Do You Know That Jesus is On His Way?

12-02-2018Weekly Reflection

Did you realize that when you awoke this morning, you opened your eyes to a brand!new year? That’s right! When the sun’s light kissed your face and quickened your pulse and drew you into this second day of December, you breathed the air of a new year of worship? Why? Because today is the first day, the first Sunday of a new year of Christian worship. The season of Advent marks the beginning of the Church year. So, I say Happy New year!

“Advent” means “coming,” and it is celebrated during the four weeks immediately preceding Christmas in a spirit of anticipation and waiting for the Messiah. The Church invites us to be aware that just as Christ grew and matured in Mary’s womb, Christ is growing and maturing in our hearts. Advent looks back to the first coming of Christ!to his birth at Bethlehem; and second, Advent looks to the future to some unknown time when Christ will come again. The coming of the Lord, both at his birth in a stable and his return on clouds of glory, is the nexus, the center, the heart of this season of worship to which God awakened us this morning.

This season decorated with promise invites us to live with joyful certainty. Jeremiah, Paul, and our Lord with one voice tell us there will be a Day when days are no more. From Jeremiah’s “there is coming a day” to our Lord’s saying: “there will be signs” of warning to Paul glimpsing “the coming day of the Lord”, certainty punctuates all our texts and dozens more just like them.

Like a chef preparing a feast for guests or a builder laying a solid foundation for a building or a surgeon prepping a patient for an operation, the coming of the Lord is a certainty chiseled into the rock of faith. Ours is not the work of calling God down to earth, nor is it the hope of willing God back, but rather the joyful expectation that God’s Kingdom is surely coming “with power and great glory.”

Isn’t this what we pray each time we say together the “our Father"? do we pray, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Why, every time we gather for worship, we look to God with wide!eyed expectation that God one day!!when days are no more!!will be the sum, the entirety,the “all” if you please, of all that has or will ever be. We of faith worship the One who came at Bethlehem, died on Calvary’s cross, rose in victory over death, and will come again to receive us unto himself. This season is a season of joyful certainty.

Paul tells us our best preparation is to busy ourselves being the people of God. While the rest of humanity goes about its business of labor and struggle, commerce and governance, God’s people are busy advocating justice and offering grace. As God’s people, we see every day as an opportunity fortransformative renewal, knowing that grace can triumph over retribution and mercy can win over hostility. The Christian story refuses to use a clenched fist to right a wrong, using instead an open hand to offer reconciliation. Christianity is ultimately counter!cultural because all our weapons areforged in the fire of God’s unrelenting love.

Rather than fretting over the coming of the Lord, our readings tell us we can celebrate God’s coming. That celebration, infused with high expectation, sends us into the world as God’s presence, God’s ambassadors, God’s people of hope.

So, as we begin this season of advent, let us listen to what God is saying to us across the centuries of time. May the love and mercy of God, the grace and promise of faith, that this season brings, become the substance of who we are and how we live to the greater glory of the One who comes at Bethlehem and on the clouds of heaven.

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