Isaiah 2.1-5; Romans 13.11-14; Matthew 24.36-44
In C. S. Lewis' Narnia, time travels at a different pace. When Lucy pushes past the fur coats and steps through the wardrobe for the first time, she has a whole adventure involving tea with a talking Faun in the strange wintery land before she goes back home. But on her return, she quickly realises that for her siblings, time had barely moved at all. They are still playing the same game of hide and seek that had begun with her going into the wardrobe. The two worlds are on a different schedule, travelling at different speeds.
Now Advent is one of my favourite times of the Church year. I love the thrill of anticipation, the excited waiting, the countdowns and looking forward. But today, as always on this first Sunday of Advent, the timing feels a bit weird. It feels a bit like we’ve stepped through a wardrobe and entered a place where things aren’t going quite at the same pace. In this morning’s readings, instead of focusing on the coming of a baby, we are looking much further ahead to the end times; we are being reminded of the big picture in the arc of God’s story among us.
We begin by looking to the end. Over the four Sundays in Advent there will be a shift from anticipating the dramatic conclusion of all things, to the more tender tone of preparing for the Nativity, but this morning we are firmly future orientated. It’s like hinting at the splendid ending of a story before you utter the phrase ‘once upon a time’.
And the reason for this is that beginning the liturgical season of Advent, beginning the Church year, with contemplating the second coming, reminds us that the work of Jesus’ first coming at Christmas is not complete. Yes, we are waiting for Jesus to be born, waiting for the incarnation, but we are also waiting for something more. We wait, every day, for this story to reach its ending. What we do, and what we are, as a church, is an embodiment of this looking forward, anticipating the day when all will be made new and drawn into fullness with God.
So our gospel reading today balances this idea of certainty - that the story is not finished, with a sense of uncertainty - the not knowing, the mystery, the ungraspable and undefinable questions of ‘when’ and ‘how’. Jesus is tantalisingly unclear in the examples he gives in this passage, and all we are really left with is the knowledge that we have no idea when things will come to an end or what that will look like. We have no idea of when we will be fully united with God and made new in Christ. So we find ourselves asked to live in limbo. We are called to dwell in uncertainty.
But uncertainty goes hand in hand with hope.
In the Narnia books which come after The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children are never sure how much time will have passed in Narnia when they are able to return. They live their lives in anticipation of being there once again, but never sure of when they will find their way or what age it will be there when they do. They live in uncertainty, but also in hope. In one exchange between Aslan and Lucy, the great lion says ““Do not look sad. We shall meet soon again." and Lucy asks, "what do you call soon?" "I call all times soon" said Aslan.”
The reuniting will happen, for Lucy and for us, so it must always be expected, but we live in the waiting period on the way.
This is why we celebrate Advent every year, and why every year Advent always starts with a gospel reading that looks ahead to Jesus’ second coming. We begin the church year with anticipation of where we are headed, before we turn our gaze to the tenderness of God among us wrapped in the fragile form of a newborn.
This sense of two times, of a then and now, a future and remembrance, is born out in our worship as well. For even though in our liturgy of the table we hear the words every week ‘do this for the remembrance of me’, we are not only recalling the past. What we are actually doing, as we break bread and share wine together, is enacting the great feast of heaven.
In the Eucharist, we prepare for what is to come - to be celebrating with God forever. The eucharist is like a small taster, a glimpse, a tantalising peek through the keyhole of what it will be like after the second coming. Our liturgical celebration of the feast whispers to our soul of the wholeness and fulfilment we long for. As we draw together in one body, united by Christ’s body, we model to the world, and to each other, what it will look like when all is made new and all peoples are gathered into God’s kingdom of love.
Advent anticipation is what the Eucharist is. Liturgy is not just a harkening back, not just a wishful remembering of times gone by, but instead it is the enactment of the world’s promised future in Christ. What we do is a powerful statement of what we believe is coming, what we are waiting for. So in response to our advent times, we witness through our faith to the things we believe are of God - we witness to love, peace, joy, abundance, the gathering of the beloved from all walks of life, together into the light of Christ.
The church is already living and will continue to live in the turning of the ages, in the strange place on both sides of the wardrobe where we are both now and then, past and future, both waiting and hope. Our task, this advent season, is to embody the excitement, the expectation, the surety of God’s promise, as we live in faithful discipleship while we await, with bated breath, the birth of Christ among us on a starry joy-filled night.
Amen.
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