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I’d like to start by wishing all of you a very happy New Year because today is the start of the Church’s new year.

Look around you .  What do you see ? The vestments and liturgical hangings have all changed to the same colour as we use for lent. Purple, no longer red.  Purple the colour of reflection.

Advent is a strange time in the Church’s calendar.

Like Lent it is a time when Christians are called to reflect on the life and death issues that dominate our lives. Thus it is a fairly sober time when we ask ourselves

what am I doing here on earth?

and Where am I with God?

Sounds rather like the themes we explored in the 40 Days of Purpose.

Advent is a time when we reflect on the true nature of our earthly existence.

This is makes us somewhat counter culture.

As the rest of  society frenetically prepares to purchase and party all the way to Christmas and beyond.

However, there it is, this  is the time when we anticipate the coming of the Messiah and when we reflect on our own fallen state, which made it so necessary for Jesus to come and save us.

So the Lectionary readings in this season ask hard questions of us and challenge us and take us to places that are way out of our comfort zones.

The Gospel reading for today forms part of a long discourse that fills two chapters in Matthew, in which Jesus makes some very challenging statements and predictions about end times or the end of the world as we know it.

Just as an aside, the context in which this passage occurs is as follows:

Jesus had been teaching in the Temple and just as he was leaving the disciples called his attention to the beauty of the architecture of the temple. This was the second temple to be built on the hill known as Zion. It was started in 20 BCE and completed in AD 64. It had marble pillars and contained gold and silver and precious stones and was by all accounts a very impressive building which symbolised the heart of the Jewish faith.

So…..as Jesus looks at this icon of the Judaism he makes some startling predictions about the destruction of the temple and the city of Jerusalem.

There is a word for this and it is ‘Apocalypse’. It comes from the Greek, meaning ‘revelation’.  It is a word that is applied to prophetic visions, and in this passage Jesus is prophesying. He is prophesying about

• the fall of Jerusalem,
• the persecution of his followers
• and his second coming or  the second advent.

Let’s take a few moments to look at the Stained glass window at the entrance to the church.  What do you see?

This window is a dramatically beautiful picture of the second advent the second coming of Christ.

Today’s bible text has been interpreted in a number of ways.

For example:

It is often used to warn Christians to be ready for the second coming of Jesus which was promised in many passages in the New Testament

For example in Acts 1:11 we read:

(“This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”)

and in Thessalonians 4:16 we read:

 (For  the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command  and with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God and the dead in Christ will rise first.”)

The vision is that one day when God remakes the entire world, Jesus himself will take centre stage and he will appear again. This will happen at some time unknown to anyone here on earth and is known as the Parousia, the royal appearing of Jesus himself.

The second way this text has been interpreted is as a warning to Christians to be ready for their own deaths.

Our time here on earth is finite and not to put too finer point on it each day we draw closer to the time when we will die.

I know this is not a popular thing to say, and you are probably thinking how depressing is this, but I am afraid that it is true and too often we live in denial of this reality. The reality that the only thing that is certain on this earth is that we will die.

Advertising and Social niceties try to protect us from this truth, but we ignore the fact that we each of us must exit from the life we know, at our own peril.

It is imperative that we live our lives within the framework of this fact  or we will fail to keep our priorities straight and we will lose our  focus  on our  Purpose in life.

For it is true that :

“What we weave in time we wear in eternity”.

The Bible tells us that we must always be in a state of readiness for that great step into the unknown whenever God calls us.

That’s one of the reasons why keeping short accounts with God, through regular worship, prayer, reading of Scripture, self-examination and Christian obedience, and short accounts with the people in our lives matters as much as it does.

So clearly, one can read the passage in either or both of these ways:

·        as a warning and a reminder of the second coming and the end of the age

or

·        as a warning and a reminder for Christians to be always in a state of readiness for their own deaths.

But there is a third way of reading this passage.

It is also useful to ask ourselves how this passage might have been heard and received by Matthew’s first audience way back somewhere around AD 50 -70.

At the time of the early Christian church the whole of the Middle East and Palestine in particular was in great crisis. People were anticipating political upheaval which finally came in August of AD 70 when Jerusalem and the temple were sacked by the Roman general Titus.

This happened a mere 40 years after Jesus had died .

At the start of Matthew  chapter 24, the disciples had asked Jesus three questions:

·        When would the Temple be destroyed?

·        What would be the sign of Jesus’ coming?

 and

• When would the end of the world as we know it take place?

Jesus answered the first question by predicting that the temple would be destroyed within one generation i.e. about 40 years and in this of course he was quite right.

Titus overthrew the city and left the 10^th Legion behind to demolish the Temple.  It was set on fire, the remains demolished and the land on which it was built was ploughed up.  At the time that this happened, Jerusalem was packed with Passover visitors all of whom were to suffer greatly during the sacking of the city.

According to Jewish historian Josephus, there were many false Messiahs and prophets at this time, who led the people out into the wilderness.  One such company of 6000 Jews died there.

So this was as Jesus had predicted a time of great trial and tribulation.

To the second and third question as to when Jesus would return in glory and when the world as we know it would end, his reply was quite simple:

‘no one knows’.

Only God knows the timing of the second coming and the end of the world.

The early followers of Jesus believed that Jesus would return very soon, but here in the book of Matthew, Jesus reminds them and us, that only God knows when the world will end and when Jesus will come again.

However, Jesus points out that there are some things he can share with us about the second coming and the end of the age.

• He states that life will go on as normal right up to the last minute, in the same way as it did when God determined to end the world with a great flood.
• Also as the moment is unknown, Jesus predicts that the perousia will come as a surprise. For this reason, Jesus urges his disciples to remain awake and alert, to keep their house in order and to keep short account with God.

Although as we have seen, that the warning to be alert and ready was primarily directed to the political situation of dire emergency in the first century after Jesus’ death and resurrection and before his words about the Temple came true,

Jesus words ring true through subsequent centuries and into our own century today also.

A cursory reading of the newspapers or simply watching the news on TV will very quickly reveal that we too live in turbulent and dangerous times today.

One only has to look at the  situation in Iraq or Israel or the Darfor Region in the Sudan to see that the world situation is  immensely disturbing.

The increase in international terrorism and the phenomenon of suicide bombers are chilling reminders that the world is not a place of certainty and it is often not a safe place either.

And on a personal level one might well ask:

Who knows what will happen to you or me next week or  next year, or even after we leave this church?

We can all testify in some way or another to the unpredictability and fragility of our earthly existence.

Scripture tells us that it is up to each church, each individual Christian to answer the question:

Are you ready?

Are you awake?

This does not mean that we live in a state of fear or anxiety always worrying what will happen next.

No, it means that we commit to living our lives so that we come under the protection of a loving and caring God.

Jesus says I am the way the truth and the life.

We step out and faithfully follow Jesus who will lead us into the light.

Jesus calls us to a life of readiness and shows us how to live such a life also.

Let’s look at the text.

Here we notice two things in Jesus’ example of Noah building the ark. 

• Noah will have prepared himself in the calm weather for the flood and when it came he was ready. Thus Noah lived in faith. Jesus calls us to do the same.
• Also Noah prepared himself in faithful obedience according to God’s instructions. No matter how odd or counter culture it was to build a boat in a desert, Noah built the ark because God instructed him to. Again Jesus calls us to do the same and to live our lives in obedience to God’s will for us.

Noah was on the right track, but the rest of mankind were lost in their eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage and so, when the flood came, they were caught completely unawares.

What are the modern equivalents for us today?

What are the things that preoccupy us that might distract us from living our lives in a state of readiness?

Perhaps it is the over-commitment to jobs and work; mortgages and materialism and consumerism that can often crowd God, and the God stuff, out  of our lives. Ironically, this tendency is especially prevalent in the lead up to Christmas.

These verses from Scripture  are a warning

• never to become so immersed in time, that we forget eternity;
• Never to let our concern with worldly affairs so completely distract us that we forget that  there is a God
• and that the issues of life and death are in God’s hands
• and that whenever God’s call comes, it must find us ready.

To be ready means that we must do a spring clean on our lives, put our houses in order; address the issues that are damaging our relationships with God and with others.

For each of us those issue might be different but they need to be addressed just the same.

So to summarise:

Advent is the start of the Church calendar. It is the start of a new journey, the start of a new year, but just like Lent, it also a period that the church sets aside for people to be reflective; to take stock of their lives and priorities.

It is a time to prepare oneself not only to remember the first coming of Jesus which we call the first Advent, but also to prepare ourselves for the 2^nd coming, the Perousia.

In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus is clear about the instruction that we too must keep short account with God and our neighbour for “you do not know what day or hour our Lord will come”.