THINGS TO COME

A SERMON FOR ADVENT SUNDAY

As there was no Mass last week, we didn’t get to hear the Gospel for what was the Last Sunday after Pentecost.  It was all about the end of the world.  End of the Church’s Year, end of the world.  Seems appropriate, right?  And yet today, this Advent Sunday, the first Sunday of the Church’s annual liturgical cycle, the Gospel is once again all about the end of the world.  And that somehow strikes us as not quite so appropriate as it was last week.

But of course, the Church would never present us with something that is inappropriate.  Believe it or not, the end of the world is as suitable for Advent Sunday as it was for the Last Sunday after Pentecost.  When we think about the things of God, we are no longer in the realm of nature with its causes and effects, its beginnings and its endings.  We are in the world of the eternal, the mystical everlasting present, of God who had no cause—he was caused by nothing, he just always was.  He had no beginning and will have no end, the Alpha and the Omega.  So the liturgical cycle begins and ends with the same thoughts of the world’s end, last week seen through the eyes of dread, and this week through the eyes of hope.

Unlike God, we, his creatures, had a beginning.  We were made, out of dust, and thanks to the cooperation of our parents, we were born into this world.  One day we will die, we will be buried, and we will return to the dust from which we were made.  And yet, thanks to the love that God has for us, another very special Man was born into the world, a man who would enable us to share God’s eternity with him.  Unlike us, he was not made out of dust, nor, for that matter, was he made out of anything else.  This Man was himself God.  He was born to be the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord, and on this Advent Sunday we begin the period of preparation for his birth.  

Today, our thoughts turn in anticipation, to the wondrous approach of our Redemption.  The Redeemer was a man like us, born through the cooperation of his “parents,”—his Father, who was the Most High and Almighty God, and his mother, a simple maiden from a little village in Galilee, one of the most far-flung provinces of the Roman Empire.  But when God asked this humble girl to be his bride, she was without hesitation in her reply.  And that most mystical of conceptions occurred, when the Holy Ghost overshadowed her, and the Son of God was made incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  

This Child, like us, was born to die.  And die he did, most savagely, most brutally, at the hands of the men he had come to redeem.   And like us he was buried.  Crucified, dead, and buried.  But unlike us he did not return to dust, because he was never made of dust in the first place.  Instead, he rose from the dead, signaling to us that although our bodies may one day lie a-mouldering in the grave, our souls will rise to judgment and the eternal life we hope for.  And when heaven and earth shall pass away, our bodies too will rise again to join our souls in their everlasting reward.

These then, are our Advent thoughts this Sunday morning.  Thoughts of hope and anticipation at the coming of our Redeemer, thoughts of hope and anticipation at the Redemption he brings to our souls, thoughts of hope and anticipation at the final coming of Christ to judge the quick and the dead, the resurrection of the body and the live everlasting.  Amen.