The radio and the world have been singing:
‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’
for more than a few weeks now.[i]
In the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
it’s never Christmas, it’s always winter.
These days we’ve done the reverse,
it’s never advent, it’s always Christmas.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
is about the liberation of Narnia from winter,
it’s liberation from the evil rule of the White Witch.
I wonder if we need a liberation from a perpetual Christmas,
a liberation from the powers that seek to make us their disciples
of greed and waste.
It is in this way that the church stubbornly sings an advent song:
‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christ is coming’
and the tune is not such a jaunty one.
The song or prayer can be found in the scriptures.
Paul prays ‘Our Lord, come’ (1 Cor 16.22)
and the Book of Revelation ends, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev 22.20).
This prayer is one of the earliest prayers of the Christian faith,
but is hardly prevalent today.
I wonder if we’ve settled too much,
and Advent comes to make us restless for Jesus once again.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
This is the song of the church.
This is the mystery of our faith,
and the third sentence is just as important as the first two.
The Jesus of Christian faith is also the Jesus of Christian hope.
Salvation is left unfinished if Jesus stays in heaven.
Advent looks forward as well as back.
Too often we spend all our time looking back to the stable,
and not enough looking forward to the coming of Christ again.
We like Christmas
because who doesn’t like a story about a baby.
We’re not sure about the Parousia,
to give the word that is often used to talk about Christ’s coming in glory,
and little wonder in the language Jesus uses to describe it.
One theologian has said ‘we can’t fathom the Second Advent of Jesus Christ,
and we stammer when we try to speak of it.’
One reason for our reluctance to talk about the Parousia
is that only a certain kind of Christian talks about the Parousia
and they tend to talk about it a lot
and often in fairly aggressive ways
and we’re pretty sure we don’t want to be associated with them.
What this means is while for some Christians it’s all they talk about,
for others we never talk about it.
What does it mean to declare ‘Christ will come again’?
It means when God renews the whole universe, Jesus himself will be present,
and not just a bystander, an onlooker,
but as the centre and focus of what God is doing.[ii]
There is no God apart from Jesus.
Jesus is the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven.
‘We do not know what is coming,
but we know who is coming to us.’[iii]
It means we live been a ‘now’ and ‘not yet.’
It means God’s great act of salvation in Christ
is finished but not yet complete.
It means Jesus didn’t come to give us an escape route from the world,
but to the see world renewed,
to see heaven and earth bound together in eternity.
The story of Jesus is not yet finished,
because of the story of creation is not finished,
but the story of creation can only be finished,
with the coming again of Jesus.[iv]
Christ’s coming, his advent in glory,
is the ending of history, the completion of the story.
This ending, this completion is not in any doubt,
the Jesus of Bethlehem, of Galilee, of Calvary, of empty tomb,
has redirected the world towards its end in him,
and that course is fixed.
The future of creation is bound with the future of Jesus.
This is the meaning of hope.
The coming of Christ again means
that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
is undoubtedly universal in scope.
What is clear is that the coming of Christ again
will not be quietly in some insignificant village
to insignificant parents.
It will not be a birth, Christ will not be born a second time,
It is Christ in glory who will come, who will appear,
and every eye will see him.
There will joy and there will be trembling.
The truth of who Christ is will be revealed for all to see.
The universal Lordship of Christ will be made known.
The universal love of Christ will be made known.
The universal end of evil will be made known.
The way and truth of Christ will be made known.
All of history and reality will be illuminated in glorious revelation.[v]
This is the meaning of hope.
The coming of Christ again means
that the church lives in patient hope,
lives with longing.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
We are not a memorial community.
We do come to worship at the shrine of some dead figure.
We do not gather to pay tribute to a fallen hero.
We are not a club are the comfortable and complacent.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
We need Advent to remind us that this is not it,
to remind us that Jesus has not left us,
to remind us that the point of Christianity is to not that we might escape this world,
but that we might wait with faith and hope for the renewal of this world.
What this means is that Advent is most Jewish of Christians seasons.
In Advent we all become Jews once more.[vi]
We await the Messiah.
The promised and anointed one.
We know he’s coming and we know his name,
but we don’t know when he will arrive,
so like the Jews of Babylon we wait and pray and hope.
Isaiah says:
I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem;
They will never be silent day or night.
You who call on the LORD,
Give yourselves no rest,
And give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem
And makes her the praise of the earth (Is 62.6-7).
The task of the church is ‘to remind Christ,
and to keep reminding Christ,
to remind Christ without ceasing’,[vii]
of the world’s need and his promise.
‘Come Lord Jesus!’
‘Your kingdom come!’
At the same time the call of the church is also to tell the world,
and to keep telling the world,
to remind the world without ceasing,
of the good news of Jesus and of his coming.
‘Change your life and believe the good news’
There is a point, an end, to life and it is Jesus.
I started with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Let me end with The Lord of the Rings by C. S. Lewis’ friend Tolkien.[viii]
The third book (and film) in The Lord of the Rings is called
The Return of the King
and so we pick up this theme of a world that is under deep threat
from powers of evil,
that must be freed
and the rightful king will be revealed and enthroned.
Before this coming of the king can take place,
and the restoration of his kingdom,
the people of middle-earth must undergo great tribulations
with patient endurance and steadfast commitment.
The Lord of the Rings is an advent story.
It is waiting for the king,
it is waiting for the final battle to be won,
it tells the story of a company of people – a fellowship –
making their way across the world, like the church.
At the dying of one character he says
he is going to the halls of waiting,
until the world is renewed.
We are in the halls of waiting,
alert, watching, enduring, steadfast,
waiting for the return of the king
and the renewal of the world.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Advent,
it’s beginning to look a lot like Christ is coming.
[i] I was helped with this beginning by Bruce Puckett’s sermon for the First Sunday in Advent at Duke Chapel on Nov 29, 2015.
[ii] N T Wright, Surprised By Hope (SPCK, 2007), p.130.
[iii] Cited in Richard Bauckham & Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology in Contemporary Context (DLT, 1999), p.117.
[iv] Bauckham & Hart, Hope Against Hope, p.118.
[v] James Alison, Raising Abel (SPCK, 2010).
[vi] Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment (DLT, 1994), p9ff.
[vii] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (WJK, 1998), p.222.
[viii] These reflections were helped Fleming Rutledge, The Battle For Middle-Earth (Eerdmans, 2004), p.41-42.
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