Transcript
From Luke’s Gospel: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?... Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." How’s that for Gaudete Sunday? Let us pray. O Lord, may thy word be my word, and if my word is not thy word, let thy people be cunning enough to see the same. Amen.
For six hundred years now the Church in her wisdom has designated the third Sunday of Advent Gaudete Sunday, a temporary reprieve from the fasting of this penitential season, to rejoice that the Lord is near. And so we get a reading about hell. That may at first blush seem incongruous, but don’t kid yourself. Today, therefore, a brief homily from hell.
First, some questions. Is hell real? Is anyone bound for it? Have we any time or place for hell in our polite, restrained and incurious Episcopal Church? (I can speak this way about the Episcopal Church because I’m certifiably fond of her; I am an Episcopal priest. As denominations go, we’re the one you can rely on to know which is the water glass, what side of the plate the fork goes on, and, when it comes to liturgy and music, we have impeccable taste. If denominations were nations, we’d be if not the British then the Japanese.)
Now what has hell to do with rejoicing? Put aside the pictures in your mind of the medieval place of punishment; the bizarre, toothy torturers of Hieronymus Bosch, the cartoonish prancing devils with their pitchforks, and the agonised, mutilated bodies of the lost. These are human nightmares: they imagine the ways in which God might be cruel in a peculiarly human way. And lest we too quickly look down upon and make fun of the unwashed denizens of the medieval period, consider our own behavior in the run up to this year’s presidential election. We built a highway to hell. The ingenuity and passion we expend to insult and demean and dismiss each other, the encouragement to see another person as less than fully human, welcome to the gates of hell.
“Hell,” the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietsche said, “is other people.” He was wrong about that. No it’s not. Hell is where we are when other people can no longer receive our affections or simple respect, not a fiery place so much as the place where love grows cold. We lay the axe to the root of the tree when we lose our capacity for sympathetic imagination; when we look around the world we are in and see nothing but endless reflections of our own pitiable, anxious, angry selves.
So what’s hell got to do with Gaudete Sunday? Everything. Today, we lament our own need of redemption, and doing that we rejoice that the Lord is near. Lament and grief are not the same, a friend who lives in Belvedere, California told me. She is a wise and discerning priest. “Grief is diffuse,” Mother Zoila Schoenberg said, “lament is not.” To lament is to take your grief in a particular direction, not to your social media but to God, and to hold him accountable for it.
That’s what the Psalmist does. And he isn’t polite about it. He doesn’t admit to God only what he thinks God will find admissible. How does Edgar put it in the penultimate line of Shakespeare’s King Lear? “The weight of this sad time / we must obey, / Speak what we feel / not what we ought to say.” (The psalmists accuse God of abandonment [22. 2; 88, 14]; of murder [22. 16]; of falling asleep on the job [44. 24]. The psalmists try to bribe God [6. 6]. They tell God just to go away [39. 13].) By far, the largest single category of prayer in the Psalter—the tephilim, the Book of Praises—is lament. It turns out that what God wants to hear from us is not a narrow set of approvals, but everything. The Psalter teaches you, when talking to God, to let him have it.
We’re created to do what the Apostle Paul tells us to do in the Philippians 4, the lesson appointed for reading today. You and I were made to rejoice not in everything, but “in the Lord.” And there’s only one way to do that, honestly.
It’s Gaudete Sunday. God wants you, anxiety and fear and heartache, all of it, ragged and tattered or dressed up just so. Open yourself fully to God. Take everything that would fester and be honed to put someone down, lay it bare before the Almighty, and doing that, you clear the way for rejoicing. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
