I’ve used Jared’s approach several times successfully, although I agree that Stephen Harris’ answer should also now work (but it’s a more recent addition to WP_Query which wasn’t available at the time I was building an events listing). Depending on the date format you are suing to store the date, you might also need to use something like the following to display the date properly (this is probably basic if you come from a PHP background, but it had me stumped for a while).
<?php
$course_start_date = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'start_date', true);
$fixed_date = strtotime($course_start_date);
echo date('jS F, Y' , $fixed_date) ;
?>