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The First Sunday of Advent, 2024Luke 21:25-38Realign Your Hearts to GodWhat is Advent about?Friends, today we come to the first Sunday of Advent. I have to be honest and say that Advent my favourite of the liturgical seasons. To begin with, it marks the beginning of the liturgical year. In this six-month period, we start by longing for the coming of Christ amongst us and then celebrate his birth at Christmas. We see the global proliferation of the Good Tidings foreshadowed in the arrival of the Magi at Epiphanytide. At length, we come to the penitential season of Lent and the darkness of Holy Week before we celebrate Christ’s victorious bursting from the tomb, his ascension into heaven, and the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the birthday of the Church at Pentecost.But there is something about Advent that is special: the sense of longing and anticipation, conveyed in colour and hymnody, the tingling sense that, one day soon, the Lord Jesus will appear amongst us out of the darkness of the darkest night. Friends, try, by whatever means you can, to capture for yourselves some of the wonder of this Advent season.How to approach Luke 21?And this exhortation leads me to say something about the Gospel text we have just heard, Luke 21, verses 25-38. Why does the Church select this text for this Sunday - this text, which is all about apocalyptic signs in the heavens, distress among nations, people fainting with fear and foreboding and so on?Firstly, we must remember that in Advent we look forward not only to the First Coming of Christ as a babe at Bethlehem, but also to his Second Coming at the end of history.This observation helps us to understand the selection of this text. It is selected because it is taken to be about the Second Coming of Christ. I say it is “taken to be about the second coming” because this passage in context is clearly also about the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which would take place, in accordance with Christ’s words, in 70AD at the hands of the Romans. But it is legitimate, in my view, to see that, within Christ’s prediction about the destruction of the Temple, he is also referring to an event farther away in history, to the very end, to a vision of the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And it is this coming, this Second Advent, that the Church bids us turn our attention today.The Meaning of HistoryI’d like then to make a couple of observation about Christ’s words. The first thing to note is that both the words of Christ and the content of the liturgical season of Advent remind us that our lives and all of history are moving in a particular direction, towards the second coming of Jesus, when he will return, as the Apostles’ Creed says, to judge the quick and the dead.As such, the Christian view does not accept that history is a random series of chance occurrences. That it is, as Macbeth says, ‘a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing’. Rather, we say that history has a particular shape and purpose, and that we, as individuals can find a place within that shape and purpose. And, as a result of this, our own lives can take on meaning and direction: We are going somewhere. We are for something.This contrasts with various post-modern and existentialist philosophies that say that meaning and purpose only exist insofar as we create them ourselves. That meaning and purpose do not exist in the world out there, that meaning and purpose can only come from within ourselves.To the contrary, we say that we are born into the midst of a universe laden within meaning, purpose, and real direction. Rather than rejecting these things in terror and disgust, we embrace them as a gift: How good and pleasant it is that we do not find ourselves simply thrown into the midst of a meaningless and empty universe, but that we are invited by God to play our part within the great story of history!Have No FearAnd this leads to my second observation, which is that the return of Christ is fundamenta