The Days Are Surely Coming: A Sermon for 1 Advent

The Rev’d Richard G. Proctor, OA

Christ the King Episcopal Church

1 Advent, Year C: 11.28.21

“The days are surely coming, when I will fulfill the promise,” says the LORD.

This prophecy from the prophet Jeremiah is a prophecy of anticipation.

One of the hallmarks of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the fact that we live in constant tension between looking forward in anticipation and looking back in remembrance. But Advent is the season for looking forward. And that is why I love the season of Advent.

Jeremiah’s prophecy of anticipation can be difficult to believe since so much time has passed since Jesus ascended into heaven with a promise to return to set things right for God’s creation.

And in our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” Since the timing of what Jesus calls a “generation” ended up being longer than one might have imagined, how do we undertake another year of remembering the story of our faith while authentically waiting in hopeful anticipation? Is our waiting in vain?

That is why our cycling back every year to tell the story over again is good for us. It allows us to remember Who it is and what it is we are waiting for. It helps us remember that it is Jesus for whom we are waiting; it is God – not the powers and principalities of this world, and not even well-meaning Christians – “who shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” It helps us remember that the way things presently are will not be the way things end up. As God promised to Jeremiah, God’s promise will be fulfilled.

And that is why I find Advent to be the most theologically rich season of the church year. The scripture lessons, prayers, and hymns of Advent invite us to remember the bigger picture of God’s plan for creation. They remind us that the “here and now” is not all that there is – God’s creation is headed somewhere much more profoundly glorious than this. Through our baptisms, we are grafted into a family and a story that is much bigger than we are by ourselves. We aren’t on an individual spiritual journey seeking meaning for our own lives. We are sojourners as the people of God through whom God chose to enact his faithful righteousness for God’s creation.

I think that is what Paul was always trying to communicate to his churches when he wrote to them. He was always reminding them that their present circumstance was only a glimpse of God’s larger plan for creation. And even though they were Gentiles, through their baptisms, they too were the people of God, and could lay claim to God’s story as God’s people.

But these new Gentile Christians didn’t have the advantage of having grown up with the stories of their spiritual ancestors like Paul and other Jewish converts did. So, Paul had to tell them the story – the larger story of the People of God – so that they might come to understand the broader trajectory and arc of salvation history. And such is the case for us here and now. We also need to be reminded of this larger, ancient, and sacred story of which we are a part.

And nearly two thousand years after Paul was establishing churches among the Gentiles, we Christians continue to proclaim that Christ is going to come again “in a cloud with power and great glory” to set things right with God’s creation. And if you’re like me, this sort of watchful waiting for Christ to come again “any moment now” can seem at times to be unreal. Do we really think it will happen in our lifetimes? If we don’t, are we being unfaithful to our calling as Christians? How do we authentically and faithfully wait without going the route of creepy “End Times” books, prophecies, and the like?  

These sorts of questions are why I love Advent, and why I need Advent. I need to hear from the prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah. They tell the truth and frame it in a way that pulls me beyond my tendency to look barely beyond the end of my nose. They remind us that we are still in an exile of sorts, waiting for things to be sorted out and made right by God. They give us permission to simultaneously lament and hope. They remind us of God’s covenant faithfulness as it relates to God’s larger plan for creation. “The days are surely coming, says Jeremiah, when I will fulfill the promise.” The way that things currently are aren’t the way that things will always be. God’s justice and righteousness will prevail over the darkness of this world as it is. The darkness of this age will not have the last word.

So, the season of Advent invites us to grapple with the much larger picture that seems so far away and perhaps entirely unreal in time and scope. It reminds us that there is a trajectory beyond the here and now and that we are waiting on something to happen and for Jesus to return to set things right once and for all. It reminds us that the whole point of being as Christian isn’t so that we will go to heaven when we die. It is much deeper, wider, and larger than that. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, being a Christian is about being a part of God’s faithful plan for redeeming God’s fallen creation. So, as God’s faithful people, we are called to wait in hopeful expectation for Christ to come again to fulfill God’s promise for God’s people. And more than any other, the season of Advent is the time to focus on this hopeful, expectant waiting.

While we wait, the gift that the Church – the Body of Christ – gives us, is the comfort of knowing that we do not wait alone. Through our baptisms, we are invited through worship, Christian formation, and Christian community to wait in hopeful expectation as Christ’s Body in the world. And while we wait together in faithful community, we call upon God, as our Collect for the Day says, to “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life.”

But we must remember that while we don the armor of light to cast away the works of darkness, it is God who is ultimately in control. It is up to us to humbly, faithfully, and steadfastly respond to God’s call to wait in hopeful expectation for “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” God’s promise for us is that our hopeful, expectant waiting will never be in vain.