Sermon: Advent Compline Devotional Address

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light......

Those resonant words, the opening petition of the Collect for Advent Sunday and indeed the Advent Season, are greatly loved not only by Anglicans but by all Christians who have adopted this most exquisitely crafted prayer as part of their spiritual and liturgical heritage.

It was, of course, written by Archbishop Cranmer for the 1549 First Prayer Book of Edward VI, and has continued in all subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer. While Cranmer appointed it for the first week of Advent only, the 1662 revisers required its use throughout the Advent season, just as the Collect for Ash Wednesday was also be used throughout Lent.

Like most Reformation collects, it was written to complement the appointed Epistle and Gospel for Advent Sunday, The Epistle, the portion of Romans 13 that I have just read, and the Gospel, the account of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the coming of the Lord to Zion as King.

Interestingly, Cranmer fails to reproduce the normal ground plan for a Collect, namely

            an invocation, in which God is named,

            followed by an attribute of the Godhead,

            followed by a petition and sometimes a virtue to which we aspire,

and a conclusion, stating that our prayer is made ‘through Jesus Christ' and often adding a Trinitarian ascription.

However, here Cranmer, after naming God, goes straight to petition, ‘...give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness'. He could have written something like this:

Almighty God, whose Son our Saviour Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, and on the last day will come again in his glorious Majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light.......

However, Cranmer is too careful a writer to change conventions merely for the sake of it, so why did he do it here?  Well, we stand at the beginning of a new Church Year, and I think that in this collect we have a classic statement of beginning a new Christian Year from where we are now.  Hence, his use of the phrase ‘now in the time of this mortal life' - in other words today, or tonight, when we are bidden to cast away, throw away, be done with, the works of darkness, the works that arise from our sinful nature, the deeds, the actions, the motives, that cannot stand before the God of holiness, and put on, or clothe ourselves, with the armour of light, all that is good and worthy and true and godly. And then, brilliantly, Cranmer relates our present, our ‘now' to those decisive ‘comings', the first Coming of the Lord in great humility and then his second Coming in his glorious Majesty.  Back then, Christ came; now he comes; finally, he will come.

As Christians we live out our lives between these two decisive Comings, both of which Advent anticipates, and we embrace his coming to us now. Suddenly, we are part of the story, part of the working out of God's purposes; we find our place in the divine drama ‘now in the time of this mortal life'.  I will come back to that theme presently.

Of course for St Paul, in his words to the Romans, ‘The night is far spent, and the day is at hand; let us therefore cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light', the point is that through our faith and our baptism, we have already entered a new world, a new creation, we have already passed from darkness to light. So, there is something incongruous about behaving as if we were still in the dark; rather, our lives are to anticipate God's new age. So become what you already are - children of light, children of the day.

Part of this call is to imitate Christ himself, the Christ who came to visit us in great humility. ‘Humility' is a gift of the Spirit which enables us to have a true perspective; it is the enemy of illusion.  ‘Visit' is a word of gravitas in this context. It's not a kind of casual dropping in for a cup of tea.  Rather, it's about God's decisive intervention. It's a very Lukan word:

            Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his

people -

so begins the Benedictus.

After the raising of the son of the widow of Nain:

Fear seized all of them and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great Prophet has arisen among us', and ‘God has visited his people'.

And when the Lord wept over Jerusalem,

.....they will not leave within you one stone upon another, because you did not recognise the time of your visitation from God.'

God's visitation is for both salvation and judgment. Salvation for those who see and perceive and recognise, but judgment for those who cannot or will not see or perceive or recognise. But the characteristic of this visitation was ‘great humility'. Here, Cranmer draws on the Gospel. 

            Say to the daughter of Zion,

            behold, your King comes to you,

            gentle and riding on a donkey.

This is a King who rules by love; this is a King who brings a peaceable kingdom, who conquers hearts.

But then note the power of contrast; the One who came in great humility, unrecognised, incognito, will come again in glorious Majesty, resplendent, unmistakable, unsurpassable.  And note that those same two themes are present that we see in the verb ‘visit'; he will come as Judge, of the quick and the dead, in other words of every human being from every time, and he will come as Saviour that we might rise to the life immortal.

But there is one part of this Collect that I have not yet mentioned, and that is its first verb. ‘Almighty God, give us grace'. We are back to the present, tonight, today, ‘now in the time of this mortal life'.  ‘Give us grace' - divine favour, divine help, divine enabling - why? So that we might cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, so that we might rise to the life immortal. The Christian Year is a year of grace, for without God we can do nothing.

But by God's grace, we find our place in this world, in history, in this life, in the human story, in the divine drama. By grace we see our humanity raised to the heights; by grace, we articulate our hope in God's future. And by grace, we are changed to become what we are, children of light, children of day.

And so in this solemn hour of compline, as darkness surrounds us, we see light, we pray for grace.