"Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 

(Luke 21:29-30)

One thing about driving is you can’t avoid road signs. They’re everywhere. Some slightly puzzle me. “Squirrels drive slowly”: well of course they do - their little legs can hardly reach the pedals. “Falling Rocks”: what exactly am I supposed to do about that? Swerve a lot? “Thank You For Driving Carefully”: How do they know? There are the signs that tell you where you are. Usually they’re quite friendly: “Welcome to Lockerbie”. Recently, because I’ve been working over there, I’ve passed “Here comes Langholm” which I found a little intimidating. Then there are signs that tell you which direction to go in which I frequently miss and get horribly lost.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the size of a sign doesn’t always reflect it’s importance. I was driving North some years ago and the weather was absolutely glorious; wall to wall blue sky and sunshine. There was one of those big signs you get on the motorway - the huge black ones - and it said “Torrential Rain Due Thursday”. This was Monday. On the other hand I was looking for a stone circle in Glenrothes and all I got by way of a direction sign was a wee twelve inch by four inch notice.

You get big signs and you get small signs and the size of the sign doesn’t always relate to its importance. There was something that struck me about the Gospel passage we read today. It’s part of what’s sometimes called ‘the little Apocalypse’ and it appears in Matthew Mark and Luke with slightly different wording. In it Jesus gives his disciples instructions as to the signs they should be looking for when God’s Kingdom is near. And yes, it has all the big stuff - signs in the sky, war, the destruction of Jerusalem that was present in the apocalyptic literature of the time. But in the middle of all that talk of mayhem and destruction and points to something small and  absolutely normal - the sprouting of leaves on a fig tree. These, he says, are signs of Summer.

This is the first Sunday in Advent and we start to look forward to celebrating the coming of Christ; to God’s fulfilment of his promise, as Jeremiah puts it, to cause a righteous branch to spring up for David. For hundreds of years people waited for the coming of that branch; for the coming of the Messiah. Probably they were expecting a really big sign. Maybe the birth of a mighty king in the palace in Jerusalem. Maybe the coming of a mighty war leader to make Israel a great nation again - and not just a great nation but the greatest of all nations. Maybe God himself would descend from Heaven and make his temple truly his home. Read the Old Testament prophets and you’ll find hints of all these things. Big signs but were they truly signs of Summer?

When the Messiah came he came in such a small, apparently normal way. It’s something I’ve always wondered about in Luke’s story of the Nativity: the angels appear to the shepherds and tell them to go to Bethlehem and look for a child wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger and that will be a sign for them. A sign of what? Swaddling bands were normal. Laying a new born child in a manger may not have been normal but among the poor makeshift cribs couldn’t have been entirely unknown. And yet for the shepherds this was to be a sign of Summer.

And maybe that’s the point. If we’re looking for signs of the coming of God’s Kingdom we have to pay attention to how God entered this world - in something so small and so apparently normal as the birth of a baby to a poor couple, witnessed only by shepherds - people who were on the margins of society and often treated with contempt by ‘decent society’. Yet it was they who were given this sign - a sign of Summer.

Maybe this is the point. Too often we look for big signs for the coming of God’s Kingdom. In America at the moment Christian Nationalism is a big thing: the idea that they can use secular power in the form of Government to impose Christian values and beliefs on the country: to bring in the Kingdom of God. Mystic Morton speaks - that’s not going to end well. In other parts of the world and in other times people have taken up arms in crusades and jihads to enforce their faiths; to bring in the Kingdom of God. But they did nothing of the sort. They were big signs but not signs of Summer.

All that big stuff misses the point. The Kingdom of God is already here, born with the baby of Bethlehem. It is here and now and we so often miss it because we get distracted by the big stuff and miss the small signs of Summer. They say that the Devil is in the details. No. The Devil is in the big things like the temptations of power and the times of war and destruction. God is in the details. God is in the fruits of the Spirit; in the countless acts of kindness and generosity and big-heartedness that we all of us so often see in the world; in the countless times folk forgive the people who have hurt them; in millions of tiny, apparently normal examples of humanity being what we are meant to be: children of God, made in the image of God.

Made to be what we have always been meant to be: signs of God’s Kingdom. Each of us, perhaps, as tiny and apparently normal as leaves sprouting on a fig tree. Each of us, insofar as we show forth the love of God in our lives, signs of Summer. Signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God

Father may we be clear signs however small we are. May we be signs of the coming of your Kingdom by following in the way of your Son

Preached at Baxter Hall Eastriggs and Annan Old Parish Church

Complete Service