In our New Testament reading for today we hear St Paul say, ‘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.’ He is
writing this in a perilous situation: he is in prison, either in Ephesus or in Rome (we don’t know
which). Paul is in prison for subversion. Preaching Jesus Christ as Lord, Saviour and King did not
go down well in the Roman empire. The Emperor was Lord, Saviour, and the appointed ruler.
Paul is writing to our ancestor church community. The church at Philippi was the very first
Christian community in Europe. A line of faith connects that tiny group of people back then with all
the other churches of Europe. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians is another living connection: we read
what he wrote to them as though written to us. We listen intently to the voice of the Church’s first
known theologian: Paul, St Paul.
So he writes to them and to us in the introduction to his letter, ‘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.’ What is
this ‘day of Jesus Christ’? It must be of significance because he uses the phrase again later on in the
reading. The day of Jesus Christ means the public arrival of Jesus as Lord and King.
Hope in the divine promise that Jesus would come again is threaded through the whole New
Testament. When we come to affirm our faith after this sermon we shall say at the end, ‘ … the
Spirit and the Bride (that is the Church) say, ‘Come!’ Even so come Lord Jesus!’ These phrases
come form the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John. The response in our intercessions is
‘Maranatha. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.’ Maranatha means in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke,
‘Our Lord, come!’
These are cries from the heart of the Church. The Jesus who at his first coming brought salvation is
the same one whom the Church community longs to come with power and glory, longs to see arrive,
bringing the whole of creation to its intended perfection. This longing is in the Lord’s Prayer too, ‘
… your Kingdom come’. This is the ‘Day of Jesus Christ’ of which St Paul speaks.
This second coming of Jesus is the theme of the Church’s season of Advent. The Church begins its
year by looking to the completion of all things in Christ. The Church prepares for the season of
Christ’s first coming into the world, Christmas, by focussing on the expectation of his second
coming. What is begun at Christmas finds its completion at Christ’s final coming.
The Church longs for the perfecting of all creation in Christ. Immediately a tension is set up. What’s
the situation now? Never in my lifetime (excepting the Cuban crisis in 1962) have we needed
Advent more. The world finds itself at a dangerous moment. In a Diocesan letter to retired clergy
which I received this week there is this sentence:
‘I suspect many of us have a sense of heaviness this year as we listen to the news and think about the rise of world leaders who are not people of peace.’
I for one sense that. Added to this, our parliament has voted, initially at least, to bring in
assisted dying. Where is that going to lead our society? The Christian community will need wise
guidance in the weeks, months and years ahead I am sure. Then there is the dawning climate crisis.
Fully arrived in places like East Africa and now knocking evermore loudly at our door. There is a
tension between where the world is now and the promised kingdom for which we daily pray, ‘your
Kingdom come’.
But … the Christian community is a community of hope. Three virtues govern the Church’s way of
life: faith, hope and love. Advent brings hope into particular focus.The little Advent card we are offered here at St Luke’s and at St John’s prays, ‘ … may our hearts be filled with the hope from knowing your promises are true. Amen.’
Our hope is based on what God has done in Jesus. When Jesus was born the Kingdom for which
God’s people Israel had longed, began. John the Baptist’s cry is ‘Repent for the Kingdom of God has
drawn near.’ The deeds of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus, the community Jesus forms around him, are
the signs of the Kingdom coming into being. At his resurrection from the dead his Kingdom takes
on universal dimensions. The Church is formed in the Spirit breathed on the Church through Jesus.
It is called as Christ’s body, therefore, to herald the triumph of Jesus’s way of living, enacting the
Kingdom. That way of living is both for this age and for the age to come. The kingdom brought to
us in Jesus is an everlasting kingdom.
The Church is a community whose task is to work for the Kingdom. Otherwise its life really has no
meaning. Every ecumenical agreement the Church of England has made with other churches has
something like this near the beginning: The Church is sign, instrument and foretaste of the
Kingdom. The Church does not exist for itself. It exists for the sake of God’s coming Kingdom. It
lives and acts as a sign of the Kingdom, an instrument of the Kingdom and a foretaste of the
Kingdom. This is why it matters what we think and say and do now as Christians, as the Church.
We are not here to mutilate the very body we are, the body of Christ. We are here to embody its
glory, the glory of Jesus who is King, by what we think and say and do.
In a dark and darkening world the Church, Christ’s body on earth is to be a light. We do not forget
the darkness or ignore it. That is mere optimism, fantasy even. Through Christ, who is the one true
light, we are to be light. A light in a world so often marred by hate, greed, and violence. Such is a
truly hopeful community, founded on the person of Jesus Christ and his promises to us.
In Advent the Church renews its unconquerable hope and hears again the words of St Paul to the
Philippians, writing from his prison cell, ‘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.’
Service: Canon Bill Croft 8th November 2024. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Readings: Baruch 5 / Malachi 3.1-4, Philippians 1.3-11, Luke 3.1-6