November 30, 2025

Advent 1 Year A

Matthew 24:36-44; Isaiah 2:1-5

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Here is the Advent I remember the most.

It’s December 1990, and Val and I are in the early days of our life in Toronto. I had arrived only a few weeks ago, and Val had made her way out about two months before that. We had graduated from Seminary in Saskatoon earlier that year, and neither of us really knew whether we wanted to be pastors – I think we were pretty sure we didn’t want to – but we did know that we wanted to live in Toronto. Just to see what we might end up doing there. And what could be more normal if you don’t have a job and don’t know what kind of work you want and don’t really have much money, than to move to the most expensive city in the country, right?

Val had managed to land a job just before I arrived, so she was settling into some pretty interesting but challenging work. I was still just figuring out how to do the job of looking for a job. I’d put together a half decent resume and had managed to drop it off at a few places here and there. Back in those days you went to a place and dropped off a resume – none of this internet stuff. That whole process was tiring, especially for someone who wasn’t exactly sure what they wanted to do, and especially for someone like introvert Paul who could find it so hard to spend a few minutes, let alone a few weeks or months, just introducing themselves – introducing myself – to complete strangers. Something in me knew that I’d find some work and settle into this new life, but I didn’t know when and didn’t know what that might be.

Val had work, though, and she would usually arrive home around 5:30 after riding the subway for half an hour or so. By that time of day the sun had pretty well disappeared, so around 5:15, I’d light a candle and put in on the windowsill of our nice little apartment above a store; our nice little apartment with the fun address for recent seminary grads of 666A Annette Street. I’d put the candle on the windowsill and look over the dark damp street as I watched for Val to get off the bus and cross the street to our cozy new furniture-free home. (We couldn’t afford to pay the movers yet.)

I always liked to imagine that I was lighting that candle for Val. Sort of a light to guide her way on those last steps home, and a light to warm her heart and remind her that I was waiting for her and looking forward to seeing her. But I was probably lighting it more for me than for her. I was spending my days either trying to work up the nerve to talk to strangers or feeling guilty for avoiding the task altogether. At the end of the day I really needed to feel like those worries were done, and I’d just be able to be at home with someone who wanted to be at home with me. So the light on the windowsill spoke to me while the evening settled in, and in some way that I couldn’t understand the light reminded me that things would be OK. I didn’t know how it would all work out, but the candlelight kind of reassured me that things would be OK, and that Val would soon be home. And things would be OK.

It’s Advent, and Advent is our season to put a candle on the windowsill and wait for one who is coming soon as the early nighttime of December settles in. But we don’t wait for someone who will arrive predictably around 5:30, like they always have. And we don’t just wait for someone who will arrive some time between the evening of December 24th and the morning of December 25th. We don’t even wait only for the one named Jesus who arrived in a small town named Bethlehem a few thousand years ago. We put a candle in the window and we wait for that one named Jesus to come again. We don’t know when that will be. We don’t know quite what that will look like. But we put a candle in the window, and the soft glow reminds us that one is coming who comes to be at home with us.

Waiting for Jesus to come again…We don’t talk about that very much in the Lutheran church these days, but right from the earliest days of the church Christians have talked about how Christ will come back some day. I’m not sure about you, but that kind of talk can make me kind of twitchy and uncomfortable. It brings up images of someone on a street corner calling out that the end is coming. Or it calls to mind songs and stories about being Left Behind, when the real Christians get taken up to heaven and everyone else is left back here, as though God just gave up on them. That whole thing was cooked up in the 1800s, by the way – not way back at the start. Or at best it just makes me remember a bumper sticker I saw once: “Jesus is coming. Everybody look busy.”

We don’t talk about it very much, but we say it whenever we say the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed together: We believe that “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” We say it when we pray together as we prepare for Christ’s coming to us in communion, and we say, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ…will come again.”

But we don’t really talk about all that very much.

Then Advent sneaks in and calls us to look forward to Christ coming again. And maybe, to be honest, it makes us a little uncomfortable. We live in a world that’s still so broken and that we’ve never figured out how to fix…or that we’ve so often just given up trying to fix. If someone is coming, someone who we have said will come to judge the living and the dead, maybe we’re afraid that we might just be judged and found to be wanting. Maybe not being judged, to be labelled as good or judged to be bad. Maybe being judged, the living and dead, simply means that we who are living, just like the ones who have gone before us, will be judged to have been unable, or even unwilling, to straighten out the messes we have made.

Yet in Advent, we still put a candle in the window to wait for that one who is to come. Because we trust that that one who knows us so well will not give up on us. And that one who knows us so well and who could show up at any time, is showing up for the good of us all. Out of love for us all. Out of love for the whole creation. We watch and wait and prepare for Christ to come again, when finally, finally, God’s work of healing the whole creation, will be completed. We don’t know when that will be. As Jesus said in that gospel today, the angels don’t even know. Jesus doesn’t know. But in God’s own good time, the one who has died and risen will come again. And all that healing work that God has begun will be finished…and all will be made well.

Advent is our season of lighting a candle and setting it on the windowsill….and remembering the promise of that one who is to come…

A few minutes ago a prophet named Isaiah put a candle on the windowsill, and that candle lit up a picture of all the nations of the world climbing a mountain and meeting there to learn the ways of peace. Everything that begins today as we move into another year of worshiping together is pushing us ahead, or gently pulling us along, to that vision of God’s gift of peace for all the people. The nations of the world will stream up the mountain and learn war no more. Weapons will be turned into farm implements, and nations won’t raise up swords against nations because there will be no more swords left. That word is a candle on the windowsill.

And when you watch the news, or see a fight in your school or a snit at the office, isn’t that what we need? Nations and peoples learning the ways of peace? And the ways of war aren’t even in the curriculum? When a war breaks out in a home or a friendship, or a deep deep cold settles over relationships that were once warm, isn’t that what we need? Nations and peoples and friends and enemies and strangers travelling together to meet at a mountain and learn a different way? To turn their tools of hurt into tools of feeding and healing and peace?

That’s what we wait for during Advent: We wait for one who will make the healing of all the nations, and all creation, and all of us, complete.

Advent is our season of the year to set a candle on the windowsill for one who is to come. That light, this Advent season, keeps on quietly whispering in our ear a word of peace, and painting a picture for us of a world reconciled and made new…inside here (deep inside), among us and close to us, all the people, learning the ways of peace from this one who comes in a birth to be with us, from this one who welcomes wise travellers from afar, who welcomes the unwelcome, who teaches the ways of peace from a cross and an empty tomb, from this one who will come again.

Welcome to this candle-in-the-window time and space of Advent