Return to Who We Really Are

Homily for Sunday, November 30, 2025
The First Sunday of Advent

In Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, Bud Fox, a junior stock broker (played by Charlie Sheen), wants to work for Gordon Gekko, a legendary but unscrupulous corporate raider (played by Michael Douglas).  If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember the line from Gekko’s famous speech that more or less sums up the movie:

The point is [Gekko says] that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.  Greed is right, greed works.  

And you may recall the plot ,how Bud eventually does work for Gordon Gekko, and in the end Bud out-Gekko’s Gekko in a profitable but scandalous deal that both takes advantage of Gekko but lands him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  In the penultimate scene, just before Bud enters the courthouse for trial, Gekko and Bud meet one last time, in Central Park.  “Is this how you pay me back?” Gekko asks.  “You cockroach!  I gave you your manhood; I gave you everything…  You could have been one of the great ones.”  And, after a brief pause, “I look at you and I see myself.  Why?”  “I don’t know,” says Bud.  “I’m just Bud Fox.  As much as I wanted to be Gordon Gekko, I’ll always be Bud Fox.

We’ll come back to Bud Fox, but first, William Butler Yeats.  Wall Street achieved a minor fame among Yeats fan because in one scene, Gekko quotes(or rather misquotes) a line from a Yeats’ poem.  “So,” says Gekko to Bud, “The falcon’s heard the falconer,” meaning here that the student has surpassed the teacher.  Does anyone recognize the quote…?  It comes from Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”  Which brings us to today’s Gospel lesson and “the Son of Man coming at an unexpected hour.”  Yeats’ actual line is:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…

Fans of Yeats will know how dark his poem is.  “Anarchy is loosed upon the world,” he writes.  

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote the poem shortly after the First World War, and rather than promote the myth of perpetual human progress, Yeats in his poem suggests that, after two thousand years since the birth of Christ, we are right back to the darkness in which we began:  

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
We're vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This morning’s Gospel lesson suggests that our Christian “second coming” will be similarly stern:

For as in those days before the flood… they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so, too, will be the coming of the Son of Man.  Then two will be in the field; one will betaken and the other left.  Two women will be grinding meal; one will be taken and the other left…  You must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Elsewhere in his Gospel,Matthew compares Jesus’ second coming to a bridegroom entering a banquet hall,after which the door was shut: “Truly, I tell you,” said the bridegroom to those who arrived late, “I do not know you” (Mt 25:12).  Or again, Matthew compares the second coming to a separation of sheep and goats.  To the sheep Jesus says, “Come… and inherit the kingdom prepared for you” (Mt25:34).  To the goats he says, “You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25:41).  

Our Christian tradition is clear that Jesus is coming again, “robed in dreadful majesty” (as the hymn puts it (#57)), and that this “day of the Lord” may well be experienced (as the prophet Amos put it), as “darkness, not light,” as “gloom, with no brightness in it” (Amos 5:20).  For though (as today’s Collect says) in this life “Jesus came to visit us in great humility,” the tradition assures us (the Collect continues) that, “he shall come again in glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.”  

If Jesus indeed is coming again in dreadful majesty to judge the living and the dead, what might we do to prepare?  And what might we do if – to return to Yeats and to speak to concerns I’ve heard some of us express – [what can we do if] we feel that things are falling apart and the center cannot hold, if it seems the “blood-dimmed tide” is being loosed and the darkness is dropping again?  

Advent – the season we have just entered – is a season of repentance. While when we hear the word “repentance,” we might  be inclined to think dour thoughts and ponder our perceived faults, at the heart of repentance is learning to recognize who we are, really.  In Wall Street, Bud Fox finally, wracked with guilt and shame, recognized who he was:  “I’m just Bud Fox,” he said.  “As much as I wanted to be Gordon Gekko, I’ll always be Bud Fox.”  One of the greatest things we can learn is who we are, really, which is “human,” that is, “of the earth,” and that only God is God.

In this season of repentance, I wonder, might we allow ourselves to better learn who we are, really?  Which is human, frail, a sinner, AND… beloved by God, who through Jesus offers a path to return.  E.M. Forster once wrote that, “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him” (Howard’s End).  By all accounts, Jesus’ second coming looks to be terrifying.  But perhaps the idea of Jesus’ second coming might just save us, leading us to repentance.  Which to a large degree is learning who we are, really, which is:  human, fallen and frail, but beloved by God – Beloved! – and offered in Jesus a path to return.