So,
Advent.
It’s almost an anomaly nowadays, isn’t it?
Out
in the world, people are starting to celebrate Christmas already
–
the shops have had their decorations up since the beginning
of last month, or even earlier,
and the round of office parties,
works celebrations, school festivities will be starting any day
now.
And the endless tapes of carols and Christmas songs that
are played in the shops, I should think they’d drive the shop
assistants mad!
But here in Church, Christmas hasn’t
started yet, and won’t for another four weeks.
We are
celebrating Advent,
and it seems to be another penitential time,
like Lent.
Those churches that have different colours for the
seasons have brought out the purple hangings,
and many will
have no flowers except for an Advent wreath.
But Advent is
really a season of hope.
We look forward to “the last day when
Christ shall come again”
to establish the Kingdom on earth.
We
also look back to those who’ve been part of God’s story,
including John the Baptist and Jesus’ Mother, Mary.
Today,
though, our readings are about the coming King.
Our first
reading, from the prophet Isaiah, tells how the prophet,
and
perhaps the people for whom he was speaking,
longed and longed
to see God in action.
“Oh,
that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the
mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs
ablaze and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name
known to your enemies
and cause the nations to quake before
you!”
Scholars think that this part of Isaiah was
written very late,
after the people of Judah had returned from
exile.
They would have remembered the stories of the wonderful
things God had done in the olden days,
in the days of Abraham
and Sarah,
of Isaac and Jacob,
of Moses,
and of David
the King –
and then, they would have looked round and
said
“But hey, why isn’t any of this happening today?”
They
reckoned the answer must be because they were so sinful.
“You
come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your
ways.
But when we
continued to sin against them,
you were angry.
How then can
we be saved?
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and
all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up
like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
No-one
calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you
have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of
our sins.”
It
does sound very much as though the prophet were longing for God,
but
somehow couldn’t find him, in the mists of human sinfulness and
this world’s total abandonment of God.
You know, there’s
nothing new –
we complain that people don’t want to seek God
today,
and our churches stand empty,
but there was the
prophet saying that thousands of years ago!
And, of
course, as it turned out,
God hadn’t abandoned his people at
all!
Jesus came to this earth, lived among us, and died for
us,
and Isaiah’s people now knew the remedy for their
sin.
But Jesus himself tells us, in our second
reading,
that his coming to live in Palestine as a human being
isn’t the end of the story, either.
Somehow, someday, he will
come back again.
He obviously doesn’t know all that much about
it while he is on earth,
and rather discourages us from
speculation as to when or how.
But he draws pictures for
us:
“The sun will be
darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars
will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be
shaken.
“At that time men will see the Son of
Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his
angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the
earth to the ends of the heavens.”
It is a scary
thought, isn't it, with the world as unstable now as at any time in
the past century.
What’s more today, as at no other time in
history,
communications are such that if Jesus were to
come back,
we’d know about it almost as soon as it happened
–
look how quickly news spreads around the world these
days.
Half the time you hear about it on Facebook or Twitter
before the BBC has even picked up on it.
And Jesus' return
would be something totally unmistakable.
But lots of generations
before ours have thought that Jesus might come back any minute
now,
and Christians throughout history have lived their lives
expecting him to come home.
We have remembered Jesus’ warnings
about being prepared for him to come, but He hasn’t come.
And
we get to the stage where we, too, cry with Isaiah:
“Oh,
that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that
the mountains would tremble before you!”
Like Isaiah, we
long and long to see God come and intervene in this world, and wish
that He would hurry up. And that’s perfectly natural, of
course.
Some folk have even got to the stage of believing it
won’t happen, and have given up on God completely.
But Jesus
said it will happen,
and one has to assume He knew what he was
talking about.
But that doesn’t mean that we can blame
God –
if You had come
back before now, this wouldn’t have happened.
Every generation
has been able to say that to God,
and it’s not made a blind
bit of difference.
So maybe there’s something else.
You
see, in one way, Jesus has come back.
Do you remember
what happened on the Day of Pentecost,
in that upper room?
God’s
Holy Spirit descended on those gathered there,
looking like
tongues of fire,
and with a noise like a rushing mighty
wind,
and the disciples were empowered to talk about Jesus.
And
we know from history,
and from our own experience,
that God
the Holy Spirit still comes to us,
still fills us,
still
empowers us.
One of the purposes of these so-called
penitential seasons is to give us space to examine ourselves
and
see if we have drifted away from God,
to come back
and to
ask to be filled anew with the Holy Spirit.
Then we are
empowered to live our lives
as Jesus would wish.
We don't
have to struggle and strain and strive to “get it right” by our
own efforts.
God himself is within us, enabling us from the
inside.
Jesus doesn’t just provide us with an example to
follow, but actually enables us to do it, by the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit.
I do two tai chi classes a week, these
days, but it’s really difficult to get it all the way it should
be.
Back in my ice dancing days, we only had to memorise a
routine that lasted two minutes, with musical cues to tell us what
move to do when.
In tai chi, it’s a 25 minute routine with no
musical cues!
I get very muddled at times.
But supposing
somehow the spirit of a tai chi master could get inside me,
and
actually make my body move in the right way,
and show me how
it's done from the inside.
That would be so much better than
anything my coach could say, or anything I can learn from watching
videos.
I really would be able to do the routine, even at home!
And that’s what God does –
by indwelling us with his
Holy Spirit,
He not only shows us what to do, but enables us to
do it.
All of us will face the end of the world one
day.
It might be the global end of the world, that Jesus talks
about, or it might just be the end of our personal world.
We
expect, here in the West, to live out our life span to the end, and
many of us, I am sure, will do just that.
But we can’t rely on
that.
You never know when terrorists will attack –
or
even muggers, or just a plain accident.
We can’t see round
corners;
we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.
But
whether it is tomorrow,
or twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years
from now,
one day we will die, and then, at last, we will meet
Jesus face to face.
And we need to be ready.
We need to
know that we have lived as God wants us to live –
and when
we’ve screwed up,
as we always do and always will,
we’ve
come back to God and asked forgiveness, and asked God to renew us and
refill us with his Holy Spirit.
We can only live one day
at a time, but each day should, I hope, be bringing us nearer to the
coming of the King.
Amen.