Open Your Gifts Early

Mt. Lebanon United Methodist Church, November 29, 2020

1 Corinthians 1:3–9 (CEB)

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I thank my God always for you, because of God’s grace that was given to you in Christ Jesus. That is, you were made rich through him in everything: in all your communication and every kind of knowledge, in the same way that the testimony about Christ was confirmed with you. The result is that you aren’t missing any spiritual gift while you wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will also confirm your testimony about Christ until the end so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and you were called by him to partnership with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent, of course, is the season where we anticipate the coming of Christ. We do that in two ways; we look forward to our celebration of Christ’s first coming, as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem, but we also use that as a symbol of the ways in which we look forward to Christ’s return.

As I was looking at the Lectionary passages for this first Sunday of Advent, the passage from Mark and the passage from Isaiah were both apocalyptic in nature, looking forward to some of the darker, more ominous aspects of…