November 30, 2025

Time is a funny thing. There are times, as when we are in the middle of something exciting, when it seems like it passes in an instant. And then there are those times when we’re sitting in a waiting room and time seems to pass slowly, especially when the doctor is late for our appointment. Years ago, I would schedule my doctor’s appointments for first thing in the morning, so when I had to wait a half-hour for him to finally show up, I could let my outrage boil over, knowing the delay wasn’t due to them dealing with another patient, but rather they were just late getting into the office. Needless to say, I eventually tired of this and found a new primary care physician.

There’s also the way in which time can seem to pass in an instant. One of the realities I’ve had to deal with as I have been rector of Grace for now more than 16 years is the disorienting way in which time passes. I’ll find myself recalling some event, or someone, thinking that it occurred a few years ago, and suddenly realize that it’s been more than a decade. It’s particularly disconcerting to encounter young people who I baptized when they were infants and are now graduating high school.

The season of Advent challenges us to reflect on the meaning of, as well as our experience of, time. In the first place, it is the beginning of the liturgical year; for Christians who follow the liturgical calendar, the first Sunday of Advent is New Year’s Day.

While thinking about today as New Year’s Day would seem to help us place ourselves in time, in fact, we find it does something else entirely. It is profoundly disorienting to our sense of time, and our sense of our place in time. Advent encourages us to look forward—to Christmas and the birth of our Savior, but as it does so, it also prompts us to look backwards, to those events that took place two millennia ago in Bethlehem.

Simultaneously, though, Advent propels us forward not to December 25 and the rituals and stories of Christmas, but to the end of time itself, to the second coming. 

This disorientation and reorientation is fundamental to the season of Advent; and it is fundamental to the Christian faith.

One way in which we are being reoriented is through the changes in the lectionary. Each of the three years of the lectionary cycle, we focus on one of the synoptic gospels. This past year it was Luke. This year, it will be Matthew. This focus allows us to spend some time getting to know the gospel writer and the context and community within which they were writing. In Matthew’s case, as we shall see, there is a particular interest in laying out the similarities and distinctions of the Jesus movement with first-century Palestinian Judaism. At the same time, Matthew, like Luke, draws on the gospel of Mark for much of its chronological structure and many of its stories about Jesus.

Today’s gospel is one of those places where Mark’s influence is particularly evident. We have a section of what scholars call the “little apocalypse—” a sermon of Jesus given in the last week of his life, while he is teaching in and around the temple. We actually heard Luke’s version of some of the same material in recent weeks.

When I was a kid, for some reason, one year one of the local churches was given the opportunity to show Christian-themed movies in the schools. One of those films, I don’t know the title anymore, was about the second coming. I remember one scene especially. A man was in his bathroom shaving, and suddenly he was gone. It was a movie that aimed to depict what is called the rapture, an idea that emerged in nineteenth century Evangelicalism and captured the fascination of many—the idea that at the second coming, the faithful would be transported to heaven while the rest of humanity remained on earth to face the consequences.

One of the proof texts for the rapture is in this passage: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It’s a frightening image, and especially as the idea has played out in modern Christianity, it has captured, and traumatized many. But it’s a misreading of scripture, and a profound perversion of the notion of the second coming. Contrast that fear-mongering with Isaiah’s vision from the first lesson:

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 any more.

This vision, cast in the ninth century bce, continues to inspire. The idea of an age of peace, of justice and equity, when God reigns is a powerful image, reminding us that even as we experience all the ways in which our world and our lives fall short of that vision, our faith continues to express itself by hoping that God will make all things right.

But it will happen in God’s time, not ours. One lesson that Advent teaches is that even as we look ahead to Christ’s coming at Christmas, as well as Christ’s second coming, the day and the hour are not ours to set. God’s time spans past, present, and future. Indeed, God is outside of time.

Yet as the reading from St. Paul’s letter to Romans reminds us, our waiting, our experience of time is not flat and meaningless. “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we were first believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

Both the gospel and the reading from Romans point to the ways in which early followers of Jesus were disoriented in time. There’s a great deal of evidence that those early Christians expected Jesus’ imminent return. When he seemed to tarry, they began to wonder whether their hopes were real, and if there hopes of an imminent second coming were not going to be realized, what would that mean for their faith in Christ?

Jesus warns his listeners, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

In a way, Jesus’ words are doing to his listeners just what Advent is doing to us. He is trying to reorient them toward a new understanding of time, to change their expectations and experiences of it. So too does Advent do this to us. We are betwixt and between. Even as the circles of time continue through the years, Advent breaks in upon us and presents us with a different sense, or senses of time. As we look ahead for four weeks to Christmas, we are looking even further beyond to Christ’s second advent and those two markers remind us that ultimately, we are not in our time, or time of our making, but in God’s time. And in God’s time, God will make all things new, and we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. And we will study war no more.

Thanks be to God.