Holy Angels Anglican Church
Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Advent
(December 22, 2024)
St. John 1:19-28
Keep the Faith
Given by: The Rev. Fr. Vincent J. Varnas
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our savior and Redeemer.
The name Jesus means “God saves” and Emmanuel means “God with us.”
This is the fourth and last Sunday in Advent. All four Advent wreath candles are lighted. The center candle, the “Christ Candle”, will be lighted on Christmas Day.
Let us recapitulate what Advent means to us as we draw near its conclusion. Advent is a season for both repentance and optimism, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus. We fast and abstain during Advent in order to clear our minds and spirits of the clutter of worldliness. We are focused upon the two comings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We reflect upon our lives and try to rid ourselves of those things that separate us from God. More than ever, we want to be Holy as He is Holy, so that we might make of our hearts and souls a fitting dwelling place for Jesus whose birth we celebrate on Wednesday. We must open ourselves to Him. Clean up that stable! Make comfortable that cave, so that Jesus will find a suitable place to be born in our hearts.
The theme for this fourth Sunday in Advent is “faith”, and faith calls us to firm up and strengthen our belief that we are indeed saved by this God-man, this Jesus, this Messiah, whose Father in Heaven sent Him to us to redeem us from captivity to sin and to give us the Christmas gift of everlasting life: eternal life in God’s heavenly kingdom. A gift that would be opened and revealed to us on Easter, as Jesus emerged from the tomb.
So, what is faith, anyway?
Simply stated, faith is religious belief. It is not a “warm, fuzzy feeling” about God, but rather it is an act of the intellect that allows us to accept the reality of God’s existence and His presence among us in our daily lives. It is manifested in His love for us. It is what separated the disciples of Jesus from His detractors and His enemies. It is what gives us hope in the promise of salvation.
Without faith, our lives lack meaning and purpose.
Faith requires absolute and total acceptance of everything said and done by Jesus as being true. There can be no reservations, no exceptions and no qualifications. Faith embraces truth as they metaphorically meet and kiss each other. Jesus tells us: “I am the way and the truth and the life”. Jesus is truth itself. Without Him, truth cannot exist. And without His truth, everything on earth would be a lie and the deceit of the devil would prevail. So our faith is founded in truth: not hypocrisy; not wishful thinking and not convenience, but the reality of God’s existence and His love for each and everyone of us.
Can faith be perfect and absolute? Not in our human experience.
As Pope Benedict XVI said: “The believer cannot escape the slightest doubt and the doubter cannot escape the slightest belief.”
St. Mark’s Gospel reads: “… the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (9:24). That father in Mark’s Gospel could not escape the slightest doubt. And Jesus understood the man’s human weakness and mercifully cured his son out of compassion.
Our faith is not perfect but grows over time with the help of God’s graces, so that at the end, we are not afraid of death, but accept it as the threshold to our heavenly reward in God’s Kingdom where we will be at peace and know perfect happiness and joy, at last.
Never be too concerned that your faith falters a bit at times during your life, for there are so many challenges and stumbling stones (skandalon in Greek) along the way to perfect belief in God’s presence among us and His providential love of us.
Each of us has a purpose in life and when that purpose has been fulfilled, we receive our heavenly reward. We live our lives as instruments of God’s will for us and His will for those we encounter along the way.
Religious belief or faith are essential to religion itself. Rather than seeking-out Santa Claus, we must seek-out the presence of Jesus in our lives who lives in our hearts. It is a journey down the path toward holiness.
Last Sunday, I spoke of joy in the context of the motion-picture film, Polar Express. Life is a journey: not unlike a railroad, not unlike The Polar Express, but with stops at various stations along the way. There is boarding the train at the station with a sign marked, “birth”. Then other stations along the way marked, “school” where we get off for a while. Then when we re-board our train, we continue our journey down the tracks of life and come to a station marked, “marriage” or perhaps “religious vocations” or even the “single life”. Here we spend many days, even years until we board the next train to our final destination. When we reach our destination, we get off the train not at the North Pole, but at the station marked, “Heaven”. It is the end of the line for those who followed the Ten Commandments with love of God and in virtuous living with love of our neighbors. Those unrepentant souls who failed these expectations continue to travel on down a dead-end track, marked “Hell”.
Our ticket on that train to Heaven was given to us by Jesus when He died on the cross in atonement for our sins and granted us the promise of eternal life when He rose from the dead and with His Ascension re-opened the gates of His kingdom and the door to enter that station marked, “Heaven”.
Our ticket is our faith, and it is an unmerited gift from God freely given to us on Christmas Day as our present under the tree. But, until our “ticket to Heaven” is punched by the conductor, Jesus, we cannot be sure that the train will stop to let any one of us off at that destination!
Did you hear the bell at the beginning of this Holy Communion service? Think of it as the bell of faith calling us to board the train’s passenger coach that is the Church.
Faith is also analogous to the headlight on the locomotive of that train to Heaven since the train travels by both day and night. At night, the headlight illuminates our way through the darkness of doubt and evil: through the wilderness of John the Baptist, as you will remember from today’s Gospel reading (Jn. 1:23).
Faith does not dispel the darkness that surrounds us on our journey. Rather, like the headlamp on a locomotive, it is a lamp that guides us through the darkness.
Faith is found through prayer and is bolstered through Scripture. It is by God’s grace that we have faith, and that faith is first given to us in Baptism, and then it grows and develops by God’s graces throughout our lives.
Christmas is about faith. It is by faith that we believe Jesus is truly the Son of God and was born of a virgin. Only the weak in faith and the incorrigible doubters ask for signs before they can believe.
We must never predicate our faith upon signs and wonders to prove that God is here for us.
Although, the Jews sent priests and Levites to determine if John the Baptist was really Elijah come back from the dead as a sign of the coming of the Messiah and as promised in the Book of the Prophet Malachi (3:1), as God says: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: ...”.
In today’s Gospel reading from the Book of John, it is revealed to us that, John is the voice of one crying “repentance” in a wilderness of sin from which there was no escape; only despair without the help of the Good Shepherd, Jesus.
That is a significant event because, as we read from the Book of the Prophet Malachi, God said that He, “... will send you [i.e., the Jews] Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6). Since the priests and Levites were well aware of the promise of the return of Elijah, they asked John the Baptist if he was Elijah, sent by God as a sign and a promise of the coming of the Messiah.
John the Baptist was not the physical return of Elijah the Prophet, but the spirit of the word of the Prophet Isaiah who promised: “... a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Is. 7:14) that means “God with us” and “For unto us a child is born ... and his name shall be called ... The mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Is. 9:6).
Today is the last day in Advent. I hope that these last four weeks have been transformative for you. That is its purpose, you know. Advent is a season unto itself. It prepares us for celebrating the first coming of Christ, so that we may better be able to appreciate the gift that God the Father has given us in the manifestation of the birth of His Son, Jesus.
Jesus is His name and in Hebrew it means: “God saves”. Saves us from what? He saves us from ourselves and as we heard a moment ago, from the curse threatened by God in the Book of Malachi.
So, look forward to Christmas with joy and gladness, but always, always remember that we are blessed by God’s love for us.
And keep the faith!