Advent Sunday

1 Thessalonians 3.9-13; Luke 21.25-36

Advent Sunday, the first day of the Church's year in the West and we begin the year by looking forward; looking forward to celebrating the Nativity of the Lord at Christmas and also to His second coming. And so with that looking forward our minds are focussed by the traditional themes of Advent - Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. It sounds like pretty serious and sombre stuff. In a way our worship seems to reflect that with the traditional Advent readings which remind us of the themes. Our hymns and music have the same feeling about them, generally speaking, we have purple as our seasonal colour and we've few if no flowers in Church.

We've got to be carefully though, that in those respects we don't make the Advent season like Lent. It may be a time to reflect but it isn't meant to have the same feeling and atmosphere at all. The themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell are there as I said, to focus the mind, but from the perspective of a healthy sense of God's place and presence in our lives; from what you might call the standpoint of a 'lively' and living faith; and not from a place of great doubt and anxiety. The themes are not meant in that sense to frighten us into submission to God but to help increase our faith and our sense of assurance that God has all in His providence and that 'He upholds us with the power of His might' as St. Paul put it and again, that 'nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord; neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth.' You might recognise those words of St. Paul from his letter to the Romans with which we begin the funeral service. Our lives as Christians are founded on faith, hope and love of God and one another and it's from that standpoint that we have in mind the themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell and take part in the Advent season; that is, from the standpoint of great confidence in God.

Having mentioned those themes though, I do so only to give us the opportunity to think about the frame of mind in which we might make our way through this four short weeks of Advent and how to keep it. There's nothing like contemplating those themes to focus the mind on our past, our present and our future. So I'm not going to look into those themes during Advent at least not directly anyway. What I want to do both on the Sundays and in our Tuesday evening services is to prepare in a more direct way for the celebration of the Nativity of the Lord and what it means for us, before the event, rather than at the time or after. I'm going to be looking more during the Advent season at what Christmas is and, with that in mind preparing heart, mind and soul so that we can appreciate it more fully. And in so doing, we might get a proper appreciation as to how we should have that constant state of expectation of Jesus's coming again. As the Advent collect says, we 'cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, so that on the last day when he shall come again, we may rise to the life immortal.' It's about being ready now, so that, when it happens, when we meet Christ again, we will receive what He promised. In that way we are able to appreciate His first coming and our celebration of it.

So during this Advent season, what I invite you to do is first of all think about what it is we are celebrating on the 25th December, who it is are celebrating on the 25th December. That might sound like a rather pointless plea because we all know don't we? Well mark my words, it isn't, and we don't, necessarily; and I'll tell you why. The reason it's not a pointless plea is because everyone of us is subject to a ruthless dumbing down of the most important event the universe has ever and will ever know - the coming of God into the world in His incarnate Christ and His life, His death and His resurrection. No other event has had as profound an impact upon the whole world. But it's no holds barred in our materialist, secularist, political correctness-gone-mad Western world. There are elements that will stop at nothing to rob us of any appreciation whatever of God in our lives. And remember it's the devil we are up against here and evil invading the lives of individuals and society, that is doing it. And especially vicious are those who call themselves atheists and who seek to rob us of our God and our Christ have no argument except to denigrate the intellect of people who sense that there's more to life than can be seen or touched. They seek to be classed as intellectuals with a superior understanding of life and the universe, but they are nothing of the sort, they are mere naysayers. Thy and the 'politically correct', whatever that really means other than 'I don't like what you do and think and say', tell us we are causing offence by using our Christian symbols and celebrating the important points in our faith, but have no regard to the offence they are causing us by their self righteous demands.

And it's more subtle than that too. We are encouraged, even from within the Church to popularise God and Christ so that He can be understood, so that people can more readily understand we are told, and so come to know and love him much more easily. Well here again, we don't make God any more attractive by turning sacred music into jingles or by reducing the beautifully expressive language of scripture and traditional hymnody into language you read in tabloid newspapers and hear on reality tv shows. And that's because when we do popularise God in that way, He becomes 'ordinary', He becomes the same as everything else in this world, when we should be showing Him as completely extra-ordinary. And when you put God on a par with everything else in life, a life of so many choices, then God is usually last to be chosen. Yes, God came to earth as a man and was everything a man was, but the point is He was everything God is as well and everything a man is not. And when we popularise Him that's the bit we miss, the most important bit, that it's God we are talking about here, not simply a baby born in a stable. If we miss that fact that it's God we are celebrating, because all we see is the baby in the manger, we miss the point entirely. And I think we miss Him so very much at this time and if at this time than more so the rest of the year.

We'll have the children in Church as we always do at Christmas and we'll be singing and hearing the children sing children's stuff and it will be lovely and I've nothing against it in that sense, as long as we realise that there's much more to it and we don't leave the children there too, with children's stuff, so that they never really grow in faith and love of God. One of the most wonderful things that's coming out of the Young Generations Sunday Slot is that when the children are writing the prayers now, left to themselves, they are beginning to write some quite sophisticated theologically and mystically profound prayers. They are actually leaving behind 'childish things' quite naturally, as they think about themselves and other people and especially about God. I've been amazed at what the children are writing as they grow in confidence and are allowed to dig down inside them and yes, listen to the living God speak in them.

We don't like to think about Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell, they are too hard to think about, they throw up too many questions, raise anxieties; so we try to push them out of the way, to forget them either purposely or by negligence. Or we minimise their impact by thinking of them in ways that take out the 'sting'. But looked at in the right way, from having a sense in God's presence and power in our lives, those themes actually help us in the living of our lives, living our lives to the full. And isn't it like that when we come to think beyond those themes to God Himself? The contemplation of God throws up too many questions for most people, raises too many anxieties, so we give up thinking about Him or think about Him in ways that we can cope with or manage. The trouble is that then, in thinking of Him in ways we can manage, we bring Him down to our size, and when He's our size, He's not big enough to handle the really serious issues in life and in death. We can't have any faith in or love for a man-sized God.

But Jesus was, you might say, a God-sized man. So much so that we believe Him to be God incarnate, God in the flesh. And it's as such that we are thinking about Him this Advent. Not simply as a baby, born in a stable, but the uncreated God, come among us, in the flesh. And as we think of Him as such, as we've removed all the dumbing down and the popularising, we must ask ourselves, how do we receive Him, what attitude should we have, what state of body, mind, spirit and soul need we have to receive Him as God come among us? Think of that over the next four weeks, and if you can, come on Tuesday evening at 7.00 0'clock when I'll be saying more, about just that.