If it seems like the holiday season is starting earlier this year, there’s a good reason.

It is.

The earliest you can have Thanksgiving is November 21st, and this year, it’s on the 22nd.

And, as a result, everybody got a jump on it.

This year, Halloween decorations were up in the stores when they started stocking the shelves for Christmas. You had holiday wrapping paper sitting next to plastic pumpkins.

Then, it started to spread.

Retail analysts say that Wal-Mart led the way with big pre-holiday sales three weeks earlier than usual. Then all the other stores jumped in. Early November, the tree was already up at Rockefeller Center, windows around Manhattan were being re-done – and just a few days ago, they put up the new decorations here in Forest Hills, in Austin Street.

In Chicago, a radio station started playing all Christmas music on November 1st. Next Thursday, Thanksgiving, hundreds of others will join in around the country. And, mind you, it will still be another 33 days until the holiday.

We are being Christmas-ed to death. And it’s not even Thanksgiving.

But then: we get hit with today’s gospel.

In the middle of all the energy and the music and the decorating … we’re reminded that it’s all going to be gone. Like the Jews who were marveling at the temple, we shocked back to reality.

Jesus talks of wars and insurrections. Earthquakes, famines, plagues, imprisonment, torture.

That doesn’t exactly put you in the holiday mood, does it?

Jesus was trying to prepare his followers for the final judgment. And the Church is now trying to prepare us for Advent — the season of waiting, and watching, which begins in just two weeks. Ordinary Time is drawing to a close.

And so we are given that sobering gospel reading. And we are introduced to the liturgy of the word this Sunday with the words from Malachi, the final book of the Old Testament. They are words of both prophecy…and promise.

“The day is coming,” he writes. ”There will rise the sun of justice with its healing rays.”

And we hear Paul’s advice to the Thessalonians. He encourages them to imitate their teachers, and continue to work quietly and prayerfully.

Indeed, Paul’s message echoes Christ’s. The last words Jesus speaks in the gospel should ring in our ears and our hearts over the next few weeks:

“By your perseverance, you will secure your lives.”

Persevere. Stay strong. Have faith. And you will be saved.

All of this, of course, is far from our minds this time of year. Most of us are not worried about our salvation right now. We’re worried about getting to the airport on time and making it through security and battling the crowds at the mall on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

People who track this sort of thing are predicting sales of over 400 billion dollars this holiday season.

We’re worried about “persevering and securing our lives” at the checkout line.

But before we do that, the Church asks us to stop. And think. Before we become swamped by the sales and the music and the Salvation Army bell-ringers – even before we start to trim the church in purple and light the Advent wreath – we need to take time, and take stock.

The world we know will disappear.

But we are assured of salvation. “The sun of justice” will rise.

Over the last 20 centuries, across all the generations that have lived, men and women and children have heard these readings proclaimed from pulpits around the world, and recognized in some way the signs of their own times. Every age has had its tsunami, its Iraq, its Darfur, its Katrina. For us, it may be that cable television and the Internet now make it all more immediate and instantaneous. Everything seems to unfold in our own living rooms.

And so it may be that the dire words of the scriptures matter more to us now. The warnings sound more urgent.

But every generation has needed a savior.

Every century has hungered for hope.

You’ll be hearing a lot in the next few weeks about the real meaning of Christmas. That is a big part of it. Underneath all the commercialism and the carols, the tinsel and tree-trimming that comes earlier each year, the world waits and prays.

We pray for salvation.

We pray for an end to suffering, an end to persecution. We pray to endure this world, and to be worthy of the next.

We pray, as Jesus asks us, to persevere.

So this Sunday, before the season overwhelms us, we pause to remember that.

And we pause to remember just how fleeting and impermanent everything around us really is.

It may seem like this Sunday’s readings are jarring and out of synch with the secular calendar – a lot gloomier than what we see on the streets and in the store windows.

But I think it couldn’t be more timely.

In just four days, we will gather with our friends and family to give thanks and count our blessings.

One of those blessings is the life we’ve been given. This is a good opportunity to express our gratitude to God for all that this life offers — to pray for those affected most by the kinds of calamities that Jesus mentions, and to join our hands and our hearts.

The season of waiting is about to begin.

And, as we will pray in just a few moments, we “wait in joyful hope.”

We wait for that new dawn…that will bring us the sun of justice.