News junkie that I am, I confess to indulging in a certain frequency of doomscrolling. I move from one story to another, compiling a catalogue of the many reasons there are to be depressed: the war in Ukraine, the horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, the crisis of liberal democracy, the latest foolish or frightening utterance by a public figure. Doomscrolling is a hard habit to break. Despair, whether personal or political, has a way of feeding on itself.
Which is part of why I welcome the yearly arrival of Advent. The great lectionary texts of Advent, whether that be the testimony of John the Baptist, or Isaiah’s glad tidings of Israel’s deliverance, or Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13 — all of these summon us to abandon our doomscrolling in favor of a proper Christian hope. Advent gives us permission to notice the darkness without giving in to it. Advent summons us to let our imaginations be shaped by our Lord Jesus Christ and his coming, rather than by the voracious 24-hour news cycle.
Advent offers us the good news that this world and its ills will be judged. One of my favorite sermons by that great contemporary interpreter of Advent, Fleming Rutledge, is titled “Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgment.”[1] Rutledge writes that the “purpose of this seven-week season [for her Advent includes the final three weeks of the Christian calendar] is to take an unflinching inventory of darkness.” Not only that, but Advent’s purpose is to brace us with the knowledge that God is coming to judge this world of ours, to hold the evildoers of history accountable for their wicked deeds.
Evildoers? That word rolls easily off our lips when it is applied to others; but Rutledge reminds us that a central theme of Advent is repentance. We are the ones whose lives will be laid bare by the judgment of Christ. In his apocalyptically charged letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses his readers as “children of the light and children of the day.” Rutledge comments:
As children of the day, we stand first in line at the bar of judgment by repenting of our sins and the sins of the whole church and the sins of the whole world. We are involved in each other because God was first involved in us. The wrath of God and the love of God are two faces of the same thing. The world will be purged of its iniquity in the consuming fire of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the Advent theme.
“We are involved in each other because God was first involved in us.” That is a lovely theological sentence. It echoes John the Elder’s assertion “We love, because he first loved us.”[2] We can even love the dreadful day of judgment, because we have been loved.
In a recent essay, Chris Holmes argues eloquently that there is no theological work in our day more important than that of being a Bible teacher, and no aspect of being a Bible teacher more important than loving God. Beyond all technical skills and resources, he writes, this is the teacher’s secret resource, the most important thing she can give to her students or congregants. Citing the Anglican Thomist Eric Mascall, who draws on the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, Holmes maintains that the theologian’s “primary need” is to “be in love with God.”
While it might seem more natural to associate Advent with hope, hope is empty apart from this primary need to love. The Christian hope is not just the expectation that something will occur, but anticipation of the coming of a Someone. Hence the bridal-nuptial imagery that punctuates the season; think of the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, a text that appears in the lectionary toward the very end of the church year (part of Rutledge’s “long Advent”). The text is paraphrased in Philip Nicolai’s hymn “Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns die Stimme,” which became the basis for one of Bach’s best-known cantatas, no. 40.[3] Longing can also be heard in the haunting strains of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a paraphrase of the medieval “O” Antiphons set to the tune of a 15th-century French processional. These musical expressions give powerful voice to love for God, indeed longing for God, in the midst of the world’s darkness.
“We love because he first loved us.” Here is what these well-worn words look like in context:
Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. (1 John 4:17-20)
Rutledge poses the question, “How shall we love the dreadful day of judgment?” We love it by loving the God who has first loved us. We love it by abandoning our hopeless doomscrolling, casting out fear in favor of the One who is our Doom itself, even the Lord Jesus Christ. (“Doom” is simply the Old English word for judgment.) We love it by loving our neighbor, in the daily apocalypse that is life in a world standing under the divine love and the divine promise of redemption. Nor do we need for our love to be perfect to begin. Even so come, Lord Jesus.
[1] The title refers to a story in Rutledge’s family concerning a New England cousin, who wished to use the marriage rite from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for her wedding. Her grandfather, a liberal Congregationalist pastor, proposed leaving out the minister’s admonition: “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.” But the bride-to-be would have none of it. “No,” she protested, “I love the dreadful day of judgment!” Rutledge, Advent, 172.
[2] 1 John 4:19, NRSV.
[3] Cantata no. 40. The hymn may be found in The Hymnal 1982 as #61, “Sleepers Wake! A Voice Astounds Us.” In the Canadian Common Praise it’s #110.
Thank you. I didn’t realize that I love the day of judgment, too.