1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and the word means ‘coming’ or ‘arrival’. Advent is not a time to rush around preparing for Christmas, it’s really a time of developing a spiritual and mental clarity by slowing down and patiently watching and waiting for Christ to come.
Preparing ourselves for the coming of Jesus – born fresh in our hearts through the infant Saviour. And then in joyful anticipation of his coming in glory like a Bridegroom to his Bride.
Each week we will light an Advent candle, nestling in the Advent wreath. These candles represent hope, peace, joy, and love.
It is a penitential time of year, and hope, peace, joy, and love are the fruit of Grace stemming from repentance, all culminating in God’s great act of love for us, and for the whole world, at Christmas.
So each week of Advent we will be looking at these different aspects of how we wait, and how this waiting is expressed in its purest form in love.
Now with this expectation of Christ’s birth and his intended return comes hope. And that hope is sure and real. Now as we have spoken about before, real hope is not a wish but confidence in certainty. E.g., I have great hope the sun will rise tomorrow.
Advent is a time we are to be reminded of the certainty that Jesus entered the world, fully human, to die on the cross for our sins and of his return to establish the Kingdom of God in our midst.
It is in the assurance of that hope upon which we stand, worship, serve, and live.
Hope is essential in life. An American writer, James Addison, said that there are three essentials in life: something to do, someone to love and something to hope for. We need hope to live.
In NYC in the 1970s and 80s, parts of the city were so vandalised and covered with graffiti that they became no-go zones where no one would live. In the 90s, a new mayor, Rudy Giuliani, changed the way they dealt with this social issue. As soon as graffiti was seen, it was removed.
As soon as a government building’s or a business’ windows were smashed they replaced them.
They started Neighbourhood Watch and never gave up hope. They just kept cleaning off the graffiti and replacing the windows and they restored whole neighbourhoods. Families and businesses moved back because hope in that neighbourhood was restored.
No one wants to live in a hopeless place. Giuliani said, “Where there is no hope in the future, there is no power in the present.”
We too need not only hope for the future but the power it gives us for the present.
This is why the first Sunday of Advent we focus on hope; that hope that breeds love. Not just any hope, but spawned by the birth of Christ when love came into the world, leading to the hope of the Second Coming of the Saviour and the establishment of his Kingdom here on earth.
So we wait. Much of Scripture, and much of our lives in fact, involves waiting of some kind. So how we spend our time waiting is pretty important.
Paul writes his first letter to the Thessalonians to encourage them and strengthen their hearts in holiness as they wait in hope for Jesus’ return.
He says to them this great hope we have in Christ is manifested in love for each other and prays in v.12 that the “Lord [will] make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all,” just as they are doing.
Paul truly loved all the churches he planted. However, in two of them, Philippi and Thessalonica, he never needed to attempt to try to correct the way they conducted themselves, because they were truly loving and joyous church fellowships.
The Thessalonians’ committed faith, and the love flowing from that, was a great encouragement to Paul and to all who heard of them. Their commitment to faith had a ripple effect on those around them, starting from within and moving outward.
This faith came from the hope planted in their hearts by the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit gives shape to our waiting too.
Now Paul’s leadership, his leadership model if you like, of all his churches was based on his deep love for all his congregations, who were all under threat of persecution. To lead by loving, what a concept!
Today’s Christian communities are enduring our own forms of adversity, but the adversity we face is mostly of our own doing and takes the form of a sort of apathy. Indeed, history has proven the sword of persecution to be less threatening than the swaddle of apathy.
In Paul’s letters, he urges his churches to imitate him and his love for them. To be a disciple is to do as our teacher does. That is, to do as Jesus did, of which Paul was the exemplar.
Paul is saying to the Thessalonians, love each other as Jesus loves you, and just as I love you – he himself models the kind of love he desires to see at work among the Thessalonians.
Advent is a time when we purposely remember that we are waiting. With the bustle of the season we often focus our attention on our waiting for Christmas, but this advent season marks so much more than that.
It’s a season in which we remember that we are a people who wait for and anticipate Jesus’ coming, both as an infant human and as the resurrected son of God who will come again to bring us into his resurrection life.
Advent is the stuff of the “now but not yet kingdom,” a time in which we see God at work, we act on our faith in Jesus and love for one another, and we wait for Jesus to come again.
Through Paul’s encouragement of the Thessalonians, we learn in this passage how to be faithful disciples in our season of waiting.
How do we do that? The great clue is in v.12 which tells us it is a result of prayer. Asking the lord to make us increase and abound in love for one another and for all.
Paul calls them to continue to be loving, but not just to one another. Their love is meant to extend outside of their intimate community and to the world around them. Furthermore, Paul believes this kind of active love will strengthen their hearts in holiness.
Because to love another person is to see the face of God. (As Victor Huge wrote in Les Miserable).
To love one another is an act of holiness that draws us into a divine fellowship with the one whose image we bear, The Lord God Almighty. This is the one we wait for.
I wonder what it means to abound in love, rather than to simply express it. I think it means that it is easy to limit our love, as if we have a finite store of compassion within us and we need to keep it in reserve for those we are close to.
But I don’t think that is true. There isn’t a limit for the love we share; it seems to be self-replenishing because it comes from God. The act of extending this holy love is, in part, what helps it to abound and multiply within us and our communities.
It is in the very act of loving, that enables us to be filled more and more with compassion for others. In v.13 Paul then says that this is what actually strengthens our hearts so we are found to be “blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints,” or as we can say today, at the Advent of our Lord Jesus.
This time we spend waiting for Christmas in the season of Advent isn’t simply a time to count down and bide our time for something bigger and better; the wait itself is an opportunity to engage the world around us in holy love for God, each other, and the world around us. Let us pray.