The First Sunday of Advent
1Thess 3:9-13; Lk 21:25-36
Bishop Dagmar Winter
Today, Advent Sunday, marks the beginning, the first Sunday of the Christian Year.
Advent moves us bit by bit towards Christmas. Of course, Christmas always finds its way into the season of Advent - not only in the Grand Arcade but often in Church too. Ely Cathedral’s giant Christmas tree is up – inside, though the lights are not lit! Yours is outside, inviting people in. There are Christmas Carol Services for various organisations etc So we as a church, live in two worlds. No full Christmas decorations in Church, our Sunday liturgy holds us firmly in Advent, but we let Christmas in for special events preparing the wider community for the Christmas festival – an opportunity to let people know why Christmas is good news.
So what is there distinctive about Advent? "Come, o come, Lord". So shortly before Christmas, we often associate this with the coming of Christmas, the coming of the Christchild in the nativity scene. However, particularly the first half of the season of Advent is dedicated to preparing ourselves not for Christmas as such but for the Second Coming, for the return of Christ as judge at the end of the world. Hence we have this powerful Gospel reading from Luke ch. 21.
Each year, at the beginning of Advent, the set Bible readings bring us these images of the coming end of the world as we know it and the establishment of the eternal reign of Jesus Christ. In evocative apocalyptic language we hear of the moon dripping with blood, the stars falling from the sky, and the Son of Man riding in on a cloud with power and great glory. And every year when faced with that, most of us cringe a bit, and wonder whether there is anything we can say about it all that doesn’t sound like it belongs to a religiously obsessed man with a sandwich board in the shopping centre. Or is the sense of foreboding expressed one with which we are only too familiar looking at the world news?
Behind Luke scribbling this Gospel at the end of the first century lies Jerusalem in ruins, after the Jewish War, after crisis upon crisis which can only be described with the language of tidal wave and thunderbolt. Luke knows well the vision from the Book of Daniel about the Son of Man coming in a cloud. And after all those harrowing experiences of the last few decades, he reflects: Jesus has come, the Church is established, Jesus has still not returned and the world is still full of wickedness.
When we think of the poverty, injustice and cruelty of past centuries we realize that the notion that no time is as bad as today's must emerge as a myth. And so at all stages of history, the symbolic warnings and promises of Jesus have evoked fresh meanings.
As Tom Wright put it: Welcome to Advent: a rich mix of politics, prophecy, prayer and perseverance. Living in the world, bringing the rule of Christ into the vision of the world and into the life of your heart.
As such, Advent is a remarkable model for the whole of Christian life. I like to think of it in terms of the time of engagement before marriage. A time of longing in separation. A time where you strangely go on living your life like everyone else but the first and last thought is always the coming of the loved one, the big date, and yes, of course you communicate as much as possible, you prepare (known in the Church as prayer, Bible study, devotional life). There are times of keen enthusiasm but as time wears on, questions and uncertainties enter your mind - am I imagining it all? But there are the signs of commitment, the seals and tokens of love (known in the Church as the sacraments). And, by God, we need them, the ordinary things that God makes holy, to mould our hearts and minds, to bring us to repentance when we have flirted with arrogant omnipotence or cynical resignation. For the time will come when we shall stand before the Son of Man, when we shall be asked how important it was to us that Christ should rule our lives, prefiguring Christ's reign over this world, that Christ should rule our lives, right down to the thousand choices we make every day on how we spend our time and our money and all our resources.
Congratulations on the new roof and the solar panels, doing something about the future in the present. I worry about our days’ environmental apocalypse not just because of being on such a dreadful course which is why your action is so encouraging. I am also concerned because the secular eco-apocalypse appears to me to paralyze far too manyesp young people’s ability to discern beauty and meaning and purpose in their lives which is necessary in order to be resilient in the face of the challenges with which we need to deal. It’s way beyond this sermon but I think we might helpfully consider in Advent how the fear of universal death which is behind the eco-anxiety relates to Friday’s vote on assisted dying.
Back to Advent: a rich mix of politics, prophecy, prayer and perseverance. Oh, and holiness too: if the Lord in his royal presence, will, according to Thessalonians, “strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless”, it would be as well to live in the present in the [sort of] mode that is to be vindicated in the future.
Do I really want that reign of Christ to come? Yes, I am sure our desire for the bloodshed in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Sudan and so forth to end, I’m sure that desire is absolutely heartfelt and true, it shakes us to the core. And yet, and yet, could there also be areas in our life where we are part of the brokenness and lack of integrity in this world in ways that might be quite hard to give up, stuff which we don’t really want to be illuminated with the light of Christ -? ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ -? These are the questions for Advent. Every week when we gather to worship, and especially during Advent, the words we pray are by no means all true of us. But we pray them because the realm of God beckons us. The final fulfilment approaches us in our worship and we pray with the words that we know we need to grow into. And we keep praying them week after week so that we might stretch our faith and push ourselves a little closer to actually living the words we pray. Our worship is not and should never be simply an expression of who we are now. It is also to be an expression of who we will become in Christ, for in worship, and this is all the more true during Advent, we stand with one foot in the present and the other in the completed Kingdom to come.
The judge will be Christ - the one who judges us most finally is the one who loves us most fully. Not the dewy-eyed sunset love of a flirt, but the tough and honest and real love to last.
The gospel is not good news because it predicts a bright shiny future where all the details are secured in advance and nothing can alter them. The gospel is good news because it promises that the future is in the hands of Jesus Christ, because it promises a future based on the faithfulness of God.
Fig tree … summer will come …
We do not know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future. We have a future, and it belongs to Christ. So we can join our voices, hesitant though they may be at times, with the prayer of the church down through the centuries: “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus, Come!”