Advent 1 (A) – 1 December 2013

sermon preached at St Margaret’s  Newlands

Isaiah 2.1-5
Romans 13.11-14
Matthew 24.36-44

Happy New Year!

Today is the first Sunday of Advent: the beginning of the new church year. So it is right to wish each other happy new year. This is a period of beginnings, a period of preparation, a time liturgically, like Lent, in which we are encouraged to prepare ourselves in penitence – hence the colour purple. Advent is a beginning, a preparation, a getting ready. We see it in the name of the season: adventus – that which comes. And yet – and yet, this is also a time in which we think about endings. We move towards the end of our calendar year, and our readings confront us again and again with images of the end of time. Advent is about beginning, and yet it is also about ending.

Beginnings and endings – advent reminds us that they are closely related. As TS Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Starting something new, making something new, often means an end, a passing away of what has been before. Beginning and ending, thought together. Beginning and ending, woven together.

Theologically speaking, we can indeed say that in Advent we are preparing for a beginning and an end: the coming of Christ into the world (preparing for something which has already taken place) and the second coming of Christ to judge the world (preparing for something which is not yet). That is a paradoxical balance. As Paula Gooder writes:

one of the oddest features of Advent is that it requires us to wait for something that has already happened, as well as something that has not. It is the double vision of Advent that we look both backwards with expectation as we wait for the birth of Christ 2,000 years ago, and also forwards with anticipation to the end times.[1]

We are preparing for the coming of Christ into our lives, and yet, at the same time, we are preparing ourselves for the end of time – which for each of us individually means our death.

These thoughts of preparation for an end are woven together in the collect set for today:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility, that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.

The collect calls us to see Advent as a time of preparation which changes the way in which we live our lives. A time in which we abandon that which is of darkness, and put on that which is of light, a time in which we – as we also do in Lent – try to consider what it means to live lives in readiness for God’s coming. The collect draws on the passage from Romans that we have just heard read. In it Paul explains some of what living this kind of prepared life might look like:

Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

For Paul this is important because time is running out: “the night is far gone, the day is near.” “Be prepared!” he says – which might be the motto of Advent.

The sense of urgency, of being prepared, is apparent too in Matthew’s gospel. But Matthew gives us a much stronger sense of the uncertainty of what we are preparing for:

about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. … But 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. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

For Matthew, being prepared for Christ’s coming, being prepared for the end of time is all about living in a kind of certain uncertainty. We have to be ready for something to happen. But for what? And when? That too is an aspect of Advent. Be prepared! Be ready! But for what? And when? Advent calendars, lovely tradition that they are, give us all the wrong messages about this kind of Advent preparation. For this kind of Advent preparation is so much not about counting down the days to Christmas, one day, one picture, one little present or piece of chocolate at a time. Of course that builds up expectation too, in a wonderful and sometimes dreadfully inexorable way. But Advent is not primarily a count-down, not a waiting process that is already measured out in steps. It is about the expectation of the unexpected, precisely about a not knowing when what is coming will come.

So we prepare – for we know not what. And “here’s the thing,” writes David Lose:

it’s not just the consummation of time and history that is unexpected. Much of life is like that. We are regularly caught off guard – sometimes joyfully, but often not. The devastation in the Philippines and other natural disasters represent the precarious and unpredictable nature of our life in this world on a grand scale. But a miscarriage, lost job, heart attack, death of a loved one, or so many other personal, poignant, and unanticipated set backs can all take us aback and threaten any semblance of order we’d imag[in]ed we’d created for ourselves.[2]

Here in Glasgow this weekend, after the helicopter crash on Friday night, we know a little bit of what that unexpectedness feels like. We do not know what is coming – and we do not know when. And yet: people on Friday showed themselves in some ways prepared. So many people heard that something had happened and ran to help. Police and firefighters were trained and prepared to respond to the crisis. The lives that have been ravaged, that have been snuffed out will not come back into being. We hold before God all those affected. And yet we can give thanks for all those who responded with such courage to the crisis. Who were prepared for the unexpected.

And yet, our advent calendars are not only wrong. We do also prepare for the expected. In this Advent period, there are things that we need to do before Christmas, shopping and presents – whatever needs to happen to make Christmas Christmas, and year end year end. And in our lives too, there are up-coming events for which we can prepare much more intentionally. The birth of a child, a wedding, a holiday, a project … Preparation can mean planning. It can mean anticipation. This week saw another momentous event in Glasgow, with the launch of the White Paper on Independence. Preparation for the referendum will be a theme through out the next nine months.

That preparation too might bring us back to the Advent theme, to our readings and particularly to Isaiah: for Advent, the preparation for the coming of the end of times, is at one and the same time preparation for the coming of the kingdom. Isaiah challenges us to ponder, to vision, the coming of the kingdom on earth. The vision of peace. Judgement here is about learning to walk the way of the Lord, not just in the future, not just at the end of times, but here and now:

He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

One of the questions being asked as we are challenged to prepare for a referendum on Scottish independence, is precisely a question of this kind of preparation. We are challenged to consider, to vision what kind of country we – collectively – want to live in. To prepare for a new future.

Importantly, Isaiah reminds us that Advent is not only about preparation, but also about hope. Nancy Rockwell has written:

Advent is about preparation for a marvellous time, a joy, for the presence of God will be among us in a new way.

That can sit uncomfortably with thinking about the dark side of waiting for the unexpected, the uncertainty, the devastation that the unexpected can bring. But Rockwell urges:

The readings ask us to hold the tension within us, and not to let go of the darkness, for in it is the light.[3]

The light is in the darkness, because Christ is already come into the world even as we await him. And because of that, we can know that promises that in the moments of devastation and darkness he is with us. David Lose again:

[The Advent] promise does not insulate us from an uncertain future, but it does promise that we will not face that future alone. Come hell or high water … Jesus will be at our side, granting us courage in the face of life’s adversities and remaining with us even through death, drawing us into new life.

In its essential nature of being already but not yet, Advent holds together past, present and future. Hope given, and hope to come. A call to live our lives in preparation for the beginning and the ending that fall together – the future moment that could be – and probably is – now.

 Amen.

[1] Paula Gooder, The Meaning is in the Waiting, p. 7.

[2]  http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2893.

[3]  http://biteintheapple.com/the-great-wheel-of-the-year/.