Sunday, November 30, 2025
Advent 1A 2025
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
Well, the season rush is on. It seems that every year, this time of year, we increasingly get into a flurry of chaos. This starts sometime between when the first Halloween decorations go up, which is apparently now just after July 4th, and it doesn’t calm down until along about January 2nd when the holidays are officially over. No wonder we then collapse and get the blues during January and February. Many of us get the blues at the front end, as soon as daylight savings changes and days get shorter.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It is the New Year’s Day of the Church’s liturgical calendar. This is also the beginning of Year A, so it’s also the beginning of the three year cycle of our lectionary. So with this theme of new beginnings, we are supposed to be talking about hope for the future which is different than any sort of holding back of the seasonal rush.
According to many self help bloggers, this is the usual time when we are expected to start experiencing the holiday blues. Like the expectation to decorate early, eat too much and spend too much, our culture has us worried about money and weary from the fear mongering of our times. It is very easy to catch the blues rather than catch the Spirit.
To make matters worse, the readings for the first Sunday of Advent are always a bit gloomy. Of course, as in most story telling, you have to set the scene and remember that the people of the first century church were living in tough times. A bit tougher even than times are now.
When my daughter Kate was three, we drove from our then home in South Georgia to Bristol for a holiday visit with family. That’s about an eight hour drive with all the extra stops you have to take and, as you know, you have a lot of extra stuff to pack when you’re traveling with young children.
On one particular trip, I spent most of the previous day packing so that we could leave early. So, early on the morning of the trip I still had the task of packing the car and this took nearly an hour with Kate toddling around at my feet.
When we finally got her in the carseat in the middle of the back seat, the Jack Russell Terrier in the front seat and all our stuff settled in for the long drive I started the engine and put the car in reverse. And as I began to back up out of the driveway, Kate said from the back seat, “Are we there yet?!”
I had to stop and laugh for a minute before I could drive. It turns out, my little girl had just told her first joke! She was teasing me with the old adage that kids will drive you crazy with such travel questions.
An hour or so into the trip though, she fell asleep and I had to stay awake to drive and I had learned by then to never stop for a break when the children are sleeping. If you wake her up too early she’ll then need attention that will take even more time from the long trip.
Today’s Gospel lesson is about being prepared, staying awake and being ready. Like all Advent lessons, this is about preparing our hearts for the coming of the Lord.
It is not, as we have come to think, about getting ready for our Christmas feast. It is about learning to live at all times in a sort of readiness for the act of God coming into the world.
It is a time for the renewal of our relationship with the God who comes into the world, now, at this moment, at each and every moment.
Advent is about hope.
I’m not a huge sci-fi movie fan, but I really liked the movie Passengers in which Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play passengers on a futuristic space ship which is traveling 120 years to a new colony planet and all the passengers have been put into a medical state of hibernation in which you don’t age while asleep.
I know, it’s a bit a stretch, but if you can buy in to that set up, it’s a good movie. Because, the two lead characters wake up 90 years too early. This is because of a collision with an asteroid that causes problems with the fully automatic vessel. So, they are stuck in real time while the rest of the ship and crew are still in hibernation mode. They don’t know why they are awake, they cannot wake the crew and they will not survive the 90 years of travel so not going crazy seems to be their goal. Until fixing the ship becomes possible.
Here’s how this story it fits with today’s Gospel. Fantasy and sci-fi films come from our imagining of what the future might hold. We can’t help ourselves from pondering such things. We tend, in fact to live too much in the future - well, when we’re not living too much in the past.
But Jesus says to not worry about trying to figure out the when and the where of the future. Jesus says that we are to stay awake - now. Watch out for what we learned from the great flood. Watch out for thieves in the night. Watch out for the workings of the Holy Spirit in the same way you would watch out for kidnappings!
It is an oft used misinterpretation of Biblical images like these, however, to use such lists of examples of why to be prepared as a means of fear mongering. Passages like this passage from Matthew (according to one scholar) have become “associated with the Left Behind series which takes these texts to refer to ‘the rapture,’ when believers are airlifted out of the world while the rest of humankind suffers tribulation. And there’s lots of movies about that out too.
In reminiscing about the traditions in her own home, of Advent calendars and Advent wreaths with specially colored candles, Diana Butler-Bass reminded me in one of her blogs that Advent calendars are a token of an ancient religious practice to mark sacred time. This is one of the few aspects of the upcoming holiday season that remains nearly untouched by secularization or consumerism. For Christians, Advent is a time of waiting, listening and preparing - again - for the birth of Jesus. It is not a time of preparing for the celebration of presents and turkey dinners and decorating and baking and all that fuss.
In the Church we practice the belief that the Holy Spirit is now. God incarnate is now. The big theological word for that is eschatology. We look to the future, we remember the past, but the present moment is where we live and where God lives with us.
And the Holy Spirit is active in our lives at this and every moment. When we celebrate communion, we tell the story, we remember the past and the future - His death, His resurrection and His expected coming again. And at the moment when the pastor blesses the bread we are filled with the experience of the remembrance that Christ died for us. At that moment, we simultaneously experience crucifixion and resurrection. The Holy Spirit is now. The Holy Spirit, the coming of God into the world, because of these acts of God in history, are happening right now.
But in her blog about all this, Diana Butler-Bass spoke of her own tendency for holiday depression. In spite of her full awareness of the constant presence of the Holy Spirit.
She listed all the recent national problems that left her feeling personally down, as well as the depression of many of her friends and those she meets on social media. She listed all the things to be sad about these days. She focused on politics, hate crimes, division and violence and said, that she is, right now “just sad: blue,” she said, “really blue.”
So, she decided to practice Advent with all blue candles in her Advent wreath instead of the traditional purple and pink. She said that while shopping for the candles and greenery for her home Advent wreath, she picked up the usual customary colors. The purple, (she reminds us) symbolizes penitence and the pink and white symbolize joy. But because she was personally not feeling very joyful she found herself drawn to some blue candles and bought four of those instead. Because blue is the color of sadness. Diana decided to have a blue Advent.
Our culture pressures us to join the chaotic rush this time of the year and holiday depression is on the rise partly because of this. The busy-ness of life increases and we seem to be celebrating chaos and despair instead of peace, love and joy.
But Diana is on to something. You see, in the medieval church the color for Advent was blue. We’ve brought that back in recent years. For the church in the 10th century - and this was mostly a tradition in England but we Lutherans have carried it forward ever since - the color blue was the color for hope. So the color blue was the color for Advent.
Advent is not about penance, like Lent. It is of a different spiritual hue: It is a time of waiting, of expectation, of hope in the darkness. The blue candles symbolize the color of the sky right before dawn, that time when the deepest dark is infused with hints of light. Advent is about hope.
Blue holds the promise that the sun will rise, and that even after the bleakest, coldest, longest night, the light will break forth, as the new day arrives.
Blue may be the color of sadness, but blue is also the color of hope.
When we hurt and think we have been abandoned, when all promises seem broken. That is when we light candles against the night, trusting and believing that a greater light will arise. When a single flame becomes a conflagration of compassion and justice.And hope.
Advent recognizes a profound spiritual truth — that we need not fear the dark. Instead, we wait there. Under that blue cope of heaven, alert for the signs of dawn. Watch. For you cannot rush the night. But you can light some candles. Sing some songs. Recite poetry. Say prayers. Diana Butler Bass
So, my friends, this is my hope for you this year as you face yet another season of challenges, as we face adversities and big changes in the months and years to come, that we always remember that the Holy Spirit is now. The Incarnation is now. God’s coming into the world is always right now.
So lay your blue candles at the altar and keep watch, keep awake, stay hopeful for God has already come into the world and nothing can separate us from that fact, that love, that peace and that joy.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Kathy Kelly
1 Passengers, Produced by Stephen Hamel, Michael Maher, Neal H. Moritz, and Ori Marmur, Columbia Pictures, 2016.
2 Ron Allen https://goo.gl/Ox0U3g
3 Diana Butler-Bass, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11/25/forget-red-and-green-make-it-a-blue-holiday-instead/?postshare=9081480113685860, accessed 11/29/25.