So: happy new year! Happy new ecclesiastical year. Today, Advent Sunday, is the day when the cycle of the church year begins again. We move into a new year of the lectionary, which these days means that we also change the main gospel for the year: our focus in year C will be on the gospel of Luke. 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.
People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Luke The world of the early Christians was falling apart. The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed; the young Christian movement was struggling to survive and to define itself. The sense of impending doom also resonates with the situation of our own world today. But I wonder if every generation does not feel that? Preparing this sermon I looked back at some of the sermons on this passage available — thanks to the internet — from three years ago, six years ago, nine years ago.
It was striking just how similar their context was to now: war and unrest in the Middle East, famine in Africa, a sense of deep foreboding about the fate of the world. And surely we will all be able to think of times when things looked even worse. How did it feel to read this passage in the midst of the first world war, or the second world war, or indeed any of the uncertain periods which pervade history? In some ways I find it quite encouraging to look back and recognise the extraordinary consistency of the sense that the world is in a sense of crisis and imminent doom: yet here we still are, years, decades, centuries or even millennia later.
There is something profoundly ordinary about these apocalyptic words although that does not mean that we should not take them very seriously. This is in part what Luke is doing in our gospel reading, as the American Lutheran preacher David Lose points out.
Luke here is less focused than, for example, Mark on the prospect that the world is about to come to an end. That is our Advent hope: that in the darkest, most difficult times, redemption is drawing near. Our task is to live in that expectation and to proclaim that redemption. And so the question for us is how we live in that hope, how we inhabit this liminal time and space of already but not yet, the time in which we proclaim that Christ has already come into the world, while waiting for his coming.
