I love the Advent Season - and perhaps the first Sunday is my favourite of all. The lighting of the candle of hope is always very moving for me. It is a time to focus forward, to feel and to know the promise of Advent. By looking toward the future, perhaps we are able to slough off the fetters of the past, and the anxieties of the present.
Reverend Johnston's sermon was entitled "Preparation!" The exclamation point is his, not mine, and I believe to emphasize that the preparing to be ready is as important as the being ready. This is surely comforting - knowing that for all our faults and shortcomings, the work of preparation is our supreme task as Christians.
Following the text of Matthew 24, Reverend Johnston challenged us to change our perspective - to be future-centred, not past-focused. The future described in this passage in Matthew is the Rapture - the Second Coming of Lord Jesus Christ on Earth. It is this future event for which we light the candle of hope, and toward which we look.
The troubling part of this passage for me is the 50% of the people who are not taken. "Are they unworthy?", I think. "Am I unworthy?", I selfishly think. Of course, there is no certain answer to these questions, but there is hope. And there is the work of preparation which may make us more ready to be taken into the glory of the Rapture. This work, clearly, is more difficult than the promise in buying an "R4R" mousepad or t-shirt! But it is the work of preparing our hearts and lives to be acceptable and pleasing to God, and in living out the promise and the hope of the Advent Season that we come to be closer to Christ.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
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I have that difficulty too, Geoffrey, with the 50% not taken. I think what I appreciate most about faith is that we're able to question these difficulties, yet still believe. The truth is bigger than my own not understanding.
ReplyDeleteI was glad for the reminder this week that Advent is about preparing - not just for Christmas, but for Christ's return.
(And R4R? That's funny, I should get a t-shirt.)
M.
At The Open Table Sunday evening, we held a short Advent Service of Light following the meal. In it we included some stations for reflection, and one of them was a poem printed next to a picture (it's actually a piece of graffiti art by Banksy, called Balloon Girl). The poem is entitled "Embryo of Hope" and it begins with the words, "there are few things more fragile than an embryo of hope". It ends:
ReplyDelete"what faith does it take to imagine
an embryo of hope
being brought to life here?
what 'yes' are you able to say
for it to be born in our world?"
What struck me on Sunday was that hope is such a remarkable challenge in this world (I nearly wrote "this age" but really, our problems are no greater than they were a millenium ago, two millenia ago: they're just different). Throughout the liturgical year we are told "Be joyful! Jesus has saved you! Be hopeful and glad!" and it's just so very hard to do sometimes. I struggle with hope. I struggle with not only knowing it intellectually but knowing it implicitly, of living it in my actions and words and thoughts, of incarnating that hope.
I think what I find so helpful about Advent and Christmas is that Christ comes as a child. A child! A baby. And I can understand that. I can easily equate the near-impossibility of hope in our being ransomed and redeemed with the near-impossibility Mary and Joseph must have felt at hearing Jesus' birth foretold. Every pregnancy is almost incredible: how can this be?! How can I suddenly be two people (or three, or four...)contained in one adult body?!
I struggle with understanding that impossible, incredible, unfathomable hope of life everlasting in Jesus Christ. But the hope of a child to be born? That I can grasp with a little more clarity. And so I start with that hope, and my thought and my faith grow and evolve to eventually conceive of the hope for our eternal souls we know through our Saviour.
Darlene