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This year, for the first time in many years,
Kate and I have had the joy of taking a toddler out shopping in the run-up to
Christmas. And mostly it really has been a joy – there’s nothing in the world
quite as photogenic as a two year old with her eyes wide with fascination at
all the festive shapes and colours and lights of a shopping mall in full
seasonal swing. On the other hand, it’s not so nice seeing their excitement and
expectations manipulated to fever pitch when Christmas is still two months
away. It makes for a very long autumn!
At last, thankfully, we’ve arrived at the
First Sunday of Advent. That doesn’t help to offset the sheer tackiness of the
commercial build up to Christmas - indeed to our granddaughter it's mostly about opening the windows on her chocolate Advent calendar. But, let me hasten to add, her calendar has a Nativity theme - not Santa Claus, not Walt Disney, not The Simpsons, but Jesus. And the start of Advent does give us as Christians the moment to
assert some kind of ownership of the season: To visibly and publicly prepare
for our own Christmas, and to remind the world that Jesus is the Reason for the
Season. Jesus, not Santa Claus, not Walt Disney, not Coca-Cola or John Lewis, not the winter solstice, and certainly not the
corporate profit and loss account.
So, Advent has officially begun. But what
does that mean for us? By the time I’d been a regular churchgoer for a few
months, Christmas and Easter and Pentecost and even Lent all meant something to
me. But it was years before I cottoned on to the meaning of Advent. Of course I
knew it was a time of looking forward to Christmas, but it’s also a time of
looking backward. In fact, if we really want to get the full flavour of Advent
we have to do one of those double-takes so beloved of cartoon artists: Forward-Backward-Forward
is how it goes. Confused? Let me enlarge on that.
The obvious starting point is that we’re looking forward to
Christmas. And today, with or without the aid of a chocolate Advent calendar, we start the countdown: 24 days during which we prepare to
celebrate the birth of Jesus – the stupendous event in which the infinite and
eternal God broke into our space-time universe.
And Christmas certainly needs preparation. Firstly, practical preparation. Nobody has
found this an easy year financially, but most of us will do what we can to
decorate our homes and churches and work places, to send greetings and possibly
buy gifts, and maybe to turn up our socializing a notch or two. So a lot of
physical preparation is called for. But Christmas also requires spiritual
preparation. That’s a dimension that can
easily get lost in the hustle and bustle, but for Christians the build-up to
Christmas has always been about spiritual growth. It’s a time to repent of our past offences
and commit ourselves afresh to living as though God really was about to come
into our world for the first time.
So the first thing we do in Advent is to
look forward to each Christmas and make preparations. But we also have to look
backwards – not just to the events of that first Christmas 20 centuries ago,
but to the centuries of Jewish dealings with God that led up to it. How can we
grasp the life-changing, world-changing impact of Christ’s birth if we don’t
reflect on what it meant to his contemporaries? And so, over the next few
Sundays we’ll be looking again at the ancient teachings, especially the
majestic Old Testament prophecies that foretell and explain the coming of the Messiah.
One such passage is the reading from Isaiah we heard earlier (Isaiah 2:1-5). It
looks forward to a time scarcely imaginable to the pre-Christian world: where
God will once again be present on earth. In that day, his Law and his glory
will be revealed not just to a single chosen people but to all the world, and
all the world will experience a new era of peace and goodwill to all humanity
under the Messiah’s banner.
Sadly though, when we look around the world
we don’t see the reign of peace of goodwill. Rather, we see a world
characterised by conflict, suffering and greed. And so, it’s not enough to look
forward to Christmas, or back to the Nativity and the glorious promises in
Scripture. We have to look forward again, not just to next Christmas or to
Christmasses future, but to the time known only to the God the Father at which
Christ will be sent back into the world to put it right. And fittingly, Advent has always been a time
for thinking about the Second Coming of Christ.
Bible passages about the Second Coming are invariably
difficult - full of dense symbolism, and I’m not going to fall into the trap of
trying to unpack them in detail. However, I can make two brief points with
confidence:
Firstly, the Bible makes clear when Jesus
comes again, it will be utterly unexpected – so unexpected that not even Jesus knows
when it will happen. And to convey just how unexpected and shocking it will be,
he uses some vivid and slightly unsettling illustrations. For example, people
don’t expect their houses to be broken into. We normally lock up at night, of
course, and most of us insure our possessions, because we don’t take our
security for granted. But an actual burglary always comes as a surprise and a shock
to the victims. And in our Gospel reading this morning (Matthew 24: 36-44), Jesus
says that when he comes again it will be as unexpected and shocking as a thief
in the night.
And here’s another thing we can be sure of about
the Second Coming: it represents a challenge to the way we live out our faith here
and now. Two thousand years ago, Jesus came for the first time, inaugurated a
new heavenly kingdom on earth and empowered the Church to carry on his work. We’ve
had two thousand years in which to build on the foundations he laid, and in
spite of some key advances the world is still a mess. Perhaps we have another
two thousand years, or for all we know Christ could come again any day now. And
he has promised that he will come not as a vulnerable infant but as a
conquering king, to eliminate conflict and suffering from the world and establish
his kingly rule forever.
When Christ comes again, whether it’s not
for five thousand years or whether it’s tonight, what will he find? All our
work will be seen for what it is. How much of it will prove good enough for him
to build on? How much will be blown away like chaff?
And so, at Advent we look forward and
backward and forward again. We reflect on our past successes and failures, both
as individuals and as the church. We look forward to tasting again at Christmas
something of the joy and excitement of Christ’s first coming. And we commit
ourselves once again to pushing out the boundaries of his kingdom in the light
of the glory that will be fully revealed only when he comes again.
As Christmas draws ever nearer, may the
excitement and the joy and the peace and the challenge of the season fill our
hearts, and may we commit ourselves afresh to doing Christ’s work in the
challenging months ahead.