[Text: Luke 21:28: “Now when these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”]

On this Advent Sunday, the first day of a new church year, the Dean has chosen to set before you in this pulpit an American bishop, which may just be all the proof you need that the end times spoken of by Jesus in Luke’s gospel are now well and truly upon us.
We have a reputation here, I know. We are too enthusiastic, too animated, too emotive, and too long. So if by mere chance you happened to know before you arrived in church this morning just what it was you would be faced with, all the more credit to you for your courage and forbearance in coming.

My English grandparents, who came to America a hundred years ago from Bath and from Berkshire, would never in a thousand years have expected that this grandchild would ever end up preaching in York Minister. Their expectations for all of us were considerably more modest.

But you will perhaps permit me to wonder—what was it you were expecting?

Maybe you have long since passed the point at which you expect anything at all from the preacher on Sunday morning. Perhaps you are among those who come faithfully to church not expecting anything new or insightful to be said, no more teaching with authority. Over the course of two thousand years it has all been said, and we come instead for the beauty, and the music, and the sacrament, and the community.

I find that in many of the churches I visit, that’s often the case. People have no more expectation of the preacher than to provide a warm bath of words between the gospel and the Creed. My own preaching professor, who once stood in this same pulpit, would not infrequently say to us beginning students—“Well, I came expecting nothing, and I got what I expected.” Is that what you expected?

I wonder what you are expecting of this year of grace that lies ahead of us, uncharted, today. What are you expecting for your family? What are you expecting for your work—or perhaps your search for work?

What are you expecting for health, and the health of those nearest to you?

What are you expecting for those whom you may know and love who are contending with a life-ending illness, in the wake of the vote in Parliament on Friday?

What you are expecting for your country in the year ahead, or for the new government in mine? What you are expecting about the miserable, grinding, depraved war over Ukraine’s future, or for the violence tearing apart the Holy Land, or for the one hundred and twenty million displaced people in the world desperately seeking refuge from the war and weather driving them from their homes?

And now that I’ve invited you on a tour d’horizon of all the things you’re expecting in the year ahead, I wonder whether I might just gently ask you: Where, in any of those—much less in each of them—are you expecting Christ?

God created us to be planners. We are blessed with memory, reason, and skill, as the prayer teaches us, but the purpose of the first is chiefly to refine and strengthen the second and the third to help us navigate our future. We are, by the grace of God, plan-making creatures—and by the mercy of God, able to change our plans when they turn out to have been poorly formed.

But for the most part, when we look toward the future, our expectations tend to fall into one of two camps—hopes, for our own ambitions or our own desires; and dreads, for the things we see on the horizon that might defeat or disappoint.

And for most of us, I’d wager, the balance between those is definitely leaning in the direction of dreads.

The thing is, in all of that there’s very little room for Christ in between our hopes and dreads—to say nothing of the Christ who is coming, Christ in glory, robed in dreadful majesty. We don’t lift our expectations much higher than the ground beneath our feet, let alone to the horizon in the East where the dangerous power of God’s love to change everything breaks like the dawn.

And that is a problem. Because it turns out that what we expect—the discipline we bring toward living toward the plans our expectations shape—has profound importance for our spiritual lives.

From the evidence in Luke’s gospel, it’s a little hard to make out just who it is Jesus is addressing in the teaching we heard this morning. We get two clues, one just at the end of the previous chapter, and one at the very end of this chapter, after what we heard this morning.

The first clue says that Jesus was saying these things to the disciples, but “in the hearing of all the people” (Luke 20:45). And the second clue says that “Every day he was teaching in the temple…. and all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple” (Luke 21:37-38).

So Jesus is speaking to a mixed crowd. He is speaking to those who have walked with him for three long, dusty years now, and to those who have just caught wind of his message. To say it differently, he is speaking to a wide variety of expectations about God. Which is to say, he is speaking directly to our condition here, in this moment, in this place, at the gate of this year.

The disciples are in that crowd; and if you look from here there is nothing to distinguish them. They are not more educated and not more wealthy. We don’t even have any reason to believe they are more religiously observant; we never see them spending a great deal of time in the synagogue, or Jesus, for that matter.

What sets them apart from most of the rest is something not about class or education or piety, but about their hearts. For reasons we’ll never fully know, they have each of them lived in the fervent, abiding expectation that God is going to enter their lives in some way. Their planning for the future has involved the constant lookout for God’s transforming love to show up.

God knows this, and that is why God calls them. And that is why what appears to us with the eyes of this world as the height of irresponsibility—leaving jobs and families and communities and the expectations of others behind to follow a wandering preacher—is for them merely the enacting of the expectation with which they have approached their future.

Mary has lived in the fervent, abiding expectation that God will enter her life in some way. Her planning for the future, young though she is, has involved the constant lookout for God’s transforming love to show up. And that is why, one fine day, Gabriel shows up on her doorstep.

And when the angel’s message comes in a way not just unexpected but questionably appropriate, when it comes with what appears to us with the eyes of this world as the height of irresponsibility, it is for her merely the enacting of the expectation with which she approaches her future.

So dear people of God, what about you? Can you make space somewhere between the hopes and the dreads in your heart to make a place for expecting Christ to enter into your life anew?

I am not your bishop, but I feel obliged to offer you this solemn word of warning: If there is any one thing we can learn from the Gospels that is incontrovertible, any one thing that is always and everywhere true, it is that no one— who encounters Christ—no one—leaves that moment
unchanged. No one.

And that is why so many people make every possible, desperate effort to avoid the meeting. Whether for good or ill, the presence of Christ, when it comes, will transform us. No one leaves unscathed. Some of our deepest convictions will be questioned; some of our most treasured institutions will be shaken; some of our most certain prejudices will be laid to ruin.

And in the midst of all that, as much today as in those first encounters, some will follow in faith; some will reject in outrage; and some, like the rich young ruler, will walk away, grieving.

I don’t know what it will be for you this Advent. I only know that if you look for it, if you expect it, it will surely come; and if you are ready for it, if you will risk it, it will change you, too.

So come with me out into the world, this world so cast over by what feels like the encroaching darkness. Come with me out to the hillside, and let us sit together, facing the east, waiting in expectation for the dawn to break.

Amen.