It’s fitting that this coming Sunday, November 27, is both an ending and a beginning for our congregation. We come to the end of our reading of the New Testament together in the Covenant Community Bible Experience, and begin a new church year with the first Sunday in Advent.
The first Sunday in Advent, which we typically describe as a season of preparation for Christmas, focuses on the second Advent, the return of Christ. Thus it calls us to turn from looking backward at the first Advent of Jesus at Christmas to peering forward toward what we usually calling “the last things” or even “the end of the world.” However in his poem “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot says,
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
So the beginning of Advent is a reminder that God’s complete purpose really starts when the “end” has come, when our salvation is completed by the second coming of Jesus. C. S. Lewis expresses much the same thought in The Last Battle:
And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
This Advent my sermons will focus on the theme that much of those endings which are beginnings, the first and second Advent, was and is unexpected, glorious divine surprises as God reveals Himself to us in Jesus. The texts this week from Revelation 22:8-21 and Matthew 24:36-44 deal with some of that surprise. Revelation 22:11 suggests that people will continue on their paths, whether good or evil, only to be surprised by the “reward” Jesus brings in verse 12, “to repay according to everyone’s work.” And of course Jesus says in Matthew 24:44, “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Advent, then, is not just about preparing to walk down the familiar path of an old and comforting story, but readiness for the unexpected implications of that story in our lives. Let us live constantly aware that Jesus may call us to changes we did not expect and that the surprises of His grace always await us.