I am writing this a few days before the great feast of Christ the King, the final Sunday of the Church’s year, which is followed by Advent Sunday which, with an amazing leap of logic, is the first Sunday of the Church’s year!

I’m sure that most people have noticed that the Church, like much else in the world, works on cycles of time: the year begins with Advent; moves into Christmas and Epiphany and then on to Lent. That is followed by Easter, moving on to Pentecost, Trinity and then the vast number of Sundays of Ordinary Time or Sundays after Pentecost. All of this is punctuated with Feast Days and Fast Days. Then the end comes, Christ the King, and we are back to the beginning with Advent. All very neat and yet all a little deceptive! It seems like a perpetual cycle, but in reality it is not.

Let me briefly contrast the Christian ‘cycle’ with the cycle of Hinduism – which is much more definite. In Hindu mythology, creation neither begins nor ends, it always is. The universe is created, goes through its eons of time and then ceases, only to be reborn. Like a circle it has no beginning or end. The Christian ‘cycle’ might look similar, but in reality it is always moving forward towards an end, a consummation.

What we learn from that is that although things might sometimes look the same, they never really are; that we cannot go back to what was before. We are constantly moving into the new. Of course, we can learn from what has gone before; that is why it looks from a casual view of the Church year that things are just repeated. But all that is repeated is the story, repeated so that we can constantly renew it for a new time.

In our personal lives we have to accept this; we can learn from our mistakes, we can repent of our sins. But we must never expect to go back and do it all again ; we are constantly moving forward.

And our church is no different; we might look back at the ‘glorious’ past (which might well not have been as glorious as we remember it!) and wish that things might go back to the way they were; but they never will be. In Christ we are called into a constant journey, a perpetual movement. The church of 2011 is not the same as the church of 1960!

The past must not be discarded; what has been before is the firm foundation on which our present is lived. We will only understand, and be able to take part in, that which is to come when we take in that which has already been. In the church’s year we are constantly being told “Hear the story; study the story; understand the story.” It is a real risk not to.

The Season of Advent points us in both directions: to the Incarnation, the fact of God becoming human: and to the return of Christ at the end. The future is founded in the past. But the Feast of Christ the King, at the end of the year, is also a great reminder: that, in the end, Christ is the ruler, that we can trust in him for what is to come.

And this is something that we, the Church, have to offer the world. The Good News that things do not have to be the same, that we are all moving towards something great and glorious! That there is hope! We are not just in an endless cycle in which we can do nothing and which overwhelms us; we can move forward, into the perfect rule of God.