Advent Sunday

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

You may notice some things are different at church today. There are no flowers, but instead an Advent wreath. The liturgical colour is now purple. We sing a different, slightly plainer mass setting, and the song of Glory to God in the highest is replaced with Kyrie eleison, Lord, have mercy. More of our hymns are in a minor key. The psalm is replaced by the Advent Prose, drawn from the Old Testament longing of God’s people for deliverance. There’s a paring back as we prepare for Christ’s coming. Keep awake, we’re told. Watch. Wait. Pay attention.

Then perhaps in our lives outside church there’s a different sort of preparation going on. Christmas cards to write, decorations to get out and Christmas lights to untangle, presents to buy, food to plan, arrangements to make or negotiations to be had about who you see when. Perhaps those preparations, even more than in the past, carry with them anxieties about money. Perhaps the preparation going on is the internal sort that requires a steeling of yourself in the face of the relentlessness of this season which rakes up painful memories for you or reminds you of loss or loneliness or strained relationships.

Whether your keeping of this season is one of pared back simplicity or busy preparation or just getting through it, today’s Gospel has some good news for you. And please stay with me because it’s not immediately obvious it is good news.

‘About that day and hour no one knows’, says Jesus. Our Advent calendars can count us down to December 25th, we can plan our way to Christmas Day, but Jesus’ second coming, the other horizon towards which Advent looks, will arrive unexpectedly. In fact, says Jesus, when he comes, he will come like a thief.

A thief, usually, does not write to tell you on what date she plans to steal from you. A thief does not simply ask you to hand over your bank passwords or alarm code. Sometimes a thief will be opportunistic – taking advantage of inattention or carelessness. Sometimes they will be thorough in planning, devious and clever in their tactics, targeted in their approach. Most of us seek to protect ourselves against thieves, with passwords and security questions, with iron bars and safes and alarms and locks.

We do it to protect the things we consider valuable. We do it because having something stolen from us, or being burgled, can leave us feeling violated and afraid and suspicious. We do it to convince ourselves we’re safe. And that makes Jesus’ words hard to compute when he likens himself to a thief, who will break in when the owner of the house is asleep or distracted.

Here's the good news: ‘Understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.’ Jesus, the Advent thief will come when we don’t expect it, when we’re not looking, when our attention is elsewhere.

Even as I was thinking about Jesus as the Advent thief I could feel my defences going up. What might this thief want? How do I feel about him staking out the joint and working out where my security defences are vulnerable? Put bluntly, how do I keep him out? And then another, fainter voice: do I want to?

There are some good tactics for keeping this thief at bay. You can shut yourself off from the places he promises to be – you can not read the bible, not pray, not worship, not engage with those among whom Jesus is most often to be found. That will help. Or you can read the bible in a way that keeps Jesus safely contained within its pages and doesn’t let him out to disrupt your life with his grace. You can worship in a way that can keep him similarly contained and safe. You can walk past the homeless person in a shop doorway, or put off visiting the lonely neighbour, or avoid the person you’ve fallen out with.

And if that doesn’t work then you can see if he can be kept out in the way you keep other people out. By not admitting need. By putting a good face on things. By hiding your tears, your fears, your pain, your sadness. By locking up the difficult stuff that you don’t want to think about and certainly don’t want anyone else to see in a box with so many padlocks on it that no one will ever open it. 

This is where the Advent thief wants to enter in. To steal into the places of our hurt and vulnerability, our sin and shame, our fears and resentments. To steal in and open up those locked up places of our lives with his grace and mercy. This Saviour so long-expected by God’s people was looked for with the promise that he would bring out the prisoners from the prison house. That he would shine light in the darkness of our lives. That he would come as key to unlock the chains of our sin and shame.

This is why Jesus as the Advent thief is good news. He breaks into our captivity. He brings light into the places we are afraid of or ashamed of or had thought would always have to stay in the dark. He will come to take from us, if we will let him, our resentments and shame and guilt and fear, carrying them away to his cross, where he makes an end of them for ever.

The one precious thing this Advent thief is after is you. Christ’s coming as Saviour at Christmas and as Judge at the end of time are but two aspects of the same divine action as God makes us his.

We don’t know on what day our Lord will come. But we know he will. And perhaps rather than being on our guard to defend ourselves from this unexpected hour, we might instead let our guard down this Advent. Leave a window unlocked so this Advent thief can find a way in to the hearts in which he wants to make his home, to the prisons from which he wants to free us, to the darkness into which he longs to shine his light.

He will come at an unexpected hour – maybe the hour when you tell someone the truth about how you are and instead of reacting with judgement they show you kindness. Maybe the hour at which you apologise to someone you’ve hurt and they forgive you. Maybe the hour in which in the silence of prayer you open up a part of your life to God that you’ve always kept hidden, and hope and healing begin to unfurl.

Already he is on his way, this thief who sees us as his treasure, who wants to enter into our lives to make them his own. Whether we look for him or not, whether we keep this season with pared back simplicity or frenetic planning or simply grit our teeth and get on with it, whether we arm our defences or let him in, he is coming. Will we welcome him?