Mastodawn

Time to wake up! A sermon for the First Sunday of Advent (Year A RCL) Sunday 27 November 2022

Scripture Readings:

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

We tend to take light for granted. Even as our northern winter draws in, we can dispel the gloom with a flick of a switch. When we do venture out, our streets, shops and public buildings are lit. As we move into Advent, many places will be lit with even more, fancy, lights- the Christmas lights are starting to appear on some houses already.

But news from Ukraine reminds us that we ought not to take our lights for granted. Many places in Ukraine are without light- and heat- as winter approaches, due to the damage done to infrastructure by the evil Russian invasion. Today we read of Isaiah, telling the people of Israel at a time when they frightened by the threat of war, that one day people will hammer their swords into ploughs, their spears into pruning knives, turning the instruments of violence into tools for peace, and that humanity will give up going to war. It is a wonderful dream which seems as distant as ever- especially for the people of Ukraine. It’s hard to dream of a better future when the present is so awful.

And yet, as the darkness draws nearer, we lit a candle in church today.

The Church season of Advent season of Advent is a strange sort of time. It’s supposed to be about looking forward to Christmas, to the day when we will remember the birth of the baby of Bethlehem. But how can you look forward to something which has already happened? How can we be expectant about a birth which happened 2,000 years ago?

Yet all this confusing of past, present and future shouldn’t be disconcerting for Christians. For we Christians know what we are living in an in-between time in history. In Jesus Christ, God has come among us, in the child of Bethlehem. But the risen and ascended Christ is, in a mysterious way, still to come. And that should make a difference to the way we live- and give us hope

In chapter 13 of his Letter to the Romans, St Paul encouraged the Christians of Rome to lead good lives. He reminds them of Christ’s command to love, writing

The commandments… are summed up in the one command, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself”. If you love someone, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.

If we could learn to love our neighbours, there would be an end to war, an end to cities without electricity, an end to new-borns killed by rockets in maternity hospitals. We are too keen on making enemies of our neighbours, and too easily forget what loving them means.

And Paul reminded the Roman Christians that the command to love our neighbours was an urgent command. We are, he says, living in in-between times:

You must do this, because you know that the time has come for you to wake up from your sleep. For the moment when we will be saved is closer now than it was when we first believed. The night is nearly over, day is almost here.

It’s as if Paul was someone who feel that time is passing quicker than other people realise.

We also find this urgency the preaching of Jesus. Consider this strange wee parable, which Jesus tells in our Gospel reading today:

If the owner of a house knew the time when the thief would come, you can be sure that he would stay awake and not let the thief break into his house. So then, you also must always be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you are not expecting him.

By ‘the Son of Man’, Jesus means himself. Now, I’m sure you can think of many things the Bible says about Jesus- Prince of Peace, Son of God, Redeemer, the Word made flesh. But Jesus as a burglar- had that ever occurred to you before? But there it is, that’s what he apparently said. Not the most obvious thing to say about Jesus, but here he is, saying it about himself: I’m like a thief in the night!

Even odder is this strange passage- words which, again, are said to be the words of Jesus:

At that time two men will be working in a field: one will be taken away, the other will be left behind. Two women will be at a mill grinding meal: one will be taken away, the other will be left behind. Watch out, then, because you do not know what day your Lord will come.

Now, this is really strange stuff. Jesus seems to be saying that, at some point in the future, we’re suddenly going to find our neighbours and friends disappearing round about us, as if they’d suddenly been dematerialised and teleported on the Starship Enterprise? What are we supposed to make of stuff like this?

I think this is Jesus encouraging us to urgency. Jesus is urging us to watch out, keep alert, look for the signs that the unexpected it going to happen. Otherwise, we will be like the folks in Noah’s day, whom Jesus said didn’t know what has happening until they were swept away by the flood.

So St Paul tells the Christians of Rome that they’ve to wake up:

…the time has come for you to wake up from your sleep.

We humans spend about a third of each day asleep. But sometimes it is as if we are asleep the rest of the time, too. We can be jolted when something apparently unexpected happens because we were not alert enough to see it coming: a health problem that leads to hospitalisation, the seemingly happy marriage which- to everyone’s surprise- ends suddenly, the discovery that we have friend who’s deeply unhappy, and we never really noticed.

It happens on a world scale, too: everyone’s asleep, until something wakes us up. The invasion of Ukraine in February was once such moment. The climate crisis ought to be another. Both represent great threats to the future of the planet. Both need us to reach out to one another and work together with our neighbours. It’s a time for battering swords into ploughshares, for otherwise, disaster will ensue.

But many of us, including our leaders, seem asleep at the wheel. So we miss the danger signs, the ‘wake up calls’. A melting glacier is a wake up call. Our putting up with far-right racism and discriminatory rhetoric is a wake up call. As St Paul says, ‘the time has come for you to wake up from your sleep’! Or as Jesus said, we are like the folks in Noah’s day who had no idea that a disastrous flood was on its way- even though Noah was building a giant boat!

Yet Paul was also convinced that the light was breaking into our darkness.

Christianity is an historical faith. We Christians look backwards to the story of God’s dealings with Israel, which come to a climax in the history of Jesus Christ. Yet our historical faith points us towards the future. Christianity isn’t nostalgia- it’s about looking forward with hope. We hope for a time when swords are hammered into ploughshares. Christ was crucified, but he rose again- how can we not have hope?

Christians are folk who have learned from the Bible what God did in Jesus Christ. Responding to God’s love with faith, we now have hope, because God, we know, is taking things further. Not everything is quite complete. In Jesus’ and Paul’s day, many people had a sense that the end of the age was nigh. They looked forward to a day when, all at once, God’s reign of peace and justice was established on earth.

But early on, Christians, such as Paul, saw that the end of the world was, in a way, already underway. From them we get this sense of living in an in-between time. We know that evil has ultimately been defeated already the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Darkness still lingers, but, like people waiting for the sunrise, Christians can see the light on the horizon. We know the sun will soon appear, but the end is not quite yet.

The waiting can be hard. We might get drowsy, and even fall asleep. We might allow the darkness, rather than the light, to lull us into false ways of living. We might given in to the darkness around us and lose hope for peace- so we need prophets like Isaiah to help us dream of a better future. We might stop being urgent about loving our neighbours, and allowing the bigots and racists get away with their hatemongering- so we need preachers like Paul to remind us to keep on loving our neighbours. We might be too drowsy to see what God is up to in the world- so we need our saviour, Jesus the burglar, to break into our houses, our workplaces and our lives to make urgent for the Kingdom that is dawning.

For in Jesus Christ, the light of the world has come to us. And his light is still dawning, especially in the lives of those who choose to live in his way, his light. He taught us to love, not just by tell us, but by showing us how to do it. In Advent, we are reminded that God’s Kingdom is it hand, already appearing among us. ‘The night is nearly over, the day is almost here’, says Paul, which for me, conjures up an image of a sunrise: the dawn light beginning to banish the darkness. Dawn is coming, and so we have hope! So let’s live in the light, dream of peace, and by loving our neighbours, light a candle against the dark!

Ascription of Praise

To God be honour and eternal dominion! Amen.

1 Timothy 6.16 (GNB)

Biblical references from the Good News Bible, unless otherwise stated

Featured image: Arab women grinding coffee in Palestine, 1905.
Published as a stereoscope in September 29, 1905 by Meadville, Pa. : Keystone View Company.
Library of Congress, Washington DC. From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59364 [retrieved November 25, 2022]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Coffeepalestine.jpg.

#Advent #Lectionary