Advent I is the start of a new Christian year. The readings are always powerfully apocalyptic - passages from Jeremiah and Luke (this year) or Isaiah and Matthew (last year) that focus on the end of time, and the Second Coming of Christ. Why do we begin the year by thinking about the Second Coming, and not the First - the birth of Jesus? The answer is that the Incarnation is NOT the start of the story of our salvation, but rather a crucial moment within it. At the start of a new spiritual year it is essential that we bring to mind the great

cosmic sweep of time within which God acts - from Creation to Redemption - and thereby renew our sense of the immeasurable 'power, might and majesty' of the God we worship, a sense easily, and comfortably, submerged in the more homely images of Bethlehem.

At the same time, this is not simply a matter of cosmic theology. The task is to shape our own lives around the very same story, and to grasp this truth -- that for each one of us Birth is the moment of creation and Death the end of time, and that at some point in our journey from the cradle to the grave, God comes to us in Christ as our salvation.

Advent I is also the Sunday on which we use Thomas Cranmer's most enduring Collect, a prayer that he specially composed for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. It has served its purpose for 460 years, and even now has been retained in all the newest versions of the Prayerbook. This is because of the wonderful way in which Cranmer uses Biblical phrases to weave together the cosmic and the personal aspects of Advent. His most beautiful Collect gives us the words to ask that in the time of our mortal lives, we may come to acknowledge the astonishing humility with which God came to visit us, and thereby find the grace to cast away the works of darkness.