In 2021, let’s make a covenant with God. An agreement to discover who we are in God, and then shamelessly to be that person. That is all God asks of you. As we grow in our relationship with God we become more fully who we are. Growing in Christ means becoming our true selves in all our uniqueness and beauty.

God so loved the world that he didn’t just send a book of instructions, an email, a text, or a tweet. Neither did he merely send a messenger to represent him. God didn’t stand on the edge of heaven and shout “I love you” very loudly, or tap out Morse code, or wave semaphore flags, or any of the other ingenious ways human beings use to express their thoughts and feelings. When God wanted to tell us he loves us he took his Word and made it human. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

The real Jesus is so much more than human beings can imagine or understand. All those knock-offs are one-dimensional. He’s a baby or a judge or a miracle-worker or a social worker. But the genuine Jesus will not be reduced to a one-dimensional cut-out, The real Jesus will not be owned by Liberals or Conservatives; he will not be defined by the Right or the Left; he will not be controlled by Protestants or Catholics or Charismatics or Mainliners or Evangelicals. Jesus, the Genuine Jesus, is bigger than all that. He shocks and offends all of us – left, right, and center.

Over these nine months, God has shown us many things, and here’s an important one – waiting is a gift.

Waiting for the vaccine helps me think of people who need life-saving drugs every day – the type-1 diabetic, the dialysis user, the cancer patient.

Waiting for the travel restrictions to lift gives me sympathy for people who live with a disability which prevents them from ever going out even before Covid.

Waiting for restaurants and entertainment venues to re-open forces me to empathize with under-resourced people who even before Covid couldn’t afford to eat out or attend a concert.

Waiting for my normal routine to resume so that I can have the days off and the vacation time that my contract grants me makes me pray for those who would love to have a job but are among the 10 million who can’t find one.

But the Advent hope is stronger than that. It’s resilient because it comes from God, it’s robust because it takes root in our hearts, it is solid because it is built on the foundation of God’s faithfulness rather than our feeble hands and fickle passions. The Advent hope is more of an expectation than a wish. This Advent Sunday, we expect God to tear open the heavens and come down. We expect that one day Christ will return to establish peace, justice and union with God. Yes, we expect things to be smelly until then, but we expect to find a pony in the middle of it.

You can tell that their love is genuine because they do something about it. They don't just talk about helping the under-resourced, they get involved, they sacrifice, they meet the need when they can. That’s always the test of reality, the hallmark of authenticity – 'does it change people?'

True faith isn’t content to dig a hole and hide God’s gifts. Real faith risks time and energy, reputation and comfort, friendships and a quiet life. Faith is spelled R-I-S-K. But what’s the alternative? Digging a hole and hiding our talents, our time, our energy, our cash, our words, our love? Because burying these things in the ground is not free of risk either. In the ground, our gifts decay, our passion rots, our joy withers and rusts, and dies. “To whom much is given, of them much is expected, says Jesus elsewhere.” “The sin of respectable people is running away from responsibility”, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And he should know – he was a German pastor who was martyred for speaking out against the Nazi regime.

John Wesley, the great Anglican evangelist whose work in the UK and America has shaped 250 years of church history, wrote this in his diaries, "Today I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them:

"1. to vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy;

2. to speak no evil of the person they voted against;

3. to take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side."

In a year of loss we dare to trust God. We give it up and let it go. We know that hoarding our resources, be they money, time, or our personal talents, does not grow the Kingdom of God. We know the secret that when we give the work of our hands, even when we think we have nothing to give, God does prosper our work. because if not us, then who; and if it’s not now, then when?

We are the bearers of his image. Dare we put ourselves in circulation?

People follow the money. When they see us being God’s coins, bearing his likeness, sharing his kindness, they will follow the one whose image we bear. They will follow you to the Father, they will follow you to the throne of grace.