Roger Ferlo
Sermon for Advent I
Preached in the Prayer Hall (aka Scott Lounge)
December 1, 2010
Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the great reforming heroes of the contemplative life, was
known to preach odd sermons. One time in Advent, in the early twelfth century, he
preached a sermon about the threefold coming of the Lord. This must have come as a
surprise to people, who like most of us here knew of only two. There was the Lord’s first
coming, of course, when Jesus was seen on earth, dwelling among us. And there would
be a second and final coming, when “all flesh shall see the salvation of our God.” But
Bernard describes what he calls a hidden middle coming—an intermediate coming—one
that was happening then and there, here and now, among the very congregation who had
gathered in the monastery to hear him:
The intermediate coming is hidden, in which only his chosen recognize his
presence within themselves and their souls are saved….It is like a road on which
we travel from his first coming to his last. In the first, Christ was our redemption;
in the last, he will appear as our life; in his intermediate coming, he is our comfort
and our rest.
He is our comfort and our rest. Requies and consolatio: the soft fluidity of these lovely
Latin words creates the very rest and comfort they describe.
It is hard to think of the past several weeks on this campus as times of comfort and rest.
We all seem to be living these days in the intermediate, in the between-times. Our very
presence in this room testifies to our sense of unsettled between-ness as this Advent
comes upon us. Where is our rest, where our consolation? We are worshipping in
makeshift, temporary quarters, wondering where to go next. We lament—some of us
more noisily and testily than others—this lack of permanence, this loss of the holy, as we
gather under these dour portraits day in and day out for prayer and praise. I understand
that a few of us have all but given up common worship altogether, waiting in various
stages of righteous indignation for the powers that be to make up their minds and get us
out of this room.
But like it or not, for the time being, we are all in this together. Matthew’s gospel today
is a bit too close for comfort. We all find ourselves suddenly displaced, at a day and an
hour that none of us could have predicted—first by fire and water and soon, in the
coming winter days, by cold and ice and darkness. We have been brought up short
against the fragility of our common life. And then, to add insult to injury, we woke up
this week to find ourselves wandering in the middle of a construction site, lamenting the
death of trees, puzzled and waylaid by mysterious fences, our familiar pathways across
the Grove cast into confusion. And the bare ruined choirs of our burned out chapel
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remain all too visible amidst the chaos. On our bad days it feels like nothing will ever
be the same, as if we were in the midst of the apocalypse that Matthew has Jesus describe
with such terrific eloquence.
So where, O blessed St. Bernard, is our rest to be found? Where is our comfort, in these
unsettled and intermediate days, as we gather for worship in borrowed places, wondering
where the road on which we travel might take us next?
Were he here I suspect that Bernard would answer us, no doubt in choice Latin, with just
one word—Chill. Look up. Turn toward the east, and look up, toward these windows,
just as you’re doing now. On most days as we have gathered since the fire this room has
been filled with the low, intense light of late autumn. Aside from these sour portraits,
which he long ago would have crated and locked away, this is just the kind of view that
Bernard would have liked. Why do I say this? As some of you may know, Bernard of
Clairvaux launched a major revolution in the architecture of sacred spaces. He had no
patience with what he considered the clutter and excess baggage of the Romanesque
churches and monasteries all around him. In his great Cistercian reforms, what he sought
in architecture was what he had already experienced in his vision of God— proportion
and luminosity, harmony and light. I like to think he would have relished the noble
simplicity of this room, and would have rejoiced in the light that flows through these
great windows.
The light you see is the same light that he saw, coming from the selfsame source. That
light was the central focus of his theology, a theology centered in the mystery of the
Incarnation, which he knew from John’s gospel was best perceived in the mystery of
light—in the brilliance of the rising Sun, in Jesus the light that enlightens the entire
world. His great Cistercian monasteries, and the Gothic cathedrals that his work inspired,
were in effect great walls of glass, stone made transparent by the glow of redeeming
light. It is hard for us moderns to understand this theologically. As one of the great
scholars of Gothic architecture reminds us, we moderns explain light in terms of physics,
or see it only as an aesthetic symbol. For most of us, these two ways of seeing have little
to do with one another. Bernard thought differently. He would have regarded the
physical and the metaphysical worlds as images of each other, and would have said that
together they revealed by a sacred analogy the incarnate and redemptive love of God in
Jesus Christ, the true light who enlightens the world, even in—especially in—these
darkest days of the year, offering rest and consolation even in the midst of our deepest
anxieties. No wonder Bernard preached his best sermons in this season of Advent.
Bernard even would have had a comment about our too-close proximity to the dining
room. It’s often been hard to pray here, what with the rattle of the silverware, and the
muffled conversation faintly audible (and sometimes not all that faintly) through these
double doors. I’ve sometimes wanted to grab the microphone and dress down the
gabbling crowd the way St. Paul dressed down the rich gluttons in Corinth. But that’s
my own anxious anger talking. Listen to Bernard on this subject, and you might find rest
and consolation praying in this room, even amidst the smell of food and the rattle of
silverware and the buzz of happy voices:
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Think of the word of God in the way you think of your food, Bernard writes.
When bread is kept in a bin, a thief can steal it, or a mouse can find its way in and
gnaw it, and eventually, of course, it goes moldy. Once you have eaten your
bread, you have nothing to fear from thieves, or mice, or mold! In the same way,
treasure the word of God….Feed on it, digest it, allow its goodness to pass into
your body so that your affections and whole way of behavior is nourished and
transformed. Do not forget to eat your bread and your heart will not wither. Fill
your soul with God’s richness and strength.
I am glad we have put this table out here, within hailing distance of the tables in there.
There’s food enough for all of us.
Don’t get me wrong. Continuing to worship in this room is probably not sustainable in
the long run, at least in its current configuration. But as Bernard would have known,
gathering at a table like this in a place like this more than suffices for the time being,
especially in Advent. It’s a good place for us to contemplate—even to embody—that
middle coming that Bernard talks about, to experience as the Body of Christ God’s spirit
and power in this, the time between. For all its Georgian severity—its brass chandeliers,
its enameled moldings, its brooding portraits of departed prelates—this room will do for
now. Our recent calamity has literally re-oriented us. There’s no place to hide, no dusty
balconies or secluded corners. We have been forced like the ancients in a time of trial to
turn our vision toward the true East, sensing in the newness of the morning light the
mystery of Incarnation, and the continued presence among us—in spite of all
appearances—of the Risen Lord himself.
Requies and consolatio, rest and consolation. So chill, people. Look east!
Quotations from St. Bernard’s Advent sermon are taken from Robert Atwell, ed., Celebrating the Seasons:
Daily Spiritual Readings for the Christian Year (Morehouse Publishing, 2001), 4-5; the original Latin
(Sermon 5 On Advent) may be found in the Patrologia Latina, volume 183, columns 50-51. The material
on Bernard’s theology of light is based on the magisterial work of Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral:
Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (Pantheon, 1956), especially p. 55.
Copyright 2010