Welcome to Advent.  It’s the beginning of the church year, a season set aside to prepare for what is coming.  So what is coming?  

Well, most obviously of course, Christmas is coming.  We prepare during Advent for the Feast of the Incarnation, when we remember God’s birth in a stable in the Middle East about two thousand years ago.  And that is a spiritual preparation, preparing space in our hearts and in our lives to welcome Christ into the world.  

Of course, we also prepare for secular Christmas.  We shop, we decorate, we bake, we party, we eat.  We mail out cards, receive cards, and plan for whatever our various Christmas celebrations will be with family and friends.  

But Advent is about more than these things.  Advent is also about preparing for the coming Kingdom of God, the time at the end of time when all wrongs will be made right and all things will be brought to completion in the sight of God.  

We get a hint of that in our first reading--Jeremiah prophesying that the days are surely coming when God will fulfill his promise to the houses of Israel and Judah, that justice, righteousness, and safety will reign.  It sounds great, doesn’t it?  I mean, who could possibly be opposed to righteousness, justice, and safety?  And Jeremiah says that this will come about by what he calls “a righteous branch . . . for David.”  It is certainly easy enough for us to interpret that as Christ, isn’t it.

But then, of course, Christ came, and justice, righteousness, and safety did not come with him.  Both at the time of Christ and since then, there has been plenty of injustice and unrighteousness, and many unsafe situations.  

Christ himself talked about this--we hear an example in our Gospel reading today.  He talks about signs in the sun, moon, and stars, and distress among nations on the earth.  But then, right at the worst part of all, the people will see the “Son of Man coming in a cloud” and then their redemption will be drawing near.  

So when we want to know WHEN all this is going to happen, Christ reminds us of the fig tree (or any tree, really), we all know that when trees put out leaves, summer is coming soon.  So, says Christ, when you see these things taking place (all those signs in the sun, moon and stars, that is, and distress among the nations on earth), then we will know that the Kingdom of God is near.

Well, I once took a class about the French Revolution.  One of the things I did for the class was look at religious pamphlets published in England at the time of the Revolution.  These pamphlets identified the events in France as events foretold in the Bible that would happen at the end of the world.  The authors of the pamphlets were convinced, and were trying to convince their readers, that this was the time and that they should prepare for the Second Coming of Christ.

But you have been able to notice, immediately, the problem with their argument.  The problem is, of course, that the world did not end at that time.  Which didn’t slow other people down from interpreting events that they were living through in the light of Biblical prophesy--throughout history, both before and since the French Revolution, people have declared themselves to be living in the end times, and urgently instructed others to prepare for the end of history and the coming of God’s Kingdom.  

People continue to do it now.  But why should any signs in the sky now, or the current distress among nations, be any more likely to be those budding leaves that herald the arrival of summer?  And given that, what do we do with these prophecies, or with Christ’s admonition to  “be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life”?  Or to “be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength . . . to stand before the Son of Man”?

I wonder if the difficulty has to do with the idea that the time that we are waiting for is to take place at some predetermined moment, that there is a kind of fatalism in the universe that God has designed and that we are somehow pawns just waiting for some kind of cosmic clock to reach a set goal, without any ability to influence the timing or the outcome (aside from trying to keep alert and so on).  With that kind of attitude, it is easy for us to take a passive stance and figure that, in some kind of cosmic way, we are just treading water and waiting for events to unfold themselves.

I wonder, though, if there isn’t more to Christ’s injunction to “be on guard” and “be alert” than that.  Recently in a discussion with the Faith and Leadership Community, we talked about participating actively in your own life.  This is the opposite of being passive--it means thinking and reflecting about your situation, deciding what you want to do, figuring out how to do it, and making it happen.  No excuses.  No whining about your circumstances and how they prevent you from doing what you want to do--stop feeling sorry for yourself and start figuring out how to OVERCOME whatever it is that you want to whine about.  

I am sure that God wants us to participate actively in our own lives.  After all, if everything were fatalistically determined, there would have been no point for Christ to come in the first place.  It is certainly much easier to go with the flow, take what comes, and let things happen TO us instead of MAKING things happen around us.  But Christ tells us that we are not to let ourselves be weighed down with, among other things, the worries of this life.  We are to make our own decisions, our own choices, and to do the best that we can to help create the world in the way that God would have it:  abounding in justice, righteousness, and safety.

Some of you know that I am a big fan of Harry Potter.  I recently re-read the second book:  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which happens to contain one of my favorite moments in the Harry Potter series.

You see, Harry has been fretting about who he is.  When he first arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the magical Sorting Hat which assigns each student to her or his “house” put him in Gryffindor, the house for the brave and adventurous students.  But before placing him there, it told him that he would have been good in Slytherin, the house that all the Dark wizards came from, the house that is known for being power-hungry and doing whatever it takes to gain power.  To give you an image of the two houses:  the symbol of Slytherin is a snake, while the symbol of Gryffindor is a lion.  Obviously, anyone would want to be in Gryffindor.  

During the course of the book, Harry has learned that his gift of talking to and understanding snakes is highly unusual and generally considered the mark of a Dark wizard.  He has learned that he has more in common with the series bad guy, Lord Voldemort, than he knew.  

Harry takes these facts and adds them to his experience with the Sorting Hat, which might have put him in Slytherin if he hadn’t asked to be in Gryffindor, and presents them all to Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts school.    

Dumbledore tells Harry:  “ . . . the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor.  You know why that was.  Think.”

“It only put me in Gryffindor,” said Harry in a defeated voice, “because I asked not to go in Slytherin . . . “

“Exactly,” said Dumbledore, beaming once more.  . . . “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Harry seems to be worried that he is fated to be a Slytherin-style bad guy even though he doesn’t want to be.  Dumbledore tells him that just because he COULD be a Slytherin bad guy, doesn’t mean that he has to:  he can choose what he will do.  

Christ calls us to be alert, to be on guard, to prepare for what is to come.  While we may not know exactly what is coming, whether it is Christ coming in clouds next week or simply continued distress among nations for the rest of our time on earth, we are to take an active role in preparing this world for its future.  We are to take an active role in our own lives, making our own choices rather than giving in to circumstances in which we find ourselves.  We are to do the work of Christ, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the least among us.  We are, in the words of today’s opening collect, to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.  No excuses.  This is Advent.  Now is the time.  Prepare.