Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend
Hebrews 10. 5-10; Luke 1. 39-45
“See, God, I have come to do your will…”
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Visitation (1910), hangs in the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.
I never expect a bumper congregation on the Sunday before Christmas [it was a pleasant surprise to have an above-average congregation at both services I took!]. I always presume it will be composed largely of people who see going to church every Sunday as their duty. That’s OK, because I see going to church every Sunday as my duty too, and I did so long before I was ordained.
Duty is a very unfashionable idea, but it’s hard to see how any society can function without it. In a culture where people have a strong sense of duty, we are more likely to know how things will work and that they’ll work at all. We will be clearer on our own responsibilities and clearer about where to expect the assistance of others. Societies where people have a strong sense of duty tend to have higher levels of trust and stronger social bonds—and they have all the benefits that flow from these things.
In times of crisis, we all depend on people doing their duty even at great personal risk. We will all remember the situation we faced in March 2020, when we depended on doctors and nurses doing their duty even though we knew little about Covid and we also knew there was a great shortage of personal protective equipment. At the other end of Europe, Ukraine’s survival as a nation depends on people doing their duty, in terrible danger and in horrible mid-winter weather, in the trenches that run the length of 700-mile front line.
From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have considered it their duty to gather to worship together on the first day of the week, Sunday, because it was the day of Christ’s Resurrection. They often did so in the face of challenges much greater than needing an extra morning to finish the Christmas shopping. Even now, this very Sunday, in places like North Korea and Iran, Christians will gather to worship Jesus Christ at the risk of their liberty.
If we, with all our freedoms, attend church every Sunday and follow the Church’s year—even on the odd Sundays when attendance tends to be low—we don’t just fulfil a duty that’s relatively easy for most of us, but we follow church’s year in its fullness, giving us a richer picture of our Faith.
What makes the Fourth Sunday in Advent interesting is that there is perhaps no other point in the year when the Church’s rhythm is so out of kilter with that of wider society. Most people assume that Christmas really started ages ago—how many weeks ago did you have your first mince pie?—with a lot of people finishing work last Friday, even the Christmas party season is starting to wind down. There is only the final blow-out on Wednesday to look forward to and that’s Christmas for another year.
But in Church, Christmas hasn’t even started yet. We are still in the season of Advent, the great season of waiting; in Advent the Church’s worship takes place in the key that forms so much of our lives—waiting with longing for God to break into a troubled world and our often troubled lives. We wait still for God to make His presence felt in all its fullness even as the rest of the world assumes the party has long started, because we know that God is often at work precisely in the opposite direction to where people are looking, in ways that will surprise everyone when they eventually come to light, through people the world considers of little account.
Mary was just such a person—a young, unmarried, woman, little more than a girl, in a deeply patriarchal society—when she received a visitation from an angel telling her that she would give birth to a great king. Mary accepted the duty God placed on her—she didn’t have to. Like all of us, Mary had free will and could have accepted or rejected God’s call. She didn’t need to keep the baby. She could have dismissed the encounter with the angel as a strange dream, a mad vision, best dismissed because that duty came with great costs. In the short term, it brought the shame that came in Mary’s culture from being a woman who became pregnant out of wedlock; in the long term, it left her open to the way her son’s life would pierce her heart.
No wonder she “made haste”, in the words of today’s Gospel, to see her cousin Elizabeth. It was probably the first chance she’d had to talk about these very strange events; when she got there, she found fulfilling her duty didn’t cause her cousin fear or shame, but gave her great joy.
Our other reading this morning is also about duty. In it, the author of Hebrews cites a number of lines from different parts of the Hebrew Bible, which is why it can feel a little disjointed and hard to follow without a commentary. He argues that these quotes foretold Christ’s fulfilment of His duty to the Father at the cost of His life; they are assembled together to argue that God takes no pleasure in the system of sacrifices associated with the Great Temple in Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish faith for a thousand years. A central argument of Hebrews generally and this short passage in particular is that there has been a shift in the nature of the duties owed to God by faithful people, away from those performed at the Temple, towards something new that Jesus Christ had brought into being by His death and Resurrection.
In the system of sacrifices associated with the Temple, people bought animals to be sacrificed by priests at the altar as an offering to atone for their sins. Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, however, is sufficient for the sins of all people for all time. In the sacrament of Holy Communion, we offer our thanks and praise to God, and our time, love, intellect, and will, so that we can be joined to Christ’s sacrifice and fed by His body and blood, broken and poured for us on the Cross.
Instead of making an offering to make up for our sins, we ask God at the start of every service of Holy Communion to forgive our sins before we make our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. That’s why we say the confession together, and I pronounce. absolution on your sins. When I or another priest does that, we do not do so through any power of our own but in the power of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and that alone.
So we are forgiven because Christ did His duty, and without Mary accepting her duty, God’s plan in Christ could not have been fulfilled. When we fulfil our duties, no matter how simple and mundane, no matter how worldly and far from God they seem, we touch some of the most divine parts of our human nature. To live up to our callings is to live as Jesus Christ did.
When we sacrifice an hour or so on a Sunday morning to fulfil our duty it anchors us as Christians—through touching God’s nature in receiving the sacrament, and in grounding ourselves in the Christian understanding of the meaning of life as expressed in the Church’s calendar.
And that shouldn’t just be about giving us peace for an hour on Sunday—what we receive here in word and in sacrament should be food that nourishes us in the duties we must fulfil in the rest of our lives.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen.
People bought animals to be sacrificed by priests at the altar as an offering to atone for their sins with the blood spilt acting as a foreshadowing of the coming Messiah.