November 30 2025 First Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 2.1-5 Psalm 122 Romans 13.9-14 Matthew 24.36-44
Today, we start a new ‘liturgical year’. But we still have 5 weeks of the ‘old year’ to get through before the ‘calendar’ new year starts. And this reminds us that, for Christians, the significance of time takes on a different meaning. Today is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, a time when we commemorate the ‘adventus’ of Jesus – his coming, arrival, or birth into our world. We have been ‘keeping’ this season since the sixth century when it was decided that we should ‘set aside’ 4 weeks before Christmas, beginning as close to St Andrew’s day as possible, to be a period of both looking backwards in history as well as forward to the future.
Christians live with time in the same way as everyone else, but within our ordinary ‘chronos’ of days, weeks, months, and years, we also discern moments of ‘kairos’, God’s special intervention. The birth of Jesus was one such ‘kairos’ moment. Luke tells us ‘when the time came’ Mary gave birth not just to an ordinary boy, but to the ‘king of kings’, the lord of all time and history. And Paul tells us ‘in the fulness of time’ God ‘sent forth his son’ to redeem humanity. And then after 30 years of undocumented, or rarely documented, activity, Jesus burst onto the scene proclaiming that in his own person ‘God’s kairos has come and his kingdom is near. Repent and believe the good news’. In Jesus, creation and the beginning of time met redemption and the fulfilment of time at Bethlehem’s midpoint of human history.
In Advent, Christians celebrate that ordinary night as the most extraordinary juncture in human history. It was on that night that ‘God, in Christ, reconciled the cosmos to Godself’. It was a night when eternity invaded time, when the sacred embraced the profane. In Advent, Christians also look forward in expectation of Christ’s future coming, to that time when God will culminate what was started ‘in the beginning’, and when God’s promise will be fulfilled. For us as believers, history is going somewhere, yet nowhere. Time is proceeding in a very linear fashion, not in a cyclical or random manner. Our readings today contain a whole vocabulary about future time. Yet, all the ordinary words about time and the future are used in such a unique way that they contain new meaning.
Isaiah considers ‘the last days’. Paul writes to believers in Rome about not ‘any day’, but ‘the day’; not just about ‘any hour’, but ‘the hour’. He writes about daytime and nighttime, darkness and light, in metaphorical ways which make a literal pastoral point ‘understand the present time (kairos)’ so that you may live your life in light of that future day. And Matthew’s Jesus tells us to ‘keep watch’, ‘be ready’, for ‘that day or hour’, in other words ‘the end of the age’, as opposed to just ‘any old day’ in which people eat and drink and buy and sell.
Advent connects these two horizons – we celebrate Jesus’ past birth and the expectation of his future coming. We live our daily lives in light of that future day. Paul warns us ‘the kairos is short, the world in its present form is passing away’. And his response to this kairos crises is – do not postpone, do not be distracted, do not become wrapped up in things. The married, the mourning, the exuberant, the buyers, and sellers, should all live ‘as if’ the normal laws of chronos do not apply. The past fulfillment and future foreshortening of God’s kairos means that we can no longer live life as ‘business as usual’. The kairos of God’s future kingdom overturns the chronos of our present time.
Matthew warns us ‘keep awake’ because we do not know when that kairos time will come. And his analogy of God coming as a ‘thief’ in the night is an interesting one to contemplate. How do I relate to a God who is ‘thief’. What in my life needs to be ‘taken’. What am I holding on to that is preventing me from preparing and truly being ready for God to ‘come’. And as Jesus describes one ‘being taken and one left’, which am I. I used to think that the one taken was the faithful person taken ‘to heaven’, I have also been opened to the thought that, in the same way as those in the time of Noah lived in ‘oblivion to what was around them’ and were then taken by the flood with only Noah and his family left, so the one ‘left’ may be the faithful one who was ‘watchful’, and ‘prepared’ for the ‘second coming’.
Advent calls us to ‘make room’ for Christ in our lives. To ‘prepare space’ for the wonderful, vibrant life that is coming. So, we need to examine our lives and discern ‘do I have room’. Have I so filled my life with ‘things’ that there is no room for God. What have I ‘kept’ in my life that Jesus needs to ‘steal’. Perhaps my self-righteousness, maybe my fears, my reluctance to forgive, or even my disinterest.
We all know that for the hard of hearing – we raise our voices, for the visually impaired – we draw or write using large figures or letters, and this is exactly what Jesus is doing in this prophetic wake-up call. He is shouting, he is drawing dramatic figures, he is using every rhetorical device he can to make us ‘sit up and take notice’. ‘Be on guard’ he tells his disciples, ‘be alert’, ‘stand up and raise your heads’. Look.
These are not the soothing, sugar coated invitations we like to find as we shop for gifts, decorate Christmas trees, and sing carols. But Advent begins in the dark. It is not a season for the faint of heart. Advent offers us ‘hard-edged’ invitations, not pretty, colourful greeting cards. But these invitations are essential and life-giving. They help us prepare for the birth that is almost here. They help us stay alert. They help us receive Jesus in all the shocking and scandalous ways God chooses to appear.
Let us wake up. May we be prepared. Let us prepare for the thief to come and take what is not needed so that we can be ready for the life and the gift that is coming.