How close to ready do you think you are?

I imagine that a fair proportion of you are more prepared for Christmas than I am. With less than a week to go, I still have to buy most of my presents, am yet to write a single card, and have lost my voice. Maybe it’s more of a comment on my own personal organisation, but I find that despite reliably coming on December 25th every year, Christmas has a way of sneaking up on you. One minute it’s a few weeks away and the next you’ve missed the last postal deadline.

Advent is a time when we not only prepare for Christmas, but we also reflect on preparing for the return of Jesus. But if my fumbling attempts to get a few cards and presents in the right place at the right time is faintly comical (unless you’re my ever patient wife), the very idea of preparing ourselves for the return of Jesus risks being ridiculous.

All through Advent, we’ve been looking at things we’ve been given to prepare us for the return of Jesus. We’ve heard the call to repent, we’ve seen the Scriptures have been given to give us hope, we’ve remembered those like John the Baptist sent to prepare the way. But is that really enough? Even with the call to repent – can we ever repent enough to be ready? Even with the encouragement of the Scriptures, don’t we find all too often that we are slow to hear? Even with those God sends into our lives to call us to follow, aren’t we continually reminded how flawed and fallible they are themselves? Even with everything God has provided to get us ready, with all those things on our side, we can still seem so unprepared, so inadequate.

The fourth and final collect for Advent, the one we close the season on, is a pastoral masterpiece that acknowledges this difficulty.

O LORD, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through the satisfaction of thy Son our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.*

Advent ends with the confession that, even when we are at some level trying to focus on repentance and preparation for the day of Christ, even then we find that our sins and wickedness grievously hinder us in heeding the call. Yes, we repent of our sins. Yes, we burrow into our Bibles. Yes, we pay attention to those who pastor us. But what ultimately gets us over the line is God’s power, his bountiful grace and mercy, his willingness to speedily help and deliver us.

This isn’t to make a mockery of everything that has gone before in Advent. This isn’t just an elaborate ruse, culminating in a ‘gotcha’ moment to convince you of the Protestant understanding of justification.** This emphasis on grace has been there from the beginning. The first collect of Advent, the one we repeat every day, starts by asking God to give us grace to repent.

Advent repentance is based on the recognition that we must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in us, both to will and work (Phil 2:12b-13). The comfort of Advent IV is based on the confidence that he who began a good work in us will, our sins and wickedness notwithstanding, bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6). As Advent closes we realise that what we thought was us preparing ourselves was more truly God preparing us.

This Advent has gone by in a bit of a blur for me to be honest. A combination of illness, a family funeral and the rush of pre-Christmas ministry has meant I haven’t given it the attention I would like. I feel ‘sore let and hindered’ by my own sinfulness. The reading assigned for Advent IV, Phil 4:4-7, encourages me – as it has in other years – that the Lord is at hand to help. God’s grace is ever ready to hear our prayers, his peace has been given to guard our hearts. With a little more time left before Christmas than you often get at Advent IV, this seems like a good time to reset my Advent.

Almighty God, give us grace…

*It’s probably as good a moment as any to mention that my wife and I don’t pray in 17th century English at home. When I’m reading these out I tend to translate them into modern English in my head. Common Worship replaces ‘sore let and hindered’ with ‘grievously hindered’ and I might replace ‘succour’ with something like ‘support’.

** It does brilliantly apply that doctrine. But unlike the first two collects we looked at, this collect isn’t actually a product of the Reformation. It comes from the Gelasian Sacramentary, an ancient liturgical manual written in around 750. It’s actually really encouraging to see how pastorally astute and friendly to Reformed convictions these ancient collects are.