Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!   Amen.

“Abide with me, fast falls the evening tide. The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.” This first verse of the great hymn Abide With Me has been playing and replaying in my mind as I think about Advent this year. The church has a great wealth of hymns for the seasons of Advent and Christmas. In Advent we have hymns that stir up hope in us like Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus, hymns that declare God's unending love for us like People Look East, and hymns that declare the joy of God coming in the world like Joy to the World. This year as we dwell in the season of Advent preparing for the arrival of Jesus Christ I find myself drawn to the assurance of Abide With Me.

This year the arrival of Advent heralds the arrival of Mark's Gospel into our worship lives. We will gather to Mark's account of the Good News of Jesus Christ. This began in the first week of Advent when we heard Jesus' words about the return of the “Son of Man coming in the clouds” (Mark 13: 26). This is from the first week of Advent! We know the season of Advent is a time to wait the Christ child to be born in a Bethlehem stable. Yet when we gather and worship for the first week of the season we hear the adult Jesus teaching about his eventual return to earth.

Advent is not only about waiting and preparing for the infant Jesus to be born wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. It is a wonderful image, something we are preparing for and will celebrate during the Christmas Season. However, if that is all Advent is about, we strip it of its power; we ignore the Good News declared to us through the Holy Scriptures in favor of sentimental notions about a nativity scene. What has become clear to me this year more than any other is that this time of year is not as much about preparing for what already happened, the birth of the Christ Child, as it is preparing for what God is about to have happen, the return of the Son.

This can and should make us all uncomfortable. The return of Jesus Christ will bring his judgment into this world filled with our sin. Of all the things I look forward to in an eternity of God, standing before the divine to make account of my short coming is not high on the list. Sisters and Brothers this is what Advent is about, it is a time of preparing ourselves for the reality that the same Jesus Christ who was born of the Virgin Mary so long ago will come again to judge the living and the dead. The only reason Christ's return can be considered Good News is because of what Jesus did when he came the first time - he was born, lived, and died as a human to free all of humanity from death.

God came into the world as Jesus Christ and he literally did abide with us. God experienced firsthand the brokenness of the world through the humble circumstances of his birth and the crowds shouting, “Crucify him.” Jesus Christ continues to abide with us through our struggles to find joy in the Christmas season when we are overcome with grief and isolation, trying to overcome financial hardship when the world tells us to express our love through the value of gifts, or trying to heal as a worshiping community in the midst of its own hardships. God abides with us through all of these difficulties as well.

Our only hope in our present situations and our only hope for the future is to look back at gifts God has already given to us in Jesus Christ. God sent us his only Son to make us worthy of receiving even more forgiveness of sins and resurrection to eternal life with God! Our hope for the future, the only way we can prepare for the future, is to look back and remember the invaluable gifts God has already given us.

As we walk through another Advent together let us look back at birth of Jesus Christ and remember it with hope for our futures with God. Let us make the final verse of Abide With Me our prayer: “Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies, heav'n's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” Amen.