Advent – from the Latin – adventus ‘to come’ is a paradox and our readings (and hymns) display this:

Oh come oh come and
Lord Jesus Christ you have come to us

After all, the cosmic ending has not come, and Jesus has come and gone!

The readings challenge us to understand that Christ in us is constantly happening and remind us that endings and beginnings are all around us and as we absorb the news that the assisted dying bill was passed on Friday it is sobering to be reminded that life, death, beginnings endings are always with us.

That our moment in history is just that ‘a moment’.

How do we reconcile ‘our moment’ to all the other historic contexts in which these readings have been heard?

Think of all the other the other generations who wondered is ours the end time? (plague, nuclear war)

We have no control over the end of the world any more than we have control over the end of our own lives Perhaps until now if the bill goes through to legislation)…

but we do have influence over the life of the planet and the life of our own bodies, through our choices we can hasten the end of each
Examples

When cosmic things look awful, as frankly the do right now, here in the midst of it all we are called to hope.

Even under the worst circumstances, even when we can’t find the way out, even when enemies surround us, Advent calls us to look for God.
To watch and wait. Advent invites us into a wonderfully irrational commitment to a better future.

While also cosmic existential worries……but I suspect most of us are very firmly and rationally thinking about the much more mundane, practical and personal worries of Advent!

Yesterday evening my ‘worry’ was ‘do I have all the dried fruit needed to make the Christmas cake?’

The answer is all but the candied peel!

And this afternoon I will open my very dog-eared recipe book which has my mothers photocopied recipe from The Times stuck into it and start to bake for Christmas.

That is my reality, I wonder what your reality is.

Whatever it is I will hazard a guess that we are all to a greater or lesser extent thinking about Christmas and our to do list.

In our collect we pray that we may be ready to greet the Lord our Saviour; I suspect most of us are thinking much more of the mere mortals that we may or may not be looking forward to greeting on Christmas Day!

While making ready for their arrival, the baby Jesus is a bit of a sideshow and so how do we mitigate the very real concerns of our daily lives to make time for Jesus?

The scriptures during Advent do not promise us smooth pathways, they do not promise us unmitigated happiness, but they do give recipes (old, worn and much used like my mother’s photocopy) for watching and waiting together building our hope and building our resilience. We hear from prophets, we hear of portents, we hear of stars and angels.

So, what will be your recipe for the journey through Advent 2024?
In the December newsletter I mention the mantra I developed from reading about the mystics, those who take a deep contemplative approach to faith and scripture. In the mystic tradition rather than worrying about the end of the world, we are encouraged us to live in the moment, to………………….

Pay attention
Be astonished
Share your astonishment

Believe it or not Advent is a season for stillness, for quiet, for discernment. It is a season of active waiting, straining forward, listening, being attentive to the things around us, to the ‘signs’, to be still and hear and feel again our deepest yearnings for a saviour, our deep connection to the earth and to each other.

Those who were confirmed a year ago will since then have had ups and downs and sometimes will have lost the thread, but the constant presence of God is not diminished by our inconstancy, it remains forever.

The “worries” in Luke is a translation of ‘merimna’ which means trivial and fleeting; unworthy of our focus or brain-time!

Jesus was condemning preoccupations with the trivial as a form of idolatry, because they tempt us into pushing our energy and attention on to things that do not deserve them. At heart, this is the emotional equivalent of drunkenness: to use material goods or temporal objects of desire to switch off our capacity to see ourselves — and the world — in godly, righteous, and sober truth.

I don’t think that preparing to bake my Christmas cake is an idolatrous act, but I do need to guard against focusing solely on the ‘trappings’ and to check what it is in my life that is stopping me from being alert to the truly important things in life.

As I gave my attention to these passages rather than my recipe book something jumped off the page at me, the number of words about signs, beginnings and proximity

Sprouting
Spring up
Fear
Foreboding
Drawing near
Near

The scriptures do not promise us smooth pathways, nor can they entitle us to happiness, instead they challenge us to be alert, to look for the signs, the sprouting’s however small in our hearts, in our lives, in the lives of others, in the life of the world for that surely is where we see God coming, that the kingdom is always near.

Whether we were confirmed a year ago or 50 years ago the season of Advent invites us to be alert to the promises we made, to the blessing given and to remember that we are not alone and that we can support each other through this time of watching and waiting.

I invite you to think about how you will

pay attention,
be astonished
and share your astonishment.

Can you take that thought away with you and come back next week to share what you saw when you were alert to the world? And if like me you still have a cake to bake you can do that too!