Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily
visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion
prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
+ In the Name of He who was, and is, and is to come: Jesus
Christ, Our Lord. Amen.
The Collect for today makes several very important points in
quick succession.
First, it prays God to visit us daily so that we may be
pure. We cannot help but become sullied, confused, and make errors in this
world, and our loving God knows this. He has made provision for this in the
Church by a regular life of grace and repentance so that we may return to him and feel his renewing
presence, never wandering so far away as to become lost.
The collect asks God’s purifying power on our conscience, a
word ultimately deriving from a Latin word for knowledge. Conscience is our
inner knowledge of what is good and right; it is that part of our mind that
stays focused and firm on what has been shown to us as good and proper as
Christians. Like every aspect of our body and spirit, our conscience needs
regular nourishment in God’s will and truth to operate properly.
The purpose of this effort is that our God may find us
mansions prepared for him when he comes to us. This is the exact opposite of
the scene in Genesis when Adam and Eve, fresh from transgressing God’s command
about the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, hide themselves away in
shame when God comes to them in the “cool of the day.” They were not a mansion
prepared for him then at all, but a closed door in fear and self-loathing.
Advent, now nearly over already, has been a brief course in God’s return at the End of the Ages and
in the daily encounters we tend to overlook as we prepare to celebrate Christ’s
Nativity. Even at this late hour, our God is speaking to us through the sacred
words of Scripture, calling to us that there is still time to live the Advent
Life of joyful expectation of Christ’s return now and then.
The Lesson from 2 Samuel tells of King David’s desire to
build for God a temple of stone, now that David has reached a place of comfort
and peace. King David seems ill-at-ease with the fact he is living in a palace
but the Ark of God “still stays in a tent.” This initially seems entirely
reasonable to the prophet Nathan, and he encourages David to carry out his
plan.
Nathan, however, daily purifies his conscience: he listens
to God. So deeply is he trained in this that even asleep he is listening. In
his dream God reveals he does not want or need David’ pity, delaying the Temple
building project. Rather than David make God
an earthly, temporal house, Nathan reports God has decided to make David’s
house eternal.
This promise of an everlasting dynasty was a far deeper
thing than David understood. David’s descendants would ultimately lose the
kingdom through their unfaithfulness…but God never reneged on his promise. What
we will celebrate at Christmas is the manifestation of that promise’s
durability and God’s faithfulness to those who make a covenant with him.
We learn from this story something else: the most important
temple we as Christians have is the temple of our heart, for it is from our
heart that the truest worship is offered to God, and from our heart that we
love our neighbor, thereby loving God. It was David’s loving heart for God and
God’s people, not a promise to build a building to house the Ark, that brought
forth the divine promise from David’s line. It is still not too late today to
open your own heart to God in humility, repentance, and service to your
neighbor. Advent is not quite over; there is still time to prepare to receive
the King where it counts most.
The lesson from the Gospel today is the account of the
Annunciation in St. Luke. We hear this story at this hour because it is the
beginning of the fulfillment of the prophesies regarding the Messiah, what St.
Paul in Romans 16 today calls “the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret
for long ages but is now disclosed.”
The Temple the Messiah would first know in this world,
before his dedication in Jerusalem, was the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That
temple was made of flesh, not of stone. At one and the same time it was very small
and cosmically vast: it was hidden inside the body of a young woman, and yet it
was “more spacious than the heavens” because it contained the Logos of God, the
Word made flesh. This impossible contradiction was the start of God’s redeeming
and healing humanity from within, rather than by forcing our compliance from
without. Yet, there had to be willingness; an openness from our side to
participate.
St. Mary is the true focus of this day. She is the most
honored of all the saints and receives our highest veneration. She is honored
in part because she was ready to be that “mansion prepared for God” spoken of
in the collect. Her response to the Archangel’s message was: “Here am I, the
servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” It was not:
“come back when I am ready,” or “I need more time.” She didn’t fully understand
but she was prepared.
We cannot know when our God will call upon us to serve him.
Perhaps it will be to help a person in great distress, or to give guidance to
someone caught in anxiety and perplexity. It could be to give time to teach, to
encourage, to witness to God’s mercy, or to show the Gospel in a courageous act
of generosity or a commitment to prayer. The essential thing is that we are a
“mansion prepared for himself,” and like the Holy Theotokos, ready to say “Here
am I” when called upon. This is the “obedience of faith” St. Paul speaks of in
Romans today—a loving obedience that produces holy lives of readiness and
courage.
The highlight of Evening Prayer is always the saying or
singing of the Song of Mary from Luke, Chapter 1. St. Mary begins her song of
praise with the words: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” When we
live such lives of God’s “daily visitation,” we are indeed living temples,
mansions proclaiming the greatness of the Lord: for our delight and for the
benefit of the world.
That is why what we do here is so urgently important—and it
is not too late to join the Blessed Virgin in her song each night at Evensong
and daily in lives consciously consecrated to God’s reign, a reign which has
already begun in heaven, in this liturgy, and in the lives of every person who
loves and serves God and neighbor for Christ’s sake. Let it be with us
according to God’s most holy will and word.
Amen.
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