When we are reassuring a friend, comforting a loved one, encouraging a colleague - someone who has really, really, messed up badly, and just as badly as they fear they have, we sometimes say, "Oh, well, it's not the end of the world." Unhappily that is what Advent Sunday is all about - the end of the world.

I don't think people come to church to be scolded or scared, but I think we do come, I sure do, to find help in facing hard facts, really difficult issues, nasty surprises, terrible times . . . problems of all sorts that affect our spiritual lives and our faith and our love and our hope. And that is what we are to get to take form Advent each year, despite the downbeat imagery - hope and help.

Every year, on the First Sunday of Advent, all the Gospel imagery, regardless of which Gospel is being quoted on any given year is always about the end of the world - and not just some quiet fading of the light into eons of stellar darkness - but something far more deranged: one year's Gospel speaks of distress of nations and perplexity of souls, men and women fainting with fear and foreboding, one year predicts the powers of the heavens themselves will be relentlessly shaken. One year's Gospel compares it all to a second Great Flood, sweeping it all away, and like a thief in the night, who is going to clean you out of everything before you even know what's happening.

The season of Advent has a better reputation than Lent, and I am not sure why. Lent to be sure, has never been seen as time for much lighthearted fun, but in its own way, Advent is just as much of a downer. Lent asks us to focus on our sins, to prepare spiritually for splendor of Easter and our share in that, and while Advent eventually gets down to preparing us for the glory and hope and peace of Christmas, the very beginning - that, this - First Sunday of Advent reminds us Jesus will appear, he will return, we will stand before him and he will want to know what we did and why. We don't think too much about that, nor should we, people who think too much about that aren't doing well. But we ought to think occasionally about it and well before it becomes a rush job.

It all sounds rushed from the world's point of view: "Four weeks before Christmas and I am also supposed to make time to plan for the end of the world and the conclusion of my life and the account I must one day give to Christ of my actions and my thoughts? Not very good timing is it?"

But from the Church's point of view it is not too late, it is the beginning of the year, not the end, a time especially set aside in the church to re-look, re-examine, our lives, what is good, what needs repair, what needs repentance, what needs to be added, what needs to stopped, and soon. The night is far-spent, the day is at hand, we are to get serious about "casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light."

As the world all around us is building into holiday craziness, this is the time the church sets aside for us all to be especially, deliberately, quiet and unexciting, subdued and reflective so that here at least here at least, once each week at least, for one hour at least, how we have done what we hoped, and how we have missed the mark,. A time in our lives together as Christians, to pause and take time to look at who we are what we have let ourselves become and to wonder why and how and am I satisfied or self-conscious hopeful or discouraged, or something very much in-between. The likeliest answer I suspect.

But Advent doesn't want us to listlessly relax into idly examining, vaguely considering our lives the way we might consider a new outfit or a new purchase. Advent keeps slipping in warnings - not nasty but pointed:

"Watch for you do not know at what hour your master is coming, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep" We are told to "Cast away the works of darkness, put on the armor of light" and to "heed the warnings of the prophets and forsake your sins:, and at the very close of the season, we offer a humble prayer that "we might purify ourselves as he is pure". Whoa, a tall order there!

We have all lived though, mostly spared and only heard about more than experienced, a year of natural disaster after natural disaster - the Tsunami in Asia, the very day after last Christmas, and then a season of unprecedented hurricanes, leading to the unimaginable horror of Katrina, and the final blow of Wilma, the earthquake and huge loss of life in Pakistan, and a man-made disasters as well - the terrorist attacks in downtown London - what a year!

A year, like Advent each year, to take a real and resilient and unsentimental assessment of just how fragile is our safety, how suddenly it can all change, what risk we run just living, just doing ordinary things, not taking foolhardy risks, just being there a the wrong time in the wrong place. A prudent regard for personal safety and deep concern for our families and friends is right and needed, but as Christians, people who go through Advent, and through disasters often enough - national, international, local, and personal, we need to accept and deal with the knowledge that we are finally, in the end, unable to make ourselves so safe we will never be hurt, and wounded, dispossessed of all with have, killed by accident even or design. There was a Collect in the old Prayer Book that asked for God's wisdom and grace to "make us always deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertain of life."

That is what Advent is about, that is its role, in the Church Year, in our worship, in our lives. Advent insists we know, really know, in a deeply "sensible" way that awful things can and do and always will happen to people, even people of great and exemplary lives.

But that is just the start of Advent, a serious and clear-eyed start - but that is not the end of Advent, that is not the point of Advent, that is not the full direction of Advent. Advent is, always and unmistakably building towards also reminding us, reminding us above all, that, after all, after all is said and done and suffered, there is hope, real and genuine and saving hope. Advent gives an early glimmer of that hope, the first faint showing of triumph, though still well below the horizon, granted.

For the other great theme of Advent - besides the end of the world business - creeps in and builds beautifully.

Advent above all wants to expect, know, believe, that no matter how bad or seemingly hopeless or pointless things are or may become, it is at just at that point, at that very point that God enters human, when things are at their worst.

Advent asks us to remember and accept and rejoice in knowing that God does not just approach our world, our lives, our hurts and wounds in some indestructible and triumphant way as we picture him at the end of the world. In Advent we see that God also prepares an entrance as a newborn - a human newborn - surely as helpless as any of us in the worst of our times

Even with all our hurts and wounds and even tragedies, in our heartache, although we will suffer and grief, we will not be undone or defeated or destroyed. We, and those we know, and those we only heard of in compassion, will suffer in this life, as God suffered. In that little baby born in Bethlehem, we believe that God opened himself up to all our suffering, to all the hurt and pain and destruction and horror of humans. God himself, God himself, made himself vulnerable, open to hurt and pain and suffering. That child to be born will one day come again in power and glory. And we will share in all of that glory and triumph, because we have shared in all the pain as well. And prepared for, in Advent, and well beyond.