I was sixteen and I’d just started going to the church of St John the Evangelist in Hammersmith, London. I think I’d only been there for two Sundays when Fr Canning, the priest at St John’s, asked me if I would be their Cub Leader. Even with no experience of looking after small seven year-old boys, I heard myself saying ‘yes’……

What does this have to do with today’s gospel reading, or indeed, with the gospel for the first Sunday of Advent? Well, I was certainly not prepared for such a question but to have refused Fr Canning’s gentle request was unthinkable. Being a Cub Leader was an education….but that’s another story.

However, the true message is, as I’m sure many of you already know, that the overall motto for the Scout movement is ‘Be Prepared’.

And so we prepare as we enter into this penitential season of Advent reflection, by pondering questions of our faith – of watching and waiting for the stupendous event that we commemorate each year – the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, born to us of a human woman. It’s a serious but not a sombre period, one during which we should arrive at Christmas Day full of renewed joy and hope.

Think of times in your own lives when you’ve been anticipating something that promises to be life-changing – perhaps studying for an important exam, or preparing for an interview for a job that you really want, or it might be that you were expecting your own baby. In all these occasions, you are full of hope but you also have a serious intent. You really want it to all go as you long for, that your hope and happiness will be fulfilled.

So you prepare. You read all those books that will be useful to your exams, you bone up on the background to the job you want, you get the nursery ready and go to childbirth classes….and you don’t engage in activities that will spoil your chances of success

I think that this message is contained in today’s gospel, in which we find a reference to ‘the days of Noah’…What I found troubling in the story of Noah is that the people who were Noah’s neighbours were going about their lives in ways that seemed to them normal and yet, if you read Genesis 6, you’ll see that ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.’ So, were they prepared? Were they fulfilling what St Paul tells us that we should be doing – to ‘live honourably’?

But how do we ‘live honourably’? Earlier in Paul’s letter, he spells it out for us:

‘8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. ….whatever other commands there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law.’

We always seem to come back to those two commandments that Jesus said were more important than any others – to love God and love our neighbour. Is this why, as Jesus says, ‘one will be taken and one will be left’? Is it that one of them is someone who is fulfilling Jesus’s commandment and the other isn’t?

I would say that knowing this, that ‘love is the fulfilment of the law’, is the personal preparation that we should be doing – not just in Advent of course, but always. Because I think that Jesus – and Paul – are giving us a way not just of doing but of being. And then we have the delight of living, not in fear of retribution, as, for me, this gospel reading seems to offer at first sight, but in God’s love. And just like Noah, we are preparing. Noah built an ark and in a way, we are too. Even our church fabric symbolises that. Look up at the ceiling of this church – it’s deliberately like the hull of a boat – upside down, of course! And you’re in the nave – Latin for ‘boat’. So we too are preparing for God’s coming but this time, it won’t be a flood – God promised that that should never happen again – but especially in the season of Advent, what we are really getting ready for is the final coming of the Son of Man. We should be building the church in order to get ready for Christ’s coming. Before that time, as we eat and drink and live our daily lives, I guess we sometimes feel disheartened because some people say that the church is a waste of time and money. We are here because we believe otherwise. We believe that the church is here to help us to prepare for Jesus’ return to earth, and to help the world to get ready, too. Just as the ark was built by Noah to get ready for the flood, we are building his church on earth to get ready for his promised return.

His promised return. It’s built into our church’s faith and into our liturgy. Said in various ways, we proclaim it every Sunday. The version I used to say as a Catholic was very short:

‘Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again’. As a congregation, we proclaimed it together.

We mustn’t forget that last phrase. Christ will come again, and we need to be prepared because unlike Noah, we don’t know when that will be. Even Jesus didn’t know, so how could we?

So, like the Scouts, let’s be prepared. Remember what Jesus promised to St John the Apostle in the final words of the Book of Revelation, “Surely I am coming soon”. And let us, with St John, joyfully reply, as we travel through this holy season, “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus”.

Gerry Ewan (Lay Worship Leader)