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Advent 1 - Year A – GS 2025    The Four Last Things

Advent is a time of loitering – well that’s what the Rector told me a few weeks ago when I asked his thoughts about Advent. A time of loitering. But loitering is hanging about with no real purpose or aim – unless that is, it’s loitering with intent. And loitering with intent used to be a criminal offence connected with vagrancy.

I’m sure Dean wasn’t encouraging either aimlessness or criminality during Advent. But he certainly got me thinking. 

We begin Advent, and the first day of the Church’s New Year, with Isaiah’s great vision—all nations streaming to the mountain of the Lord, swords hammered into ploughshares, spears reshaped into pruning hooks. It’s a beautiful picture, a picture of peace, justice and hope. Beautiful and at the same time it hurts when we realise hundreds and hundreds of years later his vision is still not a reality, and we humans have yet to respond to the call to live in the light of the Lord. 

St Paul tells the Roman Christians that they know the time and it’s the moment for them to wake from sleep. Wake up. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Get up, change the way you live, the day is near.

What day? 

The day when the Son of Man returns – and it’s near. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us that the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah: people eating, drinking, marrying—life going on as usual—until suddenly everything changes. Be awake, be ready for the Son of Man is coming when you least expect him.

During the early Christian centuries this was the focus of Christians and the Church, and its particular focus during Advent. They believed firmly that the coming of Christ in glory was near and could happen at any time and they had to prepare for it. The time when all will be made new, a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem. When all shall gather at the mountain of the Lord.

The Advent of the early Christians had four themes: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. Not cheerful, certainly not the stuff of mincemeat pies and mulled wine and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. They are known as the Four Last Things and contemplating them was central to their Christian tradition. 

I’ve rarely contemplated the Four Last Things and never preached about them, but I’m determined not to loiter. 

We could fall into the trap of thinking about these in terms that have been generally received wisdom for a very long time – in the sentimentality of the secular world and the complacency of those Christians who might describe themselves as ‘saved’, but these ideas really don’t have their origin in the Hebrew and New Testament Scriptures. 

Death – come on we don’t want to think of death as we decorate our trees and roast our turkeys. But wait. What does the New Testament say about death? St Paul is absolutely clear: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4) 

Walk in newness of life. Paul reminds us that we have died to sin - and St Peter that having died to sin we live to righteousness. New life has begun!

Judgement 

Jesus teaching on judgement was clear and specific. The sheep will be separated from the goats. The judgement will be made on how they treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. This judgement is about justice. What have they done to bring justice to those trampled down by inequality, cruelty, intolerance? Jesus tells us that it is not for us to judge others, but to follow him in bringing justice and if we face persecution or ridicule for doing so, we, like the poor, will be blessed. Judgement is about righteousness, not the kind of self-righteousness Burns describes in Holy Willie’s Prayer – or the Pharisee who proudly follows law and ritual to the letter - but the simple righteousness that’s about putting wrongs right. 

The sheep, who were righteous in that sense went to eternal life. The goats who did not, were sent to eternal punishment. 

And yet… How often do we read in the New Testament that not one will be lost. God’s mercy, God’s unconditional love, God’s forgiveness seeks out the one lost sheep.

We equate eternal punishment with hell. There are different words and concepts in the Scriptures that are translated as ‘hell’ – and certainly one of them is the pit of fire outside Jerusalem. I reckon the life of medieval priests was made easy by the murals in even the smallest country churches of people suffering in the eternal punishments of hell. But is that really what hell is? Traditional theology has developed that understanding – but many theologians question it. Think about the way we talk of hell – we use it as an every-day description of people, places and events. Princes Street yesterday was hellish, my journey from Leamington Spa on Friday was pure hell. What of the hell so many face because of war? The hell created for minorities by the way they are treated by those who see them as the’ other’, the ‘enemy’?  The rise of populists who encourage us to think that way terrifies me – they are creating hell. I’ve been reading an Advent book by Paul Dominiak who writes that both C S Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre, in different ways, picture hell as a spiritual condition that misshapes human relationships and closes them off from one another and from God.

This alienation is disrupted by Jesus – he breaks through bringing hope and love. He descended into hell, and on the third day he rose again. Dominiak writes: At heart, the hell that should trouble Christians was the one that humanity created, in all its manifold and insidious cultural, social, political and economic forms. Christ came to empty those hells by the saving act of his life, death and resurrection.

We generally regard heaven as the opposite of hell and yet: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…

Heaven, in the Scriptures, is not a place of eternal reward for the faithful – it’s part of creation and was regarded as being above the earth – the place where God dwells without losing contact with the earth. Earth thy footstool and heaven thy throne. Earth was down here and heaven just above us. Of course we now know that is not the case, but that doesn’t give us permission to separate these two key parts of creation. Over and over again in the New Testament the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven mean the same thing and we pray that God’s will be done and kingdom come on earth as in heaven. They are inseparable. We who are one with Christ through the power of the Spirit and through the waters of baptism live in both. We long for the time when heaven and earth are completely indistinguishable. How then can we stand by and watch as the earth is being destroyed. How can Christian extremists declare that it’s ok because it will hasten the time of the second coming. The way we treat our planet is the greatest immorality and evil of our time. 

I love the words from the 17^th century priest and poet Richard Crawshaw: 

Heaven in earth and God in man. 

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth

Heaven is a present reality in which we share and which we will experience in all its fullness at the second coming of Christ. As we loiter, preparing for that, is what Advent is all about. 

So to loiter or not to loiter? I come down on the side of loiter – and loiter with intent. Please, not criminal, but with the intent of contemplating the Four Last Things – death, judgement, hell and heaven – and think what it means to live now in the Kingdom of God. Isaiah’s image is beautiful, but also practical. Hammering a sword into a ploughshare is not an abstract idea. It’s metalwork. It’s muscle. It’s craft. It takes time, sweat, skill.

Sunday 1, Candle 1. What does it mean for us to have died to sin and live to righteousness?

Sunday 2, Candle 2. Recognising that God’s judgement brings justice and restoration, is there anything we can do living as the Spirit filled people of God, to bring that justice and restoration to our broken world?

Sunday 3, Candle 3. Hell, not a place, but of disrupted and distorted relationships; separation from other people and from God. How can we who live in unity with the Risen Christ give hope and bring reconciliation to those in despair?

Sunday 4, Candle 4. Heaven, not separate from earth but created alongside and groaning together in the birth pangs of becoming the New Creation. What part can we play in stopping the terrible destruction of earth and work to reverse the damage, so that God’s kingdom, to which we belong, can indeed be seen and enjoyed on earth as in heaven.

And at Christmas as we light the white candle, the candle that signifies the light of Christ, the light that is not overcome by darkness, may we be ready to walk in that light, the light of the Lord. Christ is coming. Let us be found ready—not frightened or frantic, but awake, hopeful, and beautifully alive.

Matthew 24:36-44

‘The necessity for watchfulness’

In this reading from Matthew’s Gospel account, Jesus tells us that not even he knows the hour of his return or when the Kingdom of God will be fully established on the Earth. He suggests that it will take us all by surprise as we go about our ordinary business and live our daily lives. He also, however, suggests that we should be prepared at all times for this coming and not be caught out. We need to be ready to welcome the Kingdom and his return at anytime and he encourages us, just as he encouraged his first listeners and followers to live for today with one eye on the future as well.

It is I think good advice. Too many of us live lives weighed down by the past and can miss out on things of the present and thus the future as well. If one is constantly looking over one’s shoulder to the past one will never see what is coming towards one or what is here already. We need to be alert to today and to anticipate the future as well. Live your lives in this present time, try not to dwell on the things that have gone and that you now have no control over but seek to use your experience of life to prepare for the future. Let the coming light of Christ always be your guide and the illumination along your path.

The King we worship, love and serve is no mere powerful deity. He is no supreme being wielding power at a whim over our lives and destiny, nor is he a remote and uncaring being who does not worry how we feel or how we thrive. No, the King we serve is a spiritual King and a servant. One who was prepared to take human form and to serve the basic needs of us, his creation. Our King is no dictator or uncaring governor our King is a loving and caring parent who is always seeking and hoping the best for us, always willing to love us despite what we may or may not do and ready to challenge us to do better than we thought we could.

The Gospel accounts of Jesus do not read like the life of a King. His was not a life of privilege or comfort. His life was one of service to others, healing and caring for those society rejected. He was a leader but no bully.  His followers were a motley crew with their own baggage to carry let alone their imperfections. Yet, this rag-tag King inspired those who listened to him with not only their ears but their hearts as well and this King still does that to those like us this very day. How many other Kings or monarchs still influence anyone two thousand years later? Listening to the words of Jesus and the promptings of God can lead us into pastures new and fresh. We must, however, continue to pray and listen to Jesus and like the disciples to be ready to respond to his call to be a friend to the needy, seeking to do good at all times and to be thankful to God and to each other for all we have and all we share in the name of the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ the servant King.

Our AGM coming as it does towards the end of the Church’s year is a good time for us to stop, reflect and to give thanks to God for all that we have achieved and done as a congregation over the past year. The AGM report which I hope you have all read gives a thorough review of our activities, mission and out reach. The most important thing is, however, that we have continued Sunday by Sunday and Wednesday by Wednesday to gather to give thanks and worship to God. This is part of the ‘presence’ in the community that I spoke about in my report. 

We have a presence in this bit of God’s kingdom that encourages us in our welcome and inspires our hospitality. A welcome that is genuine and inclusive of all God’s people and a hospitality that seeks to nurture and enable all to find a place in this congregation. 

Presence, welcome and hospitality have become for me and I hope you the words that encompass all that we believe we are called to do by God in this place. The past year has shown how we have begun to live out these three words and concepts, in practical and spiritual ways. The challenge now before us is to continue that discernment of God’s will in how we live out our presence, welcome and hospitality in the coming days and months and I ask you to pray regularly for each other as we journey forward into a new Church year and as we live out our call to be Christ lights in this place. 

As many of you know, I’ve been spending as good deal of time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in recent days. Its corridors are enlivened by a lot of interesting artwork, and I was particularly struck by a wooden panel into which are carved these words:

“History comes out of the walls”. 

It’s the work of an artist called Shauna McMullan, and she took her inspiration from the dining tables in the old Royal Infirmary buildings in Lauriston Place. Over the years some of the clinicians and scientists who worked there carved their names onto the tops of those tables. The most famous of them was the microbiologist Louis Pasteur who visited Edinburgh in 1884 to take part in the celebrations for the 300^th anniversary of Edinburgh University. The table-tops are now mounted on the wall opposite Shauna McMullan’s art work. 

Shauna McMullan’s intention was to bring some memories of the old Royal Infirmary into the new building, gathering fragments of the past and preserving them for the future. She wanted there to be a sense of continuity between past and future and that, of course, is precisely what remembrance is about. That great theologian St Augustine of Hippo argued that we are, in a very important sense, what we remember. In his autobiography, The Confessions, he posed the question:

“What then am I, O my God? What is my nature?”

and answered that question with these words:

“…behold the numberless fields and caves and caverns of memory, each immeasurably full of an innumerable variety of things.”

What is true of us as individuals can, and I believe should also be true of communities and nations. 

History comes out of the walls of the great majority of our churches from war memorials. The great majority of them, as here at the Good Shepherd, list those who died in two World Wars. There’s an important difference between the names carved on the tables of the old Royal Infirmary and the names on our war memorial. Those medics and scientists chose to record their names. The men recorded on our war memorial are not there by their choice. Some were volunteers, some conscripts but all went to war in the hope of returning to their loved ones. They died resisting aggression and in remembering them we not only honour them but sustain the shared memories of our nation and of the wider world and we resist the forgetfulness that is one of our greatest human weaknesses. 

St Augustine, in the quotation I used a moment ago, wrote of the fields, caves and caverns of memory. Fields are open to the view, we see what is on their surfaces. Caves and caverns can be places of concealment and, if we are not diligent in our remembrance, they become places that are forgotten. 

We are in danger of forgetting that those who fought and died in the Second World War were resisting regimes which taught that some races were superior to others, regimes which persecuted gay people, which denied millions their human rights, including the right to life itself. Those regimes believed that might is right and, in the case of National Socialist Germany, were supported by many Christians. 

A few weeks ago, Susan and I entertained a friend whose father, a German Lutheran pastor who later became a Methodist minister, was, in the early 1930s, curate to the Rev’d Martin Niemöller in a parish in the southern suburbs of Berlin. Before he was ordained, Niemöller served in the German navy in World War One as a U-boat officer and was highly-decorated. His politics were of the kind that we now call National Conservatism. He disliked the liberal, democratic republic that was established in Germany after the First World War. He voted for the Nazis in 1924, 1928 and 1933 and welcomed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, seeing Hitler as the strong man who would make Germany great again. 

He soon began to criticise Hitler’s interference in church affairs, especially his policy of forbidding Christian clergy who, like our friend’s father, were ethnically Jewish from serving in parishes. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Imprisonment proved to be a school of repentance, and he emerged in 1945 to become an advocate for human rights and a pacifist. 

Niemöller’s story is one that we forget at our peril, for we live in an era when one form of national conservatism has taken power in the United States, with the enthusiastic support of many Christians, and another has taken root in Russia, with the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church. These are forms of politics which, because they are aggressive and divisive, misunderstand and misrepresent the very essence of Christianity, an essence foretold in our reading from the Prophet Micah, who offers a vision of peace:

“…and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore…”

and developed in our Gospel reading, the Benedictus, with its vision of a people liberated from fear and persecution and its promise that God will

“…guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Not only peace as the absence of conflict, though that is a desirable goal, but peace in the sense of harmonious relations between all sorts and conditions of human beings. That peace is only possible if we open ourselves to the Grace of God and this morning’s reading from Revelation is a vision of what God intends and promises, a reminder that God

“…will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

When he was released from captivity, Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote a short statement of repentance which, in various forms, has become very well-known. This is a translation of the version displayed at the Martin Niemöller Haus in Dahlem.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

Remembrance is important. As St Augustine suggests, we are, both as individuals and as communities, what we remember. In recalling the sacrifice of those who died in battle we rightly honour them. In remembering the causes of the conflicts in which they fell we open ourselves to the possibility of eschewing the evils which led to their deaths.