Cathedral Sermons
Advent Sunday 29 November 2009
Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21:25-36
I had a call from a TV3 Nightline reporter a few weeks ago wanting a comment from me for a story he was doing on shopping mall Christmas decorations going up early. I was a little cautious, as the story had the potential to take the proverbial out of the Church, but when I discovered that his view was that early November was way too early I decided to risk it.
It seems Westfield malls are the main protagonists. They start putting their decorations up just after Labour Weekend as it takes the contractor 27 days to work around all their malls and they want to be sure it is all done by the end of November. There are twelve thousands tons of decorations to shift, including 300,000 baubles. You will be relieved to know however that their spokesperson assured viewers that you will not hear even a bar of “Snoopy’s Christmas” until it’s December. Watch out though, that’s this week.
So a sound bite for such a story? It was a tricky one because I didn’t just want to do the party pooper thing as people might expect (though interestingly the general consensus of people interviewed on the street was that it was too early). I wanted to talk about the importance of Advent that precedes the great festival of Christmas and how Christian people can find more depth of meaning in Christmas by having kept Advent; how to look back in thanksgiving for the coming of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth makes more sense if we have first looked forward in a focussed way to Christ’s coming again.
But those kinds of ideas don’t fit easily into a television sound bite, and in spite of giving it my best shot, they used the 10 seconds of vaguely party pooper stuff instead. Hopefully I will have a better chance with this 10 minute sound bite and add something to our worship today which seeks to set us off on this journey again, looking ahead during this month of Advent so that when we come to Christmas itself we can look back with more meaning.
Looking ahead is essentially what Advent is about. It is about dreaming dreams of what God’s world could yet be, and of what the quality of human relationships within it could yet be. It is about adopting a hopeful attitude to life, born not of simple human optimism, but of trust in what God has promised and shown us in Christ.
The Judeo-Christian tradition has always held this sense of future hope as an essential part of what faith is about. In the Genesis story that explains the origins of sin and its impact in destructive ways in this world, God’s words of judgement are accompanied by words of hope. “He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” are words spoken to the serpent as the personification of evil and are usually interpreted as being a reference to the hope of the future Messiah who will vanquish evil from the world.
That Messianic hope is woven right through the Hebrew Scriptures. We read it today from Jeremiah’s prophecies. Jeremiah’s ministry as a prophet occurred during the period leading up to the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile of many Jews in Babylon. Jeremiah foresaw these events and sought to warn the leaders and people of Jerusalem about what would occur. Along with what are at times despairing words of judgement from the prophet, there are also interwoven words of great hope about the future. That future in part is to do with the return of the people to Jerusalem after their Exile, but it is a much bigger future than that. Jeremiah looks to the time when God’s Messiah will establish an everlasting kingdom, one founded in the ideal Davidic line, through which the righteousness of God (another way for expressing salvation) will take effect in the world. It is the same with all the prophets. They warn of disaster, they speak God’s Word in times of national struggle and uncertainty, but hope is always present, and it is a hope that emerges from faith in a God who can and will intervene in the affairs of the world to establish a reign of peace and justice and so restore well being and harmony.
Christians believe that this hope for the future has found its fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Christ. In Jesus, born of David’s line, the righteous reign of God has broken into the world. So at Christmas we look back to that as we recall the birth of Jesus and so celebrate the birth of hope for the world, the reign of the Prince of Peace begun on earth.
Yet we know that all is still not as it should be. We will sing in the offertory hymn: “When comes the promised time, that war shall be no more, and lust, oppression, crime, shall flee thy face before?” We sing it in concert with people of every age who have longed for and worked for a world transformed in that way.
What are the dreams which we might dream of such a world?
One in which aircraft no longer crash into mountain sides or sea.
One in which there are no more acts of terror and bombs which destroy buildings and trains and lives.
One in which creation itself is no longer subject to the pollution of human wastefulness and carelessness.
A world then where cancers and sickness no longer steal our loved ones from us too young. A world where the quality of human relationships is marked by such respect that no one person will wrong another through greed or the hatred of bigotry.
Jesus taught the disciples that in the meantime, they were not to faint from fear in the face of all these things that continue as part of human existence. In spite of the reign of justice and peace which he established in this world, Jesus understood that these things would continue to beset humanity. The hope which Jesus has given us is no longer that of a far off promise. That aspect still remains as we anticipate the return of Christ and the fulfilment of the reign which has begun. But the hope of that reign is a reality among us now. What we long for and dream of about the future of this planet has been made real among us now in its beginnings as we give our lives over to the reign of Christ.
Passages of Scripture like that from today’s gospel have often been used as some means for measuring the temporal closeness of the return of Christ, with people saying “Look - this and this and this is happening right now just as the Bible said it would”. The reality of course is that every generation of human history can point to such events. Which I think is just the point of Jesus’ words. These things will continue in the world and in the face of them those who know the redemption of Christ need not fear, but be full of hope. For we know that Christ who has established God’s reign among us will return to complete that work of transformation of the whole of creation and of all human life.
This looking ahead with hope should be one of the marks of Christian faith that we carry with us always. The hope which the presence of Christ and the promise of God offers us should be the source of our determination to work to see that reign of justice and peace become more real. These weeks of Advent bring those things to fresh focus for us as we prepare to celebrate at Christmas the coming of Christ who has planted them among us.
We look to the future in this hope, so that we might look to the past with thanksgiving.