First Sunday of Advent 2024

James opens another Advent season with the Church's urgent and beautiful invitation: stay awake, keep watch, for the one who came and the one who is coming is already closer than we think.

Transcript

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And so may I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. So here we are. Welcome to Advent. The first Sunday in Advent. This is probably my favorite season of the church calendar. I know for many it's our favorite season. There are lots of reasons why that might be the case. Let me offer this morning some of my reasons. It of course has the best music, but there are some really, I think, interesting theological reasons why this is the best season in the church calendar. But let me start by reminding you, and this is an annual reminder, that Advent is not pre-Christmas. We're not here for this month simply prepping for Christmas. That time of fuzzy feelings. Advent is a season for the wide-eyed prophet, pointing to the destruction and the remaking of all things. It's very hard to hold that in your mind in the month of December. Because, of course, we're going to spend this month listening to gorgeous Christmas music. Michael Buble will be going on in the car momentarily, watching those fun Christmas movies that we all love, enjoying the feeling, the buzz, and the energy of communities getting together. And I don't want to alarm anyone, but this is also a month of really hard work. You have only 25 days until the grandchildren turn up. Not to put the fear of God into anyone, but it is the case. There's the stress of buying presents, of booking transport plans, and then having to have backup plans because inevitably the trains will fail. You've only got 25 days now to write your Christmas cards and to buy all the wrapping paper that you need and to go to Iceland to get everything that you possibly can wrapped in puff pastry. So only 25 days left until the big day. And in the hustle and bustle of this month, it's very easy to think that that is the point of Advent. But then you hear a reading like we just read in our gospel reading, and you think, what on earth is going on? Has the lectionary made some sort of mistake? Why are we talking about this in the month of Christmas wrapping paper? It's because Advent is the month of for wide-eyed prophets, declaring the destruction and the remaking of all things. And is worth, just as a general rule, when you find yourself reading a passage like this that feels a little bit strange, the first question you should ask is, What has just come before? What's the context in which Jesus is saying this stuff? Is that going to help shed light on what we're trying to read? Well, it just so happens that in the first half of Luke 21, the first 24 verses that we didn't read, Jesus is declaring and predicting the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. You have to imagine yourself there in the ancient world, looking at this beautiful grand building, significantly bigger than this cathedral, and built in the ancient world, huge big stones, tons on tons of stone upon stone, and Jesus stands in front of it and says, I tell you, not one stone will stay on top of the other very soon. And his prediction came to pass. In 70 AD, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. And this prediction was likely 40 years earlier. The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem was a world-altering act on a scale with 9-11. So significant a religious building in a religious city like Jerusalem, the destruction of that did feel like the end of the world for the people who were there. And so Jesus, having predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, goes on in our passage to describe essentially three things, one on top of the other. He describes the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem, and then he starts talking about the culmination of his own ministry when he is hung on a cross. And this cross is also the moment at which he is crowned king. And so we have this cross that becomes also an enthronement. And he starts simultaneously predicting his second coming, which Christians many years later, looking back on this passage, start to discern. So you have these three things all sat one on top of the other in this very complex passage. But I think we can agree, it is cosmic-sized, it's cataclysmic. He's describing apocalyptic events where we see the world differently, sometime maybe for the first time. And that is the point of Advent, my friends. It's a season for wide-eyed prophets describing the destruction and the remaking of all things. But that's the challenge of being a Christian in the 21st century, holding the truth of this season while also enjoying, of course, enjoying all the other things that are part of this season. So, with that as our context, I'd like us to dig in a little closer to what Jesus says, because our passage, our gospel reading this morning, is broken into three sections, and helpfully the typesetter has set them out so that you can see the three sections as the three paragraphs in your bulletin. First, Jesus tells us there will be signs of this comic. Then he says, you can actually discern the signs yourself because you understand the warp and weft of the world in which we live, the seasons in which we live. And then finally, he says, it doesn't matter how good you get at discerning the signs, you just have to stay on your guard and be alert because the Son of Man will come unexpectedly. So we're going to talk about signs this morning. The signs that Jesus points to. What is a sign? Well, I'd like to imagine you to imagine yourself in a forest, walking through a forest that you've got a little bit late. It's been a few hours since breakfast, and you're not entirely sure where you are. You're back, your phone has run out of battery, and you're starting to get a little bit panicked. And then you stumble in this forest to a clearing, and in the center of a clearing is a wooden post with arrows pointing in different directions. We know what that's called, don't we? It's a sign, a signpost. And the sign does certain things. Firstly, it alerts you to its presence. It says, Here I am in the middle of this forest, look at me. And then as soon as you've looked at it, it points you away from itself to something greater than itself. Because no one stands in the middle of the forest looking at the sign. The sign is not the point. The sign is there to point to something greater. The signs in the Gospels are just like that: symbols, moments, images, things, the point to something greater than themselves that says, Look at me, now look away from thee to the Creator, to the one who is coming on the clouds in glory. And then Jesus goes on to tell a parable about the fig tree. And he says, You are good at this already. You know how to read signs, you know how to understand what's coming and how to predict what's going to happen next. Just look at the fig tree. You know when the where the figs are going to be in season because the fig tree produces flowers, it produces leaves, and then the leaves tell you that the time is coming for summer, and then you can expect to eat figs. No one goes to a fig tree in winter when there aren't any leaves on the tree and say, Where are all the figs? Because we know how these things work. Or you might want to think about this, Freyus. Red sky at night, shepherds delight. When the clouds are in the west of the sky, as the sun is setting, the clouds are lit up by the sunset, and the red sky at night means that the clouds have already passed, which means the shepherds can delight because they know it's not going to rain tonight. Red sky at morning, shepherds warning. When the clouds are in the east, because of the way the wind blows, we know that the crowd, clouds are going to be overhead, and so the warning is that it might rain on the shepherds if they're not careful. And so we know when we orient ourselves in the world how to read signs and understand what's coming. We do the same to use a modern analogy in the stock market. Day after day, there are people saying, oh, the Dow Jones is down, that means we need to do this. There's a sign over here, these stocks are up, that means we need to do this. Or political polsters. The why do political posters manage to retain their jobs? They don't seem very good at predicting the results of elections at all. But they stay in their job because we want them to be able to. We need them to be able to. Tell us the results of the elections. What are the signs? How are people moving in one direction or another? Tell us the signs, help us to read the signs that are coming. We live in a world surrounded by signposts pointing us in one direction or the next. And we use them to understand and orient ourselves in the world in which we live. And Jesus seems to just take this as red. This is the way of the world. Look out into the world and read the signs. But I wonder if what I've been saying for the last few minutes or so sounds strange in your ears. Because as a church, generally speaking, in the West, this is not the way we talk. We don't say, look out into the world and see what's going on. We say things like this: close your eyes and pray. God will put the answer in your heart. Look inside yourself. Don't look out there where the unholy things happen. Look inside yourself and you will discover what you need to know. Just pray and God will reveal it to you. But that's not what Jesus says. Jesus says something quite different. So why are we expecting Jesus to say, look inside ourselves? But we hear him say, look out at the world. I suspect it's because of a sensibility in our Christian life that started 2,000 years ago with a guy called Tertullian. I'm a big fan of Tertullian, generally speaking. He gave a lot to the church. He was writing between 155 and 240 AD, and he said this. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? And when he said that, he was pointing to uh Athens as the symbol of philosophy, of rational thought, of study and scientific experimentation and of the pagan world. And when he pointed to Jerusalem, he's talking about revelation and faith and faithfulness to God. He says, What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? We don't need rational thought or science or study or the natural world. That's all Athens. We just need Jerusalem, faithfulness to God, revelation, prayer, and scripture. And this idea, Athens versus Jerusalem, sits in the Christian church to this day. It reveals itself in this idea that science and faith conflict with one another. All this month, the cathedral has been running a science and faith conference, and one of the themes of that conference has been the conflict thesis that science and faith are a conflict with one another. And the point I've been trying to make, and the other speakers of the conference have been trying to make, is that there is no conflict between science and faith. There is dialogue between two mutually benefiting uh types of thought, types of understanding. It might also impact the way we think about the moon in our midst. I had emails this month saying things like this. I don't like the moon being in the cathedral. Because why is the cathedral, a holy building, involved in something about the world out there like the moon? When I read emails like that, I can understand what the person is saying and why they might be uncomfortable about this uh moon in our midst. But what I hear underneath the question is this conflict thesis, the idea that Athens and Jerusalem would have nothing to talk to one another. And the worry for me with that idea is that it impacts all of our lives. When we think about our choristers who sing in our choir, what is the relationship for them? Folks, you might want to ask yourself this. What is the relationship between all the schoolwork that they do from Monday to Sunday, Monday to Friday, and the singing that they do on a Sunday morning? What is the relationship? Is there any relationship between Athens and Jerusalem? Or with your work? What is the relationship between the work that you do and the way you worship on a Sunday? What is the relationship between votes in Parliament and receiving communion together on a Sunday morning? Is there any relationship between the two? Is there any relationship between Athens and Jerusalem? That is the question that lies behind our reading of this scripture. And why it might seem strange to us that Jesus doesn't say there is a man, there is a son of man coming, and he will be revealed to you privately in your heart. What he says is there is a son of man coming, and you can find out more about that by looking at the natural world, by discovering more about what's going on, by looking at the signs. It's my hope that these signs would be for us a way of looking at and pointing to the God who created everything. These exhibitions that we're putting on in the cathedral can be a creative and provocative way of looking at the work of God in the world. Here's what I saw time and time again this last month with the Moon Project. Because we've had easily 10 to 12,000 people just in the daytime alone come through these doors to look at the moon and to visit the cathedral. And again and again, they would stand at the west doors and they would look up in wonder and amazement, jaw-dropped, couldn't believe what they were looking at. And they would stand there for a minute or two. And then they would start to notice the rest of the building. And they would start to see the little breadcrumbs that our team has been placing around the building. The signage that we have, the work that the education team have done in providing incredible resources for our children. These little breadcrumbs that we've been dropping, inviting people, drawing them out to discover more. And so they look at the moon and then they look beyond the moon to something greater. And so we've had, I think, something in the region of 4,000 candles lit in the last month. The Virgers had to go out and buy more. They practically ran out at one point in the month. All the way through this month, there have been people sitting in chapels to pray, to light a candle, to take a moment to pray and to enjoy the silence and to think, maybe for the first time in a Christian building, about their life and their faith, or maybe their lack of faith. This is the way signs work. They say, look at me and then look beyond me to something greater than me. And that's my great excitement about having the moon here and all that it offers us as a way of doing ministry and mission in Blackburn and Lancashire. And I hope we do it again. So, Advent, our third passage. Jesus says in the first paragraph, look at the signs. In the second paragraph, you know how to do this, you understand how signs work in the natural world, and then things take a turn in the third section. Jesus goes on to say, but you'll never know enough. Be alert, be on your guard. Things will still happen unexpectedly. Look and work hard, discerning the times that we're in, understanding the culture that you're a part of. Observe, work, do the work of science and rational thought and philosophy, and then ultimately return to Jerusalem. There is an excess in God that we cannot overcome. And so in Advent, I think we are reminded that the Christian story cannot be domesticated. It's about the breaking in of God's kingdom into our world, and as a result, shifting cosmic forces that are outside of our control. And we're invited to look for and to notice the signs of this kingdom breaking through, to watch for those signs and to discern the times that we're in, in which we live. This cathedral is a wonderful place to do that because we have these signs in our very building, and we get to invite other people to look at those signs and then look beyond them to something greater. They inform our faith. But then ultimately, we must stay alert. We will never know enough. King Jesus could arrive at any time. In the end, all we can say is Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.