Advent Sunday

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

Today is the first day of our new Church year. It is the first day of the season of Advent, the few weeks we take to prepare for the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In the ancient Church, in the East, this is a season of fasting which began two weeks ago on the 15th November. It's a fast in preparation for a feast. And what a feast it is in many different respects that is in front of us. And what preparation it needs, and all of us come through this preparation with different degrees of love or loathing. The fasting is meant to help prepare in body, mind, heart and soul for a greater appreciation of what it means for God to become man amongst us, for the uncreated God to become incarnate as one of us. And a greater understanding of what it means for our life here and in eternity. When you think about it in some depth and linger over the consequences of God becoming man, you can't help but be caught up in the wonder of it all and hopefully in the joy too, which we will read about and celebrate in a few weeks time. But for now we have to start with our preparations.

Our preparations here in the Western Church take on a more sombre tone as we traditionally recall and ponder over the Four Last Things as they are called, Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. And there's nothing like the contemplation of those four things to focus the mind, as we all in this life head in the same direction, the direction of those four last things. And the most important thing is that we don't know, we really don't know how near we are in time and space to their reality. Most people treat the contemplation of death with a morbid fear and quickly change the subject when it is raised. And that is something of a pity because the healthy contemplation of our own death and associated subjects like judgement, heaven and hell can be a very positive occupation leading to our living a much fuller, richer, more faithful to Christ life than we would otherwise. On Friday last I began to read a book by Mitch Albom entitled The Five People You Meet in Heaven. It starts by considering the last hour of the main character Eddie and with thirty four minutes to live and going about his work, the narrative says of Eddie - 'Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.' I thought that was a most apt description of the way we typically live our lives.

Our readings will reflect these issues in the coming weeks on Sundays and if you follow the daily readings in the lectionary, you'll find the themes there as well. And I'd like to think of all of this as an underlying agenda for a simple preparation for hearing again, the story of the birth of Christ. But also and more importantly a preparation for thinking about and taking action on the way in which we respond personally to this great gift to us of Himself, that God made in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. Because the incarnation of Christ will only remain a story, will only remain a myth unless the Truth of it is made real in the living of our lives, made real in a daily turning to God in faith and love for the shaping and living of every moment of our lives.

So you see, I've turned the subject around about 180 degrees. Our traditional themes focus our mind on the living of our lives in the present by thinking about death. What I'm asking you to do is to focus your mind, for the present, on the living or your life in the present by thinking about a birth, the birth in a stable of God Himself as a baby boy, God in human form, God with us. This life that comes to birth in the stable will also lead through growth and death and even resurrection. And in the course of time we'll ask ourselves the same questions about that life's relevance 2,000 years ago to our own life, here, now. But for the time being we stay with His birth and our preparations for that.

You will know the sorts of preparations you will be making or will already have started to make for the celebration of Christmas. Some will be looking forward to a very happy time with the joys of family and exchange of gifts and feasting and partying. And some will be looking forward, rather, to some sadness for many a different reason. Either way, the preparations will be made and practicalities seen to with varying degrees of anxiety, worry and stress. I wonder if anybody will be counter-cultural this year and actually enjoy preparing for Christmas??

But what we are going to celebrate is a birth that has the potential of changing each and every individual human heart, mind and soul, if we let it, if we are prepared for it. It has the potential of turning every life around, of moving its existence onto a much higher plane; one in which love is the mover of every breath and heartbeat and the foundation of every relationship. And by that I don't mean human affection but divine love, the love of God. And that love comes into our lives in that birth, not forced upon us, but as a gift, quietly, silently even. And it's because it is a gift that comes almost unseen, almost unheard that we must be prepared if we are to receive it. We have to open our spiritual eyes and ears to see and hear, to look and listen. When we do that we might begin to hear the angels singing 'glory to God in the highest' as those shepherds did.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Let's not rush into Christmas. Let us just prepare to receive this gift anew as though we had never received it before, because when we do that, when we really look and listen, we might realise that we never have really received it, that our lives have up to now not shown the response the gift should evoke from us; that we have up to now still been in darkness when God is calling us year after year into the light, the light of His love. Let us look forward to this birth, this gift to us, this time with our eyes and ears fully open, and hearts and minds fully prepared.