This weekend ushers in the season of Advent. We often hear sermons that tell us how increasingly difficult it is to celebrate Advent properly - the shops and lights, the incessant carols and jingles, the sheer commercialisation of it all preludes a proper time of waiting for the Christ child. And that’s of course where the sermons go off-beam somewhat because, as is clear from the readings of this Sunday, quite a bit of Advent is nothing to do with the Christ child at all. The first part of Advent is about the Second Coming of Christ.

It’s that message, that ‘Christ will come again’, that the world and the Church so badly needs to hear. Our hope for the future is not some airy, fairy idea of a heaven far away but the Kingdom that will be established by Christ when he returns in glory. And for that Kingdom we are to pray - and watch. We are called to be awake for the Master when he returns and to pray that we will be about the tasks he has given us. We should not fear the Lord’s return we should earnestly seek it and until then we are to do what we heard him command so clearly in the gospel for the feast of Christ the King: feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned. It’s that message that the carols and the carousing, jingles and the jangles, the commercialisation are drowning out, and which our self-obsessed society needs to hear. P.D.