First Sunday of Advent.
† Sunday 3rd December 2000
Cycle of Prayer: Migrants and Refugees - Migrants Day

Theme: Longing, and waiting eagerly for Christ’s coming!

A reading from the Prophet Jeremiah 33: 14 - 16
These words are from a collection of the prophet’s Messianic oracles added to the text after Jeremiah’s time. God will fulfil the Promise made to King David. For the day will come and one of David’s descendants, “will practice honesty and integrity in the land, and Judah will be saved and Israel dwell in confidence.” The People of Israel wait, with eagerness, looking forward to better times, for the coming saviour king, their Messiah, the anointed one.

The first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians 3: 12 - 4:2
This text is part of a three-fold blessing in the style of letter writing at the time. Paul asks that the Lord will “so confirm your hearts in holiness, that you may be blameless in the sight of God the Father when our Lord Jesus Christ comes with all his saints.” For Paul, and his readers within the early Christian communities, there was the expectation that Christ would return soon. There is an urgency in his plea that you, “make more and more progress in the kind of life that you are meant to live: the life that God wants.”

Gospel according to Luke 21: 25 - 28. 34 - 36
“Your liberation is near at hand,” says the evangelist, “watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened with…the cares of life, and that day will be sprung on you suddenly like a trap.” Luke having listed the cosmic signs of the end of time, encourages the faithful to have the confidence, to hold their heads boldly erect, “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen… and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.”

© Peter Harrison 2000