Sermons

First Sunday in Advent
Sunday 3 December at 10am

Lesley Ashton
Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

Those of you who use particular train stations or the underground on a regular basis will be familiar with the announcement 'Mind the gap'. A warning to travellers that the space between the train and the platform, should be negotiated with care. The sort of care that ensures that one's feet move from one set of firm ground to another, to fall into the gap would be dangerous, embarrassing and probably harmful.

In other walks of life we tend to be people who like our feet to be firmly on the ground both literally and metaphorically. We like to know where we are going and how we are going to get there, we do all we can to preserve our sense of well being and to plan for our futures. We get worried when we hear of pension plans collapsing or of house prices rising or falling steeply. We believe that we can control our destiny if we are wise, prudent and forward thinking..

Yet as Christians we are people who are called to live within the gap, the gap between the already and the not yet. We live with faith in a God who has intervened in our lives and in our hearts and in history but with the understanding that there is more to come, that there are end times ahead.

Throughout history we have been a people who have experienced God's grace, our lives have been changed as individuals and as communities. We have been pointed in new directions and urged by the Holy Spirit to be and become people who live out the values of God's kingdom by following in the footsteps of Christ. Yet we are also aware that we wait with eager anticipation for that day when Christ will rule and when God's kingdom will be known by all.

Jesus spoke of the signs that will precede the coming of the Son of Man, the day when we know that our full salvation is very near. He was of course speaking from the context of his own time, near to the time of his death and just before he ate the meal with his disciples in the upper room. The religious and political establishment are unnerved by his teachings, he has just received a triumphant welcome into the city, there is a mood of unrest and there are murmurings of different understandings of God. Christ must have been aware of heightened tensions all around him when he spoke of the future. He was possibly aware or becoming aware that he was placed in the gap between the people and God, the gap that on the cross he would at last be bridge for all time.

In this day and age we live with different tensions, different sorts of violence, different fears compared to the time of Christ, but they are real nevertheless.

Many of those things we have taken for granted are beginning to crumble. War is no longer fought on the battlefield but in our own cities, we cannot predict how or when it will happen or who will be affected.

We experience violence in the form of words in the media, within images in magazines or on the screen and they begin to be taken for granted.

The violence of abuse has moved to the internet becoming even more hidden and less able to be interrupted. We used to be afraid to walk the street in the dark and we can now fear for our safety in broad daylight.

We also have experience of gaps.

Many will know and have experienced the gap that comes with bereavement or with illness or with dementia. When all is changed from the rock to shifting sand. When there is a movement from the known into the unknown, living in the wilderness, unsure of what is to come.

On a more global level there are many who through circumstance are forced to live in the space between 'no longer and not yet'. The many millions who live with HIV and AIDs, those who seek asylum, those whose lives are affected by war, by conflict, by hunger or homelessness. They live in that gap between one sort of firm ground and another ground yet to be found or experienced.

We like to think we are in control, that we are on that firm ground, that we have minded the gap, that we have put in place all that will keep us safe but there is both warning and prophecy in the words of Christ. It is through and beyond the despair and the fear, that the Son of Man will come in his power and glory.

We are warned not to put our faith in the powers in space, the rulers, the politicians, the financiers, nor in our possessions or insurances.

And I suspect we can even use our faith as an insurance policy, for there is the Pharisee in each of us, proud and boastful, convinced our way is the right or only way, confident that we have behaved or believed better than others.

This is the first Sunday in Advent, the beginning of the Church year, the time we wait with expectation and hope for the coming of Christ.

We wait to remember his birth and we also wait for his coming again in glory.

We wait in the gap between the two, preparing to receive again that which we already know of him, the child come amongst us, God in human form, that which we celebrate each Christmas and that which is still a mystery and known only to God. We have one foot placed strongly in our faith with the other stretched out into the unknown, the already and the not yet.

The passage from Jeremiah reminds us that we are people who have hope and that hope is founded on what we already know of the love of God in our lives and our hearts. And because we know whom we have believed we also have hope for the future.
Out hope is founded on Christ and we can look with eager anticipation towards that which will come.

We may be unsettled by the tensions and fear in society, we may have to live with difficult situations or we may have to address our own pride and arrogance but we can live in this gap because we know that our liberation is near.

Christ tells us to lift up our heads, to be alert, there is a sense of anticipation, of watching and of waiting for the kingdom of God to come in all its glory.

And until it does we have a message of hope to share in a world. In a world whose hope often seems to be focused on winning the lottery, of having more and more possessions, of dominating or excluding those who are other than ourselves.

But we have a hope that is based on Christ whose holiness and obedience bought for us our salvation, our peace, our reconciliation and our joy. He stood and was present in the gap and showed us the way of hope, the way back to God.

So like Him may we too stand in the gap between the world and God, following his example may we let go of all that assures us of our standing in the world and with Christ may we hold hope for each other, for all people and for God,.

For our God whose hope is in us. Amen

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay