Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The First Sunday of Advent, 1^st of December, 2024

Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

The church’s time is different from the world’s time. A couple of Sundays ago I talked about the difference between chronos time and kairos time: chronos being time that can be measured in hours and days and years; kairos being the unmeasurable right time, the perfect moment. To remind us that church time is different, today is the beginning of the church year. In the world around us, the year is ending; we have entered its last month. For Christians, a new year is beginning. The world around us is preparing for Christmas, whether that Christmas is a purely secular event of family and feasting or includes the remembrance of the birth of Jesus millennia ago. But we are starting Advent and looking forward to the Parousia, the Second Coming, the fulfilment of the messianic age that comes in kairos time.

Every year people like me moan and complain that the outside world has started preparing for Christmas too early. The Council put up decorations, the shops started trying to sell us things, butchers and fishmongers told us to order now for Christmas feasts before December had even started. Rather than being quite so Scrooge-like, grumpy people like me should perhaps look at the time and effort the secular world puts into preparing for Christmas, and put the same time and effort into preparing for the Parousia. That is what today’s Bible readings advise.

Today’s reading from the prophecies of Jeremiah comes from what is called his ‘Small Book of Comfort’. The Book of Jeremiah explores the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the worst tragedy to face the people of Israel since their captivity in Egypt. In his earliest prophecies Jeremiah had warned of the coming judgement, begging Israel to repent of its wrongdoing: ‘O my poor people, put on sackcloth, and roll in ashes; make mourning as for an only child, most bitter lamentation: for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us.’ (Jeremiah 6:28). Through Jeremiah the Lord had promised his people, ‘if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors for ever and ever.’ (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

The people had not changed their ways, and so the threatened punishment arrived: ‘Their widows became more numerous than the sand of the seas; I have brought against the mothers of youths a destroyer at noonday; I have made anguish and terror fall upon her suddenly’. (Jeremiah 15:8) But, as we hear today, exile and destruction do not have the final word. The people are to look to the future, ‘in those days and at that time’. Jerusalem has been sacked and its Temple destroyed, but through Jeremiah the Lord promises that the day will come when Jerusalem is no longer called Jerusalem but ‘The Lord is our righteousness,’ and there will be justice and righteousness in the land. To a people in exile, full of anger and despair, God offers a future.

Listening to the promise of the righteous Branch who will spring up from the line of David on this first Sunday of Advent we read this prophecy as referring to the birth of Jesus, but the future that Jeremiah describes is still ahead of us. We are in the same position as the people to whom Jeremiah prophesied, in exile, surrounded by violence and danger, and to us Jeremiah offers the same hope: the world for which we are longing, the world of justice and righteousness, will come.

When will it come? Jesus tells us that we will not be able to miss it; that ‘there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.’ To reinforce his message, Jesus tells his disciples the parable of the fig tree, calling on us to have the eyes to see the signs, and the good sense to be ready. The point of Jesus’ apocalyptic warnings is not to inspire Christians to calculate a date for an apocalypse and then simply await it, although throughout history there have been sects that have done just that. (So far, obviously, all of them have been wrong.) Jesus is advising us how we are to live in the meantime.

Luke records Jesus as saying: ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.’ It could be that by ‘this generation’ Jesus was referring to those who opposed him, those he called ‘you faithless and perverse generation’ (Luke 9:41) and of whom he said, ‘this generation is an evil generation’. (Luke 11.29) Certainly there have always been and will always be those who oppose the message of the gospel. But Jesus could have meant ‘this generation’ to refer to ‘the people alive now,’ in which case by the time Luke wrote this story down his community would have known that Jesus’ saying was untrue in any literal sense. But for each of us in our generation there will come a last day, a day when we have no tomorrow. There will be for each of us a day when our world will end. When Jesus warns us to, ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly,’ we know that that day will come – none of us is immortal. The tech billionaires may be trying to extend their lives, as they want to leave this planet and its problems behind, but in the same way that we know that God gave us this one precious planet to care for, we know that God has given us one life of limited duration. One day, each of us will ‘stand before the Son of Man’.

The season of Advent seeks to prepare us for that day. In what many commentators agree is his very first letter, the Apostle Paul speaks to the Thessalonians of ‘the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’. We may not notice it, because we are so used to it, but in this short passage Paul uses the word ‘Lord’ to refer to Jesus three times. In one of the earliest, if not the earliest, writings of the New Testament Paul makes it clear that for Christians the ‘Lord’ is not Caesar. The Feast of Christ the King or the Reign of Christ may only have been introduced in 1925, as I said last week, but recognition of Jesus’ rule was there from the beginning. As citizens of the kingdom of heaven, those for whom Jesus is Lord, Paul tells us we are to increase and abound in love for one another and for all. The kingdom of God is both a dream and a task, both not yet and near, among us now. Living as we do ‘between the time of Christ’s death and resurrection and the final consummation of all things which Christ will bring,’ in the words of the Basis of Union, we are to live lovingly and with hope, knowing that in kairos time God’s justice and righteousness will prevail.

I want to end with some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on today’s gospel passage and its use in Advent. He writes of Jesus’ command ‘stand up and raise your heads’:

Advent creates people, new people. We too are supposed to become new people in Advent. Look up, you whose gaze is fixed on this earth, who are spellbound by the little events and changes on the face of the earth. Look up to these words, you who have turned away from heaven disappointed. Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who are heavy and who are crying over the fact that the earth has gracelessly torn us away. Look up, you who, burdened with guilt, cannot lift your eyes. Look up, your redemption is drawing near. Something different from what you see daily will happen. Just be aware, be watchful, wait another short moment. Wait and something quite new will break over you: God will come.[1]

Stand up and raise your heads, people of God, because the days are surely coming when the Lord will execute justice and righteousness in the land. No matter the horrors we may see in the world around us, we can hold on to hope and live with love because the kingdom of God is near. Amen.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, translated by O. C. Dean Jr, compiled and edited by Jana Riess, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), pp. 40-1.