Advent Hope

On 30th November, the first Sunday in Advent, our Lay Worship Leader told us about the tradition of lighting Advent candles.

Advent is the first season of the church year, beginning with the fourth Sunday before Christmas and continuing through the day before Christmas. The name is derived from a Latin word for “coming.” It is a time of preparation and expectation for the coming celebration of our Lord's birth, and for the final coming of Christ.  The Advent wreath is believed to have originated with a Lutheran pastor working among the poor in Germany in the late 1800s. Different traditions attribute different meanings to the candles, and even use different colors, but the purpose remains the same: to provide Christians with a way of marking the passage through the season of anticipation until we reach the birth of Jesus. The four candles symbolize Hope, Faith, Joy, and Peace. The lighting of the first Advent candle symbolizes this hope, reminding us of God's promise to redeem creation and to come again in glory.

HOMILY

·        Isaiah 2:1-5

·        Romans 13:11-14

·        Matthew 24:36-44

·        Psalm 122

As I explained earlier, the Advent wreath and the candles it contains have different significance, depending on your denomination, your upbringing, or simply the whim of the person in charge. This year, our candles, and the lighting of them  symbolise Hope, Faith, Joy, and Peace. And so, today, as we light the first Advent candle we ponder on the meaning of that word Hope.

So, what exactly does “hope” mean? What do you think of when you hear the word “hope”?

As a verb, it often seems to be used in a slightly negative way – I hope the weather will be good (but it’s probably going to rain) …Terry hopes his exam results will be good (but he didn’t study very much, so who knows?) … I hope the train will be on time (but you know what the rail links are like).  There almost always seems to be a “but” attached to the word.

Used as a noun – “the hope of something better”, for example - there is the sense that the present situation is bad, so we look forward to an upturn in the status quo…but there is still the feeling that it won’t happen. It may improve, but it’s not sure. There is always an implicit sense of a degree of uncertainty.

And we as humans, well, we like to know, don’t we? We like to be sure of the facts. If we don’t know when an event is going to end, we get edgy – will we catch the last bus home? What happens if the taxi driver doesn’t wait? If we don’t know when our guests will arrive we wonder if we need to prepare lunch and dinner, or if we’ll have time for a shower, or to clean the kitchen floor.

This idea runs into the readings today: even as Paul writes his letter to the Christians in Rome people are already eager to know when the Messiah is going to come in all his glory, forgetting that, in God’s time, the Messiah had only just come in his humility and ordinariness, to demonstrate how our relationship with God has been utterly turned on its head.  In a way, I wonder if people thought “that wasn’t quite enough” … yes, we’ve seen the humble side, now give us what we were expecting and hoping for. The power, the glory, the hosts of angels.

People have tried to predict dates of when the world will end, when the Second Coming will occur, since forever. It was happening in Paul’s days, it was happening with Nostradamus, with prophets and preachers in practically every generation, because we want to know these things. Because we want to be sure.  Because we want to be ready. We want to set our affairs in order, so God won’t find us lacking. Because, perhaps, if we knew when it was going to happen, we could slack off until just before and then get ready.

When Andrew was spending one week working in the UK, and then one week here in France, it became known among our friends that I would be unavailable for socialising the day of his arrival because I would be cleaning the house! Without Andrew around, I had a tendency to become rather slovenly and careless in the house cleaning department! If he had changed his schedule without letting me know, he might have found the house in a slightly more dishevelled state than expected, as I hadn’t actually prepared for his return.

Perhaps God understands that humankind is a little like me and Andrew. If we knew when Christ would return, then maybe it would be a last-minute rush to get things in order, and to make sure that we fulfil the requirements to get into heaven. We want to be the ones who are transported into heaven, not those left standing around wondering what has just happened, but we don’t necessarily want to make the effort if it’s not really required!

 In thinking like this we are falling into the trap of making our faith about the end goal, the “getting into heaven”. We are focussing on the destination, if you like, and not the journey.

But our faith is about more than just making sure we’ll get into heaven. In fact, I think that should probably be the last thing on our minds. Instead, it’s about the here and now. It’s about being prepared – as Paul said, it’s about laying aside the works of darkness now and putting on our armour of light, so that every day we are ready to face whatever the world – and God – is going to throw at us!

Rather like our home when Andrew wasn’t living there full time, the world has become a rather messed up place. Just before this passage in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says You will hear of wars and rumours of wars but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.  Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.”. If we’re honest, these signs are nothing new or surprising, as such things have been happening constantly throughout the world since Jesus’s first coming and before.  Maybe what Jesus is trying to tell us is summed up in the words that follow: Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

I think that we are being reminded that the world will always be messed up, so we are called to prepare both ourselves and our little part of this broken hurting world for Christ’s coming. By hoping for better.

But not hoping in the slightly uncertain “I hope the bus will come soon” kind of way, but rather in the way of the second definition that I found in the dictionary, which read “to place trust in; to rely on” We are to place our trust in Christ, to rely on him, to follow him. We are to put on the armour of light

The love of most will grow cold, Jesus said, but those who follow me will stand firm amidst the chaos. They will love fiercely, strongly, burning with a desire to be a part of making this world a better place in the here and now, not just in the unknown future when the Kingdom of God is fulfilled.

 So, paradoxically, what this means is that we can ready ourselves to see God face to face, to leave this earthly life by truly living in it in the present: by working towards the peace and justice that God has promised will come with his Kingdom; by showing the love and the kindness that our Master has already shown to us.

To sum up, one commentator writes:

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus is reminding us that not even he, nor the angels, know when God will come. Some like to think that God will come in terrible retribution with flames and violence. These people look for signs in international politics and weather patterns that God is coming to judge and destroy the world. This is the Day of the Lord, the great apocalyptic coming of God to be with the creation fully. The reason that so many doom-sayers proclaim that, “The End is Nigh,” is because the prophets and gospel writers, even Jesus, used language like this: great tribulation, division, floods of fire and water.

The point they are trying to make is that when God comes to be fully wedded to creation, the existing order of things will be reversed. Instead of violence and oppression being used to secure economic and political flourishing for some, the Kingdom of God will be established so that peace and justice will walk hand-in-hand and will be the status quo for all humankind.

These reversals of the worldly ordering of life is a trademark of God’s presence, and it always comes as a surprise because that kind of life, one marked with peace, justice, presence and love can be achieved in the here and now.

And we are called upon to be part of that kind of life, bringing peace, justice, presence and love to all around us.

So I urge you to use this Advent to pause, and to consider what your part will be in this Kingdom in the present. Not in the future, when the end is nigh, and we rush to put our house in order, but now, in the messiness of the world, when people are hurting, and Jesus calls out to us from every street corner.