King’s Acre Church, 28 November 2004
Are you
Ready?
Today, as we have already
established, is the first Sunday in Advent.
The start of a new Church year.
And the start of the period of preparation for Christmas. Preparing for the coming of the King.
In our family, we don’t
start Christmas until Robert’s birthday on the 15th – I don’t put up
decorations, or Christmas cards before then, and I don’t send my Christmas
cards until then. Mind you, I don’t
always put up decorations and Christmas cards anyway, since we don’t normally
spend Christmas in London, but we do have one of those trees with twinkling
lights on it, and I usually manage to put that up, and maybe some candles, and
Robert does the cards. But the 15th
is quite late by some standards – Peter Jones had its Christmas decorations up
before the end of October, would you believe.
I went there just at the end of October to buy a new zip for Robert’s
skating trousers, and all the decorations were up already. And I saw the first Christmas cards and
wrapping paper in Tesco’s even earlier than that. And many, many families will be beginning to think of putting
their tree up as soon as it’s December.
But for the Church,
Christmas is a “don’t even go there” for another four weeks. Our liturgical colour changes to purple – I
wore my purple boot covers to the rink this morning – and we don’t have
flowers, both signs that it is a penitential season. Penitential doesn’t really mean being sorry, I don’t think, although
that’s part of it. It’s more about
getting ready, preparing ourselves, getting rid of stuff that we’ve allowed to
accumulate between us and God – and between us and other people, too, of
course. Far from celebrating, we are
busy preparing ourselves.
The four Sundays in Advent
traditionally have different themes.
Next week we remember the Word of God in the Old Testament, and we think
of the prophets who God used to tell out his word. Then we think about John the Baptist, the Forerunner, and sing
“On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry”. And on the last Sunday of Advent, which can be anything up to a
week before Christmas, we remember how Mary said “Yes” to God’s request for her
to be Jesus’ mother, and we sing the hymn called “Gabriel’s message”, with the
refrain “Most highly flavoured gravy, Gloria”, or something like that. But this Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent,
we think Christ’s coming in glory.
===oo0oo===
Actually, it’s a very
difficult thing to think about, because it hasn’t happened yet! The Bible shows us most clearly that the
early church was convinced that it was something that would happen any minute
now, certainly in their lifetimes. But
here we are, two thousand years later, and nothing has happened. So most of us don’t really believe it will,
or if we do believe it, it isn’t a belief that’s in the forefront of our
minds. It doesn’t really affect the way
we live.
But maybe it should. We don’t know when Jesus will return, but we
do know that this earth is finite. Or perhaps
I should say that we know that humanity’s tenure of this earth is finite. We are going to run out of essential
supplies like oil and aluminium and iron and stuff like that; and it wouldn’t
be altogether surprising if we were to blow ourselves up one day. Climate change might make the world uninhabitable,
or we might be wiped out by an asteroid impact, like the one they thought might
have killed the dinosaurs. Or
something.
And our own lives are most
certainly finite – we don’t know when we will be called to glory! A friend of mine was saying the other day
that a family at her son’s school had been killed in a car crash. I know it’s not fashionable to talk or think
about death these days, but it will happen to all, and all of us will one day
have to stand before Jesus. It’s
possible, but not very likely, that he will return before that happens, but
even if he does, we will still have to stand before that throne!
We need to be ready. Our readings today all reflect that. Our Gospel reading sounds a bit disjointed, almost
as though Matthew has collected odd bits of Jesus’ sayings. But it still has a clear theme – be ready,
because you never know!
You’ve probably seen those
ads the police are putting out at the moment reminding us not to invite
burglars into our homes and cars by leaving windows open or doors unlocked. I don’t think Jesus could have seen that ad,
but the end of the gospel reading reminded me of it: “If the owner of
the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have
kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be
ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
===oo0oo===
Okay, so we need to be ready. Fair enough, but how. How do you get ready, how do you stay ready, and above all, how do you go on being ready when nothing seems to happen?
I think the answer is also
in the parallel with the thief in the night.
We make it a habit, don’t we, of checking that our doors and windows are
locked before we go out, even on a short trip to Lidl or Tesco. If we have our car, it’s automatic to check
that we haven’t left anything visible, and that it is locked, before we leave
it. And we have insurance to cover us
in case the worst happens anyway, no matter how careful we’ve been.
Well, it’s the same, I
think, in our Christian lives. We can
build good habits of prayer, of reading the Bible, of fellowship and of coming
to the Sacrament regularly. These are
what John Wesley called “The means of grace”, and they are the building blocks
of our Christian life. They are as
essential to our Christian life as food and drink are to our physical
life. But they are also habits that one
can acquire or break. You’re in the
habit of locking your front door whenever you leave the house – are you in the
habit of contacting God every day, too?
You make sure you’ve shut your windows – are you sure you take the
Sacrament? And so it goes on.
Parallels only work so
far, of course, especially because it’s not all down to us. I know we sometimes talk as though it is,
and, of course, we are always free to say “No” to God – though I do very much
hope we won’t choose to do that. But God
has far more invested in the relationship than we do – either that, or God is
so far above us that he’s totally uninterested in us as individuals. And we know that’s not true! So it must be true that God is numbering
every hair on our head, and being far more interested in maintaining a
relationship with us than we are with him.
We don’t have to do all the hard work.
Nevertheless, good habits
are good habits, and we need to acquire them!
And with God’s help, we can. We
don’t have to do it alone, because God indwells us, through the Holy Spirit,
and enables us to actually want to read the Bible and pray, and worship, and
take Communion, and so on.
===oo0oo===
We don’t often think about
the end of times and the Last Judgement, and that’s probably as it should
be. If we thought about it too much, we’d
never get on with our lives, and we’d end up being so heavenly-minded we’d be
of no earthly use. But we do need this
annual reminder, because we don’t want to end up living as if this life were
all there is, either. Obviously we don’t
absolutely know that when we die, we’ll go on with Jesus somewhere else. It might just be wishful thinking on our
part. But that’s what faith is all
about! We can’t know, not really, but
we can choose to believe it, and to live accordingly. And to work together with God to become the best we can possibly
be.
And then, if, or perhaps
when the unthinkable happens, then we’ll be ready. Are you ready?
Oh, one loose end – in my
parallel with burglar-proofing our houses, I mentioned insurance. Do we have insurance? As Christians, yes, we do. We have Jesus’ promise in John’s gospel:
“For God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not
perish but may have eternal life.
Indeed, God did not send
the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might
be saved through him.
Those who believe in him
are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because
they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
Says it all, doesn’t it!