The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13; Luke 21. 25-36

“…when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’”

Happy New Year!

I haven’t got the calendar wrong by a month. The Church’s year starts now, on Advent Sunday. From now until Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday, we will journey through the great themes of the Christian story. Advent is a season of waiting, and so we start our journey in the waiting room. Advent is a season of humanity waiting through trials and exiles; of the disappointment of trying and failing that is so much a part of all our lives. It is a time which remembers how much of our lives are taken up with waiting, and also how much of the lives of nations and civilisations take place in periods when people see no obvious hope of things getting better on their own, and so wait for God to break into world.

God will indeed break into the world at Christmas, as a tiny baby. Then we will journey with that little baby as He becomes a man, go into the wilderness with Him during Lent, walk through death to resurrection and eternal life with Him during Holy Week, and then to the birth of the Church at Pentecost. After that comes the long season of Ordinary Time, the celebration of Christian life in the everyday, which starts as the summer begins and ends… well it ended yesterday. Today, the cycle repeats, Advent starts again, and we wait with longing for God to break into the world.

A new year for the Church also means a change to our Bible readings on Sundays. Our Sunday readings take us through a different Gospel on each year of a three year cycle – Matthew one year, Mark the next, and then Luke. Readings from John are scattered through all three of the years, especially around major festivals. This year, through to November 2025, most of our readings will come from Luke’s Gospel. There is much to be said about Luke’s unique understanding of Jesus’ life, but for the moment, let me just draw one point out: Luke is a Gospel of journeys

Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a lot of the same material, sometimes being word-for-word the same, but tell the same story from slightly different angles—John is really quite different. That’s why together Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, which sounds like a very difficult term, but synoptic just means seeing with the same eye. All three of them have Jesus’ ministry starting in Galilee, followed by a journey to Jerusalem, which leads to the final crisis of Holy Week. In Matthew and Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is a short interlude relatively late in the story. One thing that makes Luke distinct, however, it that this journey takes up almost half the length of the entire Gospel. That’s one of a number of ways that Luke presents Jesus’ life and our own as a grand journey: in Luke’s stories of Jesus’ birth, for example, the whole world is on the move as a result of a great census called by the Roman Emperor; and the first witnesses to the Resurrection are two men on a journey to Emmaus.

Let’s turn for a few minutes to our first reading, from St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. This was perhaps the earliest part of the New Testament to be written, a letter from St Paul to the church he has established in the great port city of Thessalonica. It shows that Paul is very proud of them. There are plenty of clues in the letter that most, if not all, of the members of this church were Gentiles, and so this might be a letter to people who represented the first real expansion of Christianity beyond the Jewish world. Paul is writing perhaps 17 years after Holy Week, and he wants to encourage this fragile church, so brave in the face of increasing harassment and discrimination.

Yet although the loyalty and love of these Thessalonians fill Paul with joy, they are not yet the completed product. Paul says he is praying that he gets the chance to see them to “restore whatever is lacking in your faith”. He wants them to deepen their love for one another, and for everyone, and he wants them to deepen their holiness. Although they aren’t yet the finished product, they are on a journey towards a deeper love, and a deeper trust in God; they are on a journey that is leading them to heaven.

Although today is the start the Church’s year, and the start of our journey through Luke’s Gospel, the reading we have been set for this morning actually comes from a later part of the story, from Holy Week. Jesus is in the Temple in the last days of His earthly life. His journey is about to take Him to the darkness of the Cross; but here He prophesises that His journey will only be complete when returns in glory.

I know some people don’t like these stark prophesies from the last days of Christ’s earthly life, with their warnings of dire troubles in the future. Yet Luke is the Gospel writer who is most direct in saying that the return of Christ is something to look forward to rather than to be feared. Although: “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world when these things begin to take place”, Jesus here tells his listeners to “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” We only need fear these prophecies if we forget that Jesus Christ didn’t come into the world to redeem us, but to save us.  

The human race is on a journey. The Big Bang started the physical existence of the universe; the first chapter of Genesis paints in theological terms the journey from that moment of creation to the start of human life. Then the story of Adam and Eve tells how we became modern humans – not how we became biologically modern humans, which is a story rightly left to science books, but we became morally modern humans, with the knowledge of good and evil, and our tendency to rebel against what we know to be good.

Most people in our society, including most Christians, firmly believe that humanity is indeed on a journey, but a different one than that painted in the Bible and the Christian tradition. They believe we’re on a very long journey from superstition to enlightenment, from tribalism to tolerance, and that science and learning are going to help us do that. But look around at our world and ask yourself if you’re really sure that’s the case? Technology and knowledge are amplifiers – they give us more power to do good and they also give us more power to do evil. We think of ourselves as being superior to our primitive ancestors, but they never had to contemplate climate change, or nuclear war, or what genetic engineering and artificial intelligence might produce.

As a species, humanity already has power beyond its capacity to use wisely and that gap is growing. It’s in in that context that we need to ask if we’d be better run by Jesus Christ than by Trump, Putin, and Xi, by the listless democratic leaders of this and other European countries and the thuggish autocrats of the Middle East? Of course we would. Pray that you might be lucky enough to see it.

Be alert. You don’t know when your earthly journey will end. But you can trust Jesus Christ when he tells you that your redemption is coming near, and if you trust Him, your journey will end in your redemption into eternal life.

The Advent of a Journey: Sermon Preached on 1^st December 2024 (Advent Sunday)And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen

Top banner image: Friedensreich Hundertwasser, It Hurts to Wait With Love if Love Is Somewhere Else (1971)