Readings for the First Sunday of Advent (Year A)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on November 30, 2025.
On this first Sunday of Advent, we generally wish each other a happy new year as we begin a new liturgical year together. So, happy new year! Today, we begin our three-year journey through Years A, B, and C when we read through the Gospel of Matthew (this year), Mark (next year), and Luke (the following year), with John sprinkled in during Lent and Easter and other holy days. Matthew, which is canonically the first Gospel, presents Jesus as a Jewish rabbi or a maggid, thus emphasizing the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Matthew’s Gospel includes some of the most beloved and poignant Christmas stories: Joseph’s dreams of angels, the Holy Family’s escape to Egypt, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, and the Visit of the Magi, the wise men, whom we celebrate on the Feast of Epiphany. We might assume that our Gospel reading for this first Sunday of Advent would be one of these stories about Mary and Joseph preparing for the coming (the Adventus) of the Christ child. Instead, today’s Gospel reading reminds us of the polyvalent meaning of Advent, which is not just about waiting for the coming of the Christ child; it’s also about waiting for the Second Coming, the Second Adventus of Christ. This passage from Matthew Chapter 24 has been called Matthew’s Mini Apocalypse (or the Olivet Discourse since it took place on the Mount of Olives). The word “apocalypse” literally means the unveiling: calypse (where we get the name Calypso) means to cover or conceal while apo means the reverse or the opposite. The apocalypse is the opposite of concealing, the removing of the veil; and we generally associate this word with the end times, the end of the world, since that is often what is being unveiled in the apocalyptic writings of the Bible. And that is often how preachers interpret today’s teachings of Jesus, teachings that can easily make many of us Christians crazy with fevered obsession about the rapture and the great tribulation and the antichrist and all that. A popular Christian rock star named Larry Norman wrote a song about the rapture based on today’s Gospel titled “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”: “Two men walking up a hill / One disappears and one’s left standing still / I wish we’d all been ready / There’s no time to change your mind / the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” These lyrics inspired the best-selling “Left Behind” fiction series about the Rapture when millions of Christians will vanish, leaving behind others to face the ensuing global chaos.[1] Episcopalians have generally been wary to jump on this bandwagon, preferring instead the wisdom of the early church fathers and theologians, who call us to humility and a healthy agnosticism about the end times. If the angels in heaven and Christ himself do not know the day or the hour of the second Adventus then maybe we should practice some humility ourselves. And perhaps this might be the primary invitation for us in today’s Gospel as we begin our new year and our three-year journey through the three Gospels: to humble ourselves and to acknowledge our human limitations and finitude.
We might also see today’s Gospel as a call to acknowledge our mortality by appreciating yet another meaning of the Adventus. One of the greatest and even holiest of the Church Fathers and certainly the most influential was a man named Origen of Alexandria who lived in the 2nd and 3rd century.[2] He wrote the following about Matthew’s Mini-Apocalypse:
“All who listen to the depths of the gospel and live it so completely that none of it remains veiled from them care very little about whether the end of the world will come suddenly and all at once or gradually and little by little. Instead, they bear in mind only that each individual’s end or death will arrive on a day and hour unknown to him and that upon each one of us ‘the day of the Lord will come like a thief’” [1 Thessalonians 5:2].[3]
The season of Adventus invites us to prepare our hearts not only for the coming of the Christ Child and not only for the Second Coming of Christ, but also for that unknown day and hour when Christ comes to each of us individually, not as a grim reaper, but as a warm, loving presence receiving us into the beatific light, when we inevitably pass through the gateway called death. That could be today or tomorrow or decades from now. We don’t know. Our Gospel today asks us, “Are we ready? Are we ready for our own death, which may come like a thief in the night?”
Advent invites us to prepare for the coming of the Christ child, the Second Coming of the Christ, and the inevitable coming of our own death by practicing humility, acknowledging our humanity and mortality, and finally, by regularly receiving the Christ who comes to us in the bread and wine made holy and who comes to us now in the sacrament of this present moment. Let us pray.
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in our last day, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Tract from Kohl’s pants pocket: “‘Normal’ isn’t coming back, but Jesus is!!! Are you ready?…Terrible times are coming to this earth in the very near future. You can be saved from these horrors…”
[2] Thomas Merton on Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 253): “There is a fashion among superficial minds to dismiss Origen as a heretic and have nothing to do with him. This is very unfortunate because Origen is certainly one of the greatest and even holiest of the Church Fathers and was certainly the most influential of the early Fathers. His contribution to Catholic theology and spirituality was inestimable, and if he unfortunately did fall into theological errors (which was not to be wondered at in these early times when theological teaching had not been at all systematized), it is not difficult to separate his errors from the great mass of his orthodox teaching. Of all the Eastern Fathers Origen is perhaps the one who remained the most influential in Western monasticism, not excluding St. Basil. St. Bernard’s commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, which is typical of the whole theology and spirituality of the Cistercians and of medieval monasticism as a whole, goes back directly to Origen, and is often merely an elaboration of the basic ideas found in Origen (many of which in turn go back to Philo Judaeus).” Thomas Merton, A Course in Christian Mysticism (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2017), 33.
[3] Commentary on Matthew 56 GCS (Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1897) 38.2:130 – 131.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 