Today is Advent 1, the beginning of the season of Advent and the starting point of the new ecclesiastical year. What makes today different from the secular New Year’s Day is that there is little of the typical "out with the old, in with the new."
If anything, our Christian Advent is a promise of more of the same. We plan to read the same lessons and to say the same prayers in this new year that we did in the year past, and for almost two thousand years before that. Even our New Year’s resolutions, found in this morning’s excerpt from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, are the same old resolutions that Christians have made every year since that glorious year so long ago when our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven.
So are we in a rut? The secular world (which means literally, "the world of this age") would say we lack imagination and our religious observances are boring because we have no plans to change what we believe and what we hope for from year to year.
Advent promises us otherwise. The Latin Adventus means simply a coming, but the Church uses it to refer to two comings of the same Divine Person: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. On Advent Sunday we look back to the pinnacle of history, as far as the purposes leading to the conception and birth of the Son of God, made man by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. When Jesus Christ shed his Blood on the Cross and offered his life before his Father’s throne, all sins were redeemed - completely bought and paid for. The victory of God in Christ over the world, the flesh, and the devil was accomplished once and for all, and all anybody had to do, then, now, or a thousand years from now to share in that victory, is to confess his sins and to submit to Jesus Christ his Son.
That was the First Coming of Jesus Christ. We lived under God’s judgment, and the terms of the salvation of mankind were made as clear as they could possibly be. All the history that has followed that First Coming, however great or small, ties up all the loose ends like the end of a novel.
The Second Coming represents no change in plans on the part of God, no surprise ending, no new thing at all, with the exception that Jesus Christ will announce the end of human struggles and the beginning of eternal blessedness for the resurrected and redeemed. This is the true "world without end." This is the eternal reality; a changeless God whose rule cannot be overturned.
In our prayer book, words like “day-spring” are used to describe Advent. Day-spring means the dawn, and the first coming of Jesus Christ was the dawn of salvation upon the world. The Second Coming isn’t the sunset part of the story, but the second dawn that puts an end to the darkness of sin and of Satan’s legions.
Today in church, as we lit the candle of hope, we were assured of the same sunrise, the Light of Christ in the manger, and the Light of the world when he comes again. Our calendar reminds us every year of the reality and trustworthiness of the promise of light in Advent. The Light has come. The Light will come again. And when that light comes, we must belong to it or endure an eternal darkness. With our new Church year, we begin again the lessons, prayers, and discipline that will prepare us for light eternal.
Be walking in the light,
Bishop Ian
If anything, our Christian Advent is a promise of more of the same. We plan to read the same lessons and to say the same prayers in this new year that we did in the year past, and for almost two thousand years before that. Even our New Year’s resolutions, found in this morning’s excerpt from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, are the same old resolutions that Christians have made every year since that glorious year so long ago when our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven.
So are we in a rut? The secular world (which means literally, "the world of this age") would say we lack imagination and our religious observances are boring because we have no plans to change what we believe and what we hope for from year to year.
Advent promises us otherwise. The Latin Adventus means simply a coming, but the Church uses it to refer to two comings of the same Divine Person: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. On Advent Sunday we look back to the pinnacle of history, as far as the purposes leading to the conception and birth of the Son of God, made man by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. When Jesus Christ shed his Blood on the Cross and offered his life before his Father’s throne, all sins were redeemed - completely bought and paid for. The victory of God in Christ over the world, the flesh, and the devil was accomplished once and for all, and all anybody had to do, then, now, or a thousand years from now to share in that victory, is to confess his sins and to submit to Jesus Christ his Son.
That was the First Coming of Jesus Christ. We lived under God’s judgment, and the terms of the salvation of mankind were made as clear as they could possibly be. All the history that has followed that First Coming, however great or small, ties up all the loose ends like the end of a novel.
The Second Coming represents no change in plans on the part of God, no surprise ending, no new thing at all, with the exception that Jesus Christ will announce the end of human struggles and the beginning of eternal blessedness for the resurrected and redeemed. This is the true "world without end." This is the eternal reality; a changeless God whose rule cannot be overturned.
In our prayer book, words like “day-spring” are used to describe Advent. Day-spring means the dawn, and the first coming of Jesus Christ was the dawn of salvation upon the world. The Second Coming isn’t the sunset part of the story, but the second dawn that puts an end to the darkness of sin and of Satan’s legions.
Today in church, as we lit the candle of hope, we were assured of the same sunrise, the Light of Christ in the manger, and the Light of the world when he comes again. Our calendar reminds us every year of the reality and trustworthiness of the promise of light in Advent. The Light has come. The Light will come again. And when that light comes, we must belong to it or endure an eternal darkness. With our new Church year, we begin again the lessons, prayers, and discipline that will prepare us for light eternal.
Be walking in the light,
Bishop Ian
