Advent 1 Outline
Love is great,
But love becomes more obviously so powerful, so wonderful, so life-giving …
in the face of hate, lies, sin, … and raw evil and cruelty – in the face of chaos.
God promises our redemption, a new creation, out of the end of the universe, the end of all time.
- Advent is
- The beginning of the New Year, the Church year
- Time for Reflection, a sombre season
- Blue
- Hope
- So much more than pre-Christmas
- Reflection on New Beginnings
- The Gospel is Hardly Good News
- Foretelling disruption of the universe
- 21st Century equivalents
- macro, micro, psychological
- What is this? How can we respond? What is this?
- Challenges of daily life
- Can overwhelm us as much as anticipating the end of all time
- Its not end times, it is as if all time ends for us, even while the world continues without us.
- How can we respond when we are overwhelmed?
- Jesus:
- Signs of the end, equated to signs of new life.
- These overwhelming events, end times, or time that ends
- Are actually God starting something new
- New:
- Live in safety
- Ruler that executes Justice based on truth, instead of lies and excuses for facts
- All of the universe, the glue that holds everything in order,
- Marco, micro, internally, personally
- This is God
- God is right-eousness
- God is the one who makes everything right
- Right is order, is the opposite of Chaos, is the opposite of Creation (Chaos is the opposite of all that is Good in Creation.)
- Right for our safety,
- Right in relationship to God
- God is what holds chaos at bay
- Exactly in the horrendous view of the end of time, nature, world, universe, our minds
- This is where God is most obviously discernible
- This is where we see God most clearly
- In the face of chaos Grace abounds
- God present always, everywhere, but most obvious to us in the chaos
- L Cohen: it’s through the cracks that the light gets in.
- In sinners made saints God makes God present
- And we see God face to face
- This Advent
- All challenges that we face
- God is our rightness
- God is the source, re-creator, and guarantee of our safety, and our everything.
- God is with us.
- Time to reflect on the serious things of faith, life and our times.
- So that the end of all time
- Or the end of our time
- Does not catch us unawares
- So we pray: let us not be put to shame,
- For God is our rock and our salvation
(I highly recommend reading the blog posts on sermon preparation in the order they are posted. So read the next two first. The visceral images of this week’s Gospel, reflected in the first post, and other references barely explained in the outline above are required to make sense of the outline. Otherwise it is as mundane, spit-warm and boring as the pre-Christmas musac that now pummels every shopper’s brain. Both the destructive power of what is objectionable and the amazing work of God’s Grace healing wretched sinners will be able to be smoothed over leaving us comfortable … even with the impending collapse of the universe, beginning with our minds.)