THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT  2021
 
Collect
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the deeds of darkness and to put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
 
This is the Word of the Lord
Romans 13 :10 - 13
Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.
 

THE ADVENT ALARM

Understanding the present time: Life in the present is not an index of what is to continue or to come. Our current condition cannot be guaranteed to remain. Our state of mind or circumstance is fragile to the force of changeable and fluctuating fortune beyond our ability to determine or influence. Divine Providence reigns over time and motion, and the future is unpredictable; although man cannot resist the temptation to venture forecasts with certainty that is unwarranted. This is a daring beyond the lowly attitude of prayer and dependence upon the wisdom of the Divine.
 
Any present comfort, coziness, or composure is unreliable. Time moves swiftly and new events occur rapidly that can totally alter a situation with suddenness. A sense of repose can be seriously risky. There is a human tendency to rest and revel in the abeyance of alertness to instant emergency - a state of contentment unguarded against any kind of surprise or crisis. Snoozing can be a way of life. A slumbering present can inure us to incidents of shock that require immediate attention and preparation for decisive action.
 
The present time is not a permanent state of affairs but the threshold to successive developments, good and bad, and it is good to be on guard for whatever eventuates in order to take advantageous or defensive measures. Believers take cognizance of the pledges and warnings of God as to what the future will contain, without a revealed timetable of fulfillment. Readiness is to be their watchword. Every hour is to be the hour of expectation. We wake up quickly from lapses into slumber knowing that the promised Day of the Lord portends triumph for some and tragedy for others. It is imperative that we heed the Gospel that will divide the sheep from the goats. The last day approaches ineluctably. The hour has come for an encounter with reality.
 
The day is almost here: Heaven’s red-letter day is firmly fixed and established as to when it will appear. It must always be considered as imminent. “But the Lord will come like a thief” (2 Peter 3:10). It is designed to surprise, though much warning is delivered in good time for us to be on the alert. For Christians the undisclosed date of the Lord’s appearing is prospectively a cause of immense joy and eager anticipation.
 
Salvation is now nearer than when we first believed: Salvation is our immediate hope and inheritance the moment we believe. We possess it fully through the promise of God’s sure word. But entrance to everlasting life won for us by Jesus Christ is preceded by a travel through time until we connect with eternity. Our union with the Lord Jesus through saving faith affords the certainty that our unfailing Companion will lead us home as we follow in his steps, his hand holding ours. “God will show us the path of life; in his presence is the fullness of joy: and at his right hand there is pleasure for evermore” (Psalm 16:11).
 
Earth’s night of uncertainty, trial, temptation, sin, grief and doubt is almost over. The darkness need not enclose our lives any longer, nor influence our desires and deeds. The light of the Lord protects and guides us. His word, wisdom, and commands help us to choose our way carefully and to walk in safety. Paul adumbrates the sinful, careless, life driven by carnal urges in such distasteful terms that grieve us. But without grace none of us could avoid the most horrid tendencies of our fallen nature. We are always in need of exhortations to holiness, reminders of moral danger, and protection from entrapment. The certainty of the Day of The Lord enables us to press on in resolute righteousness. The enticements of a sinful world cannot dissuade us from the vision of our Saviour’s glorious Majesty. Indeed we delight to clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ: his mind, his truth, his fellowship, his influence within, his shining purity, and tender conformity to the likeness and will of God. How rapturous is such closeness to him in repudiation of the wicked world that bequeaths us only shame, guilt, and separation from a gracious and good God, the only delight of a converted and regenerate heart.

Jesus, the Redeemer of the world, will come as stern judge of the whole earth, its total population throughout all time. None shall escape his universal scrutiny and just verdict. With fondness he will regard each one of his chosen people. He will bid them and bind them to himself. What inexhaustible bliss.
 
With justice he will banish all who refuse him and have desired never to know and trust him; those who fail to truly repent and sincerely believe his holy gospel.
The Advent Alarm gives shrill bidding to all to consider the summons of the gospel with grave good sense.
 
The present will pass. And so too the day of salvation.
 
“Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen” (1 Peter 3: 17-18).

RJS

TWENTY THIRD SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY  2021
 
Collect
Lord God, our refuge and strength, and the author of all godliness: Be ready to hear the devout prayers of your Church, and grant that what we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
 
From the Word of the Lord
The Epistle
Philippians 3:17 - 21
Join with others in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you. For, as I have often told you before, and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
 
The Gospel
Matthew 22:15 - 22
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are.  Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?”
 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.
 
Citizenship in Heaven and Earthly Things
 
The Christian life is two dimensional. We sojourn on Earth but our sight is on heaven. What binds these two aspects of our existence together is the sovereignty of Christ. Paul and Matthew merge in bringing these two themes together and they are to be entwined as we live out our allotted time in the world and anticipate everlasting life in the presence of God.
Christ is the content of both modes of life. He is our Lord in our day to day experience and our eternal expectation. As believers we know him to be the sum of our two-fold reality - the earthly phase and the heavenly eon. There is the sense in our dual-leveled place of abode, one temporary—this transient world, the other timeless—the world to come, that there is a variation in authority. Here, God rules through human appointment to various forms of civil authority. In eternity God will govern directly and immediately in his majestic supremacy, seen, surrounding and sensed. We glean an understanding of this supremacy, historical and heavenly, performed through the Lord Jesus, from evidence indicated in our two passages of Scripture.
 
Matthew raises the issue of the authority of Caesar representing the civil administration exerted over communities and countries. The dialogue recorded by the apostle rightly describes the function and rights of human administration – service to the citizenry and the collection of enabling taxation. But there also seems to be an implied irony as well. Jesus points out the power of the state and its possession of permission to raise tribute money: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But strictly speaking the authority and levies gained by Caesar are God’s and Caesar is simply a trustee. Compared to the authority of the Lord Jesus, all human power is trifling. The wicked and conspiratorial band of Pharisees and Herodians had no concept of the Owner and Disposer of all things with whom they were deceitfully dealing.
 
Courteously, Jesus acknowledged Caesar and his borrowed greatness, but in reality and justice he could have laughed at his vaunted pre-eminence and consigned the portrait to scorn. In reality Caesar has nothing that is not God-given. Nonetheless civil government is an ordinance of God, and even citizens of heaven and the children of the King are to render proper submission and obedience in all matters moral and beneficial. Earthly order and peaceful society is a Christian priority. But, indeed, the believer is law abiding because it pleases his Lord to be such. Beyond the role of human authority to command, the people of God perceive duties to be fulfilled in obeisance to the divine will. To give to God what is God’s requires our all.
 
Paul in the entire spread of his teaching provides a pattern for the life of faith, namely, the thought that determines attitude and action. It is an internal template ingrafted upon the heart and not an external code dictating outward behavior. According to the apostle our minds must rise above exclusively earthly things, even those matters legitimate for this life. To the fore of our mental life, and its expression through the inclination of the affections, should be the glory of the cross. The stream of our understanding of God flows from the supreme revelation of his being and ways from the deep and wide contemplation of the cross of Christ in its intent, meaning and accomplishment. The cross is the cure of our maladies and the confirmation of our blessedness.
 
It confers upon us citizenship in heaven, and presents to us the Lord Jesus Christ as our heaven-sent Saviour. This humble, lowly, obedient Victim on our behalf is now exalted to the loftiest pinnacle of divine power and authority. He is seated upon the summit of absolute control over all things celestial and all things created – vast cosmos and speck-like planet of our habitation. Here, we await his second scheduled Advent from the Throne above in order to consummate the history of mankind, dissolve our orbiting sphere, and bring a new heaven and a new earth into one. The crowning message of the two apostles is the splendor of the lovely Lord Jesus in total command of absolutely everything, and the co-author with the Father and the Spirit of the utterly indescribably spectacular universal transformation.
 
RJS