First Sunday of Advent

First Sunday of Advent - Year C

For the past twenty years, as our family has grown, we've piled into the car around this time of year and taken a drive around our suburb. We head to the same streets each year - the ones that we know will have Christmas lights - and one particular house that transforms a large pine tree growing in its front yard into a giant Christmas tree, complete with a four-foot light up star a good thirty feet in the air. This, and my wife administering my in-laws Secret Santa draw are the hallmarks that Christmas is coming.

And every year, this last four weeks before Christmas passes so quickly and so slowly at the same time. Time seems to do funny things once the tree goes up - and it is no different in the life of the Church.

This Sunday marks the beginning of Advent which the Church describes as a time of joyful anticipation. But reading Luke's Gospel it seems that Jesus didn't get the memo. Instead, he issues a warning about nations in agony and men dying from fear.

'Watch yourselves,' he says, 'Or your hearts will be coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness, and the cares of life.'

But Advent is also a funny thing. Yes, we are anticipating the birth Jesus, and the fulfilment of God's promise that he would come among us to lead us into holiness. But at the same time, we are living in anticipation of the end of the kind of suffering that Jesus describes. The time that we profess in the Apostles creed when he will come to judge the living and the dead. And these two Advent realities are tangled together like so many Christmas lights.

Over the next four weeks though, as we live out the hope that Jeremiah speaks of in the first reading, and the generous love that Paul encourages us to, we can untangle ourselves and be among those that Jesus describes as standing with confidence when he does come again.

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