'AWAIT THE COMING’
Mark 1.1-8
May the Word of God redeem all our speaking, and may the Wisdom of God inform our listening – that we may hear, pray and act.
Today, Advent Sunday – the Day of Coming - marks the birthday of the church. Today is a new beginning – the start of a month’s preparation, reflection and waiting before we celebrate the coming of light into our world’s darkness, the birth of Jesus Christ the Word of God.
We wait - but waiting can be hard. We are not encouraged to wait by a consumer-led free market in a fast and noisy world. Yet over the past 8 months we have had to get used to waiting – waiting with uncertainty, with anxiety and frustration, grief for some, having to watch our every step … waiting for news of loved ones, waiting for a vaccine … waiting in hope & faith that there is indeed light at the end of a dark tunnel - and that this is not yet another onrushing train heading directly for us!
Today is Sunday – yet we continue to wait in a seemingly endless
Saturday Time. For
Saturday is that longest of days between the dark desolate tragedy of Good
Friday and the liberating light of Easter. This day has to date been a 2,000
year long day – a continuing time between the decisive drama of that first Good
Friday and the final glorious flowering of Easter – that time when God will
come in Christ to bring all things together
through inclusive Judgment and liberating Redemption.
So “All is ready - but not yet”. Meanwhile, in an ever more crisis-torn world, we might well often cry “When O Lord – when – WHEN?” But be sure of this, resolution will come. The time will come when ‘the crooked places shall be made straight’ and ‘justice will roll down like waters’. It will be so in God’s good and right time . But until that time comes, it is our part to wait and act in faith and hope.
Today also signals a time to wake up! “Sleepers wake, a voice is calling”. For, as the writer Franz Kafka said, we humans all, collectively, tend to be ‘sleepwalkers’!
Are we, then, ‘woke’?
Are we awake, alert, aware of what is going on here in our community and in the
world around us? Can we read the signs of the times, can we see and hear
what God, with an ever more urgent voice,
calls out to us through all this? Do we heed these messages of warning,
but also of hope?
We certainly hear warning about peoples, communities and a
world in crisis. Crisis of
pandemic, crisis of economy, of civil war, crisis of countless refugees, of
poverty, crisis of climate emergency.
But we also know hope. Hope as young people spearhead the Black Lives Matter movement. Hope as they come out, speak and act on our pressing need to tackle Global Warming now. Hope through the deep care, compassion and love shown by health workers and so many others during this pandemic – together with so very many unknown, unrecognised acts of kindness. Hope too after the election of Joe Biden, with a promise of some decency, humanity, & truth returning to American life – and who knows, the life of the world!
Above all we keep hope - but also heed warning –
because Jesus Christ comes. He comes
into our life, and so God comes – not just then, 2000 years back, not just at
some future Judgment time, but here and now, every day!
So on this Advent Day we wait, we wake and we watch – and take in, as we must, today’s prophetic Gospel warning of global chaos if we fail to follow the way of justice, mercy and peace. And let there be no doubt that we have our part to play in this work. We begin again today, here and into the future, watching and praying with active hope. Today we affirm that the ever-spreading flood of light and love released in the birth of Jesus means that God-in-Christ does indeed come into our lives daily - and that when the Son of Man, the man Jesus Christ who is God, comes in that final Judgment where all things on earth become at-one with all things heavenly, then all our long and active waiting, and waking, our watching and praying, our working and keeping faith, will surely be vindicated. Because when Christ comes, his Judgment will be thorough, searching and tough – but in the end it will be marked by forgiveness, mercy and liberation.
For this, you see, is the abiding reality and truth, the foundation of all that life - that God is, God is as he is in Jesus, and so there is hope!
What is more, as surely as day follows night, God comes, God is most truly God as he comes in Christ Jesus, and so most comes the divine promise that we, with all those who have opened themselves in penitence to the redemptive forgiveness of God, will be as children of God. And so will we, together with all creation, become free – oh yes, free – free at last – when the time shall most surely come – that final Easter Resurrection time, “the time that will surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the Glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” AMEN
Rev Paul
Fisher
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