Second Sunday of Advent (Fr. Robinson)

A woman went into a post office to buy some stamps for her Christmas cards. “What denomination do you want?” asked the lady at the counter. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Has it come to this?  I suppose you’d better give me 20 Catholic and 20 Presbyterian stamps, then.”
 
 As we all begin to make preparations for Christmas, with gift purchasing, and the sending of cards, and some of us even beginning to decorate for Christmas—here we are in the Church being very counter-culture in a very visible way. You don’t see any Christmas trees, no festive lights. There are fewer candles on the altar. The color is purple, suggesting penitence. There are a few decorations: the Advent wreath—a plain circle with four candles, only one of which is lit today; a stable with animals; the picture behind the Lady Chapel altar is covered with a purple cloth; a picture of the Annunciation is on the altar; and three outdoor wreaths with purple bows are on the red doors. For throughout the Church this is not the Christmas season. It’s the season of Advent, a season of waiting.
 
 And Advent is not just a season of preparation to celebrate the birthday of our Lord. It’s a season that focuses, first and foremost, on preparation to receive him when he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. It’s a season devoted to contemplation of last things, the traditional themes being death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Advent is a time for examination of our lives and confession, for resetting our priorities, and for special acts of devotion and self-denial. It is as if to say that when we are prepared to meet the Lord when he comes again in glory, then we will also be prepared to celebrate rightly the annual observance of his first coming as the Babe in Bethlehem.
 
 With the exception of the first reading from Jeremiah, the readings appointed for today, as well as the Collect of the Day, point us in this direction, toward the Last Judgment.
 
 St. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, urges them to be abounding in love toward one another and to all people, and live holy lives so that when Jesus comes again he may find them blameless before God.
 
In Luke we have the familiar warning that “there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the seas and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.”  If you were living last month in Sarasota, Florida, where Linda and I are from, when both of the hurricanes struck, you might have thought this biblical prophecy was coming true!  A dear friend actually died from fear during Helene.
 
With what’s going on in the Holy Land and in Ukraine and Russia, just to name a couple of nations, it might seem to some that that’s enough distress among nations to qualify as a sign of the end time. In this prophecy of things to come, Jesus tells his disciples that the Son of Man is coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
 
The earliest Christians truly believed Jesus might come at any moment. Early in his ministry St. Paul clearly believed that Jesus would come again before Paul died. Every day was Advent in the early Church.
 
t took some 40 years after the resurrection for the first account of the Gospel to be written. Have you ever wondered why there weren’t disciples cranking out best sellers immediately after the resurrection?  They believed there was no need for a written record, probably that there wouldn’t be enough time to get one written, before the Second Coming; and time would be better spent in getting out the word. And so they had no problem living each day as if it would be their last opportunity to get their lives in order and to proclaim the message of salvation.
 
Some 2000 years have passed. The Son of man still has not returned, yet the readings in this season remind us that the promise has been made. Jesus shall indeed come again. That coming may still be a thousand years away or it may be today. And that coming will be a time of final judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.
 
The idea of judgment is based on the presupposition that there is such a thing as right and wrong, that there is such a thing as sin, that God intends for his people to have a certain standard of life, and that there is a way to break out of the cycle of sin. That “way” is Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life.
 
Is there any doubt that the world is just as much in need of a Savior now as it was 2000 years ago?  Watch any news report on any given day and you’ll find many examples of our world’s need of the Savior. They’re filled with examples of war, violent crime, reports of divorces, stories of neglected and abused children. I don’t agree with William Bennett on some key issues, but I think he got it right in an article published years ago titled “Redeeming our Time,” when he stated that “there are other signs of social decay that do not so easily lend themselves to quantitative analysis….For there is a coarseness, a callousness, a cynicism, a banality, and a vulgarity to our time.
 
There is a sense in our time that there is no such thing as sin, and if there is a God, he doesn’t much care about how we live our lives and we certainly are not going to be held accountable.
 
Advent, all four weeks of it, reminds us that the world still needs the Savior. It reminds us that our thoughts, words, and deeds do have eternal significance, and we will be held accountable. It calls us to get our priorities straight and to be the sign to the world of all of these things. Yet our preparation for the Second Coming, as well as our preparation for Christmas, is a joyful preparation, in a quiet sort of way, for we know the Savior and we want to make him known. There is a solution to the problems that face us as individuals and as a society, and that solution is the One whose birth will be celebrated this Christmas Eve.
 
I invite you, during this beautiful season of Advent, truly to make it a time of preparation—to examine your lives and make your confession, to reset your priorities, and to make special acts of devotion and self-denial, all to the end that when our Lord Jesus comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.