, he began to take life seriously, to think about things for himself. He removed himself from the noise and stupidity of the world for a while. And, of course, doing so, he bumped into God. Seeing reality, how the world really is and how he really was, he finally came to a point, heartbroken and lost, where he heard mysteriously, in the voice of a child, the words “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read.” And then, looking around, the first thing he picked up, the first words he read from Paul’s letter to the Romans were these: “…not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”[8] Augustine said these words were like light flooding his heart; he said they took his darkness and doubt away.[9] It was the beginning of a whole new life for him. Because he listened. Because he at last heard the word of God and welcomed it. Which is why I think the biggest challenge for Christians today, the biggest challenge for the Church, is actually this: that it’s really hard to have an experience like this today because our televisions won’t turn off. If we heard these words today, we would assume we’re more sophisticated; we would assume Paul is clearly a bigot and that we should take these words out. We would edit the word of God and feel nothing, and not be changed. This is the challenge, nothing else really, that we’ve made a world in which this is really hard: to listen, to be changed.

But it’s all you and I need to do to be prepared as Jesus said, to wake up as Paul said. It is so easy, but we make it so difficult—the simple invitation of God, of Advent—to go deeper, to be quieter, and to find God, the God who’s looking for us, who wants to give us his grace. But only if we want it, if we want to be human, want to change; if we want to be the saints, which by his power, we can be. Amen.

[1] Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, 210

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s Discourses, Prologue 5

[3] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 156

[4] Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 13

[5] The Screwtape Letters, 56

[6] Matthew 24:44

[7] Romans 13:11-12

[8] Romans 13:13-14

[9] Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29

© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield