I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

The earth revolves around the sun at a steady and predictable rate of about 67,000 miles per hour. We can count on that… and we do. The speed at which the earth orbits the sun is so reliable that we can set our calendars to it… and we do. We mark our calendars, keep our personal records, and schedule our lives based on it. We count our age and the age of everyone and everything we see by how many times we have ridden the earth around the sun. It is how we organize history. Every human culture there has ever been has ordered their lives around the repeating seasons of the year; around a predictable cycle of harvests and rainy seasons. For many people living now, changes in weather and the timing of agriculture don’t play into their planning very much, but even for them, birthdays and anniversaries, holidays and commemorations are all linked to how long it takes the earth to make its 580,000,000 mile circuit around the sun.

The followers of Jesus have long had an annual pattern of holy days and celebrations: Christmas and Easter, Palm Sunday and Good Friday, Holy Trinity, Christ the King, All Saints’ Day, Reformation Day, and many others. We call this the liturgical calendar, or more simply, the church year. The church year still takes up the same amount of time as it takes the earth to go ‘round the sun. The church year is 365 days long, most of the time, with an extra day thrown in at leap year when there needs to be. There are however, some big differences between the church year and the solar year. To start with, instead of four seasons there are six, and they can be as short as twelve days and as long as six months. The seasons of the liturgical calendar are Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. But the most important difference is that the church year isn’t so much a matter of the earth revolving around the sun. The church year instead gives us a way to order our lives around Jesus. The seasons and holidays of the church and the stories that they tell take us through the whole life and ministry of Jesus, and through the story and teaching of the church. The church year starts off with anticipation, with waiting. It starts not with January, like our solar calendar does, but with Advent.

When you think about it, Advent is the perfect way to start off the church year, because Advent looks ahead. Advent is the season when we prepare to celebrate God becoming incarnate (literally “in the flesh”) in the baby Jesus at Christmas. Advent is also a time to wait in joyful anticipation for the return of our Lord Jesus, when God will make all things new.

In the past half dozen decades or so, more and more congregations have adopted blue as the color associated with Advent. This is not simply a matter of decoration or style. Advent is all about expecting, hoping for, and counting on, what comes next. It is about the coming of Jesus into the world, first as a baby in a manger, and again, sometime in the future, when he will bring God’s kingdom in all its fullness. Blue/violet represents Advent because is it the color of the morning sky. Blue is the color of the new day. It is the color of the future. Blue/violet is the color of what comes next.

We often worry about the future. It can be frightening because the future is so uncertain. We have no real way of knowing what is coming next. We so often wish that our current situations will pass and that life will return to the way it was. But history doesn’t work that way. History may repeat itself at times, but it never moves backward. The future is always different from the present, and the present is different from the past. Always. That’s the way that history works.

In the life of the church, it is so easy to long for the golden days gone by when things were, at least in our imaginations, more faithful, more secure, and just generally better. “If only” we say: “if only we could be the church that I remember from…” “If only we could go back to when…”. But the Holy Spirit doesn’t work that way either. God is not the God of the ideal. Jesus didn’t wait until we got everything perfect to come among us. God doesn’t wait for us to get there. God comes to us, whether we’re ready or not. God comes to us as we are, and then moves us forward. The Holy Spirit moves, and the Holy Spirit moves us. The Holy Spirit never lets us remain stagnate. It takes us where we are, and moves us closer to God and closer to our neighbor. The Holy Spirit calls us, leads us, and when necessary, drags us out into the ever-changing world to show that world the love and hope and forgiveness of Jesus.

We don’t know what the future holds, with a very important exception. The future has Jesus in it. The future holds Jesus. We can know that with absolute certainty. In the future, Christ will continue to be with us. Jesus is calling us into the future with him. The Holy Spirit is moving us into the future. There is one other thing that we can know for sure. The future has other people in it. We will not be alone. To carry on the work of Jesus, to show his love to the world, is not a solo project.

God could have stopped at Adam. God could have created just the one person and called it a day, but that is not what happened. God didn’t just create a person. God created people. God created people to support each other, to care for each other and to love each other. God called, gathered, and enlightened the Christian church on earth. In hundreds of countries, through thousands of languages, across tens of thousands of denominations, God has formed the one church, the one body of Christ. You are God’s gift to the world as a whole, and specifically to the other members of the body of Christ, and those countless members, scattered throughout time and space, are God’s very real gift to you. Remember that this Advent. Remember that we are united by our baptism and made one by the work of the Holy Spirit. God made us to live together and to work together and to be God’s people together. As we show God’s love to the world, we do it together. As we serve God and our neighbor, we serve together. As we wait for our Lord to come again, we wait together.

Amen.