I have often wondered why Advent, the church season that we have entered today, never feels like the beginning of a new year.  For it is the church's new year - as important and profound as the new year that we will celebrate in just over a month.  And maybe that is part of the problem.  Having two new year's celebration so close to each other almost certainly means that one or both of them will be muted by the proximity.  You can't have two major "head of the year" parties (that, by the way, is the meaning of the Jewish New Year Rosh (head) Hashanah (the year )).  Again, that maybe one of the reasons that Advent doesn't feel like the real beginning of a year - it's not exactly party-time.  New Year's celebrations (the ones that come on December 31 and January 1) are full of parties and champagne toasts and noise makers and parades.  It is a time of high merriment.  Advent, on the other hand, is a muted celebration at best.  We sing of longing and need.  Many of our hymns are in a minor key.  We sing "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence."  For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the days continue to shorten and the last hold out of trees sheds its leaves.  On a very practical note, we already have a second "new year's" in the church - the beginning of the school year - which brings a flurry of new planning, new programs, and new opportunities.

But I believe there is another reason why Advent does feel like New Year's for so many of us.  It is because it is presupposed on an experience of time that feels like no other new year's celebration that we know.  On December 31 and January 1, we tend to look back over the past - the newspapers will be full of "year-in-review" columns.  Was this a good year or a bad year?  For the Cardinals it was iffy, then very good, then not so good.  For the country politically it was tedious and tense and then, depending on your political affiliation, it was either very good or very bad - and for many perhaps more a sense of relief that the whole thing is over.  These assessment go on and on as we close the book on another year.  The other "time" exercise we engage in on New Year's is looking forward.  We anticipate what the next year will bring and many of us resolve to be better, richer, thinner, healthier, happier, more giving, less codependent that last year.  We remember the past and wait for the future.  This approach pretty much coheres how we experience time.  The time is fixed and pushes us toward a future that is unknown and yet to be determined.

But Advent introduces a completely different sense of time.  On this new year's we wait for the past.  At different times of my life I have found Advent to be odd.  We talk about the incarnation (that moment in time when God became one of us) as if it never happened.  We sing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" like he never came and wouldn't come if we didn't sing it.  We sing "What Child Is This?" as if we didn't know.  We sing "Watchmen Tell Us of the Night" as if we didn't know what they would tell us.  And the fact is that we know the story so well that I daresay each one of us, even down to the youngest child in this church could "tell us of the night."  And yet, we wait for this past event - and we wait so intently that we prepare our hearts and homes and Sanctuary for it - just like we are waiting for it for the first time.

Advent, however, not only plays with our notions of the past; it also introduces a new way to interact with the future.  Our reading from Matthew today is not a call to wait for the nativity - that is the first coming.  In this passage, Jesus calls us to prepare and wait for the second coming: "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming."  How strange that during a time that is so focused on the past, that we are called to turn our attention to the future.  In the very season when we prepare to wait for the first coming, we are instructed by Jesus to wait for the second coming.  Like most other new year's celebrations, we have a past and future component.  But again in Advent, our concept of time is altered.  Jesus speaks of the second coming, that is, he speaks of God's future, not as some vague possibility, but as a certainty.  He speaks of the future like we often speak of the past - as a given.  He tells us that we may not know the hour, that we must be alert and awake, but that the hour is surely coming - of that we can be sure.  Throughout scripture we are given pictures of that day - a day when there will be no more crying and death is swallowed up - a day when the lion shall lie down with lamb and every shall live at peace.  The Bible is full of visions that start with the phrase "The days are surely coming..." and "in those days..."  Jesus and all the prophets speak of God's future with a concreteness and a certainty.  And in so doing, they do not call us wait for an unknown future, but to remember a certain future.

Waiting for the past; remembering the future.  No wonder that Advent doesn't feel like the beginning of a new year; this concept of time flies in the face of our usual understanding of time - an understanding that is reinforced when we change our calendars.  This approach to time also counters our usual rhetoric of time - a rhetoric that was forever capture in George Santayana's famous quotation: "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."  According to Santayana, the past is a fixed event or series of events that are to be remembered and learned from.  And the only way to have a predetermined future, a known future, is repetition of the past that comes from forgetting it.  This sense of time is reinforced by our own experiences of time.  By and large, we think of our past as something that is over and done with - and there is nothing we can do to change it.  And that past pushes our present toward an unknown future.  We certainly believe that there are things we can do to improve our future - get an education, start exercising, go on a diet, but for the most part, the future is a great unknown.  The known past pushes our present toward an unknown future.

But God's time, a time that breaks in on us in Advent, rearranges all sense of time.  In God's time, it is the future that is known, and it pulls the present toward it and thus has the ability to change the past.  Think about that - it is not the future which is fluid and changeable, but the past.  And we affirm that every Sunday when we confess our sins.  By confessing our sins, we not only acknowledge what has happened, but we ask God to change what has happened - that our past be finished and gone and everything become fresh and new.  God's future also transforms our past when we discover God's call for reconciliation - reconciliation between individuals or nations.  So often we feel that past wrongs completely determine the future.  We break off relationships and if things get really tense, we go to war.  But God's future calls us to a new past - a past where we can find common ground and a new beginning.  This is why it is so important that in Advent we wait for the past.  We wait for the past - even a past we know by heart - so that we can experience the God who not only calls us to a better future, but to a redeemed past.  When we wait for the Christ child who was born 200 years ago and who is born to us "this day," we acknowledge with our whole being that God is at work in the world today - that the scriptures - those that we call "our story" really is our story.  And that it still has the power to save us and transform us - not only into the future, but into the past.

And we remember the future.  When we remember the future, we are relieved of a tremendous amount of anxiety.  We have anxiety over all sorts of things - our health, our family's health, our children, our parents, our environment, our security and safety as individuals, as a nation and as a world.  But Advent with its remembrance of the second coming of Jesus reminds us that not only does he have the whole world in his hands, but he has all of time and all of our lives in his hands.  We may not know what the weather will be tomorrow, we many not know if we are going to be attacked tomorrow, but we know that God will be in our midst and will hold us and call us to live in the new heaven and the new earth - a new heaven and earth where there will be no more crying and no more dying.  Advent allows us to remember that future so that we can live more fully and more free today.

 In Advent we wait for the past and remember the future.  When we remember God's future - a better future that is promised and whose fulfillment will come - we no longer have to live in the grip of anxiety.  Remembering God's future does not mean that we will not experience difficulties and loss - we will.  But remembering God's future, means we don't have to worry about what will happen - for the future, the known future, is in God's hands.