The First Sunday in Advent

“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep.”

We always know that the beginning Advent and, subsequently, Christmas is on our doorstep. We are reminded of it by television, by flyers that get pushed through our mail-slots, and by the store displays that change from patio-furniture to fake Christmas trees in the week after Harvest Thanksgiving.

Yet still, for all this, Advent and Christmas seem to arrive like an unexpected guest each year – and maybe this is a good thing.

Advent is a season which turns our minds towards the beginning of all things and the end of all things.

Christmas is the celebration of a beginning of sorts, of Jesus’ incarnation, but that birth and that beginning can never be thought of apart from his death and resurrection and the fulfillment of his promises of return. Even Mary will be told this by Symeon in those piercing words about swords and hearts.

Advent then is a season of preparation, but not just a preparation for Jesus’ birth but also a preparation for the end of all things, the last day, when he will come again. Just as we cannot separate Jesus’ incarnation from his crucifixion and resurrection, neither are our lives separable from the knowledge of our own deaths and our spiritual destiny as God’s children – something which was hammered home in those last great feasts of the liturgical year of All Saints’ and All Souls’. 

Advent is meant to show us that the preparation we need to undertake is not just a preparation for Christmas – the incarnation – but for his return, and for our own ends, inseparable as they are from his life, death, resurrection, and coming again.

Yet how hard it is to give time to this preparation! We give preparation time to all kinds of things in our lives, and indeed in this season particularly we give great amounts of preparation for Christmas – food, décor, presents, etc. All good things, to be sure, and part-and-parcel of the rhythm of our lives – but ultimately not the most important preparation we need to be doing.

But then how do we prepare not just for Christmas but for our end, and for His return?

The Good news is that we are once again going to hear the answer to this, this season.

This call to prepare is most beautifully summed up in the Advent collect which we will hear every week from now until Christmas in which we pray that God might empower us to cast out the works of darkness and to don the armour of light. A message that affirms what we all inherently know: becoming those people we are called to be in Christ isn’t easy. The virtues are things striven for, worked for, and practiced, they are hard-won and easily lost; even in children we know that sharing is something that must be taught, and the same is most certainly true for us.

The temple we hear about in the Gospel this morning, the one Jesus enters after arriving at Jerusalem, is not just the temple in Jerusalem but it is a symbol of ourselves, our souls, our minds and our hearts which so often are deeply disordered and more preoccupied with fear than hope, with greed than trust, with the fulfilling of our own wills and not God’s. Just as the temple is a house that Jesus enters to get in order, so too are our hearts – temples of the Holy Spirit – houses that Jesus is coming to get into order.

But even in this is revealed the beating heart of what is so very good about this good news, about the good news of Jesus’ incarnation. You see our lives are a kind of coming-and-going to God; we set out from God in our creation, made in His image, but it’s back to God that we return at the final judgement, like weary travellers coming home. But we also know that God doesn’t wait until that future day to bring us home, or drop us back into his lap. God goes out himself to meet us everywhere, to confront us, to surprise us, to fill us with hope.

This is what is so beautiful, so important, and so necessary about the birth of Jesus – what we’re preparing for – because never before did God seek us out in such a way. Where once we may have been lucky to know God’s mercy from afar, to hear stories of others who never saw God face to face but spoke to him through fire atop smoke-shrouded mountains, now God comes to us in a form we know. A form that will look up and coo at his mother like every other baby that has ever been born, a form that will go through boyhood like every boy, that will befriend others, walk with them, talk with them, eat with them.

We call him a Judge, and so he, but imagine a judge who knew the outcome of your life before you even lived it, a judge who knew every single one of your offences before you committed them, a judge who knew what punishment every one of those offences might deserve, but a judge who comes to walk beside you through it all with forgiveness on his lips and mercy in his hands. A judge who offers us a way to be free from the outcomes of our crimes while there’s still time.

Advent is the time when we recollect all of the waiting that man did looking and watching for that merciful judge to come, it’s a time when prepare to celebrate that that judge has come in time as one of us, that the judge took the punishment we deserved and died for us, that he will come to us at the end of time on the day of judgement, but critically – that he comes to us every day, every moment, to help us especially in our darkest times to learn, to know, and to be transformed by this Redeemer’s love.

The armour we pray that we might put on this season is that which can defend us against all the barbs and arrows that want to undo us, so that – as we prayed last week – our wills might be stirred up, that we might be awake to what is going to happen at Christmas and to what is already happening right before our eyes.