Worship - 30 November 2025

Summary of this week's theme

Advent is a time of waiting. Yet beyond the familiar pull of Christmas trees and festivities, how do we truly inhabit that waiting? The first Sunday of Advent in our lectionary always confronts us with an apocalyptic text, such as today’s gospel. Far from diverting us into spectacle, these readings widen the lens, revealing the sovereignty of God over history itself. We live, in effect, in the ‘between times’ - held in the tension between God’s past faithfulness and God’s promised future.

We draw hope from the story of God calling forth Israel, raising a saviour from within Israel, and gathering a community of disciples around him. The same God invites us to look forward to the new creation, when all things will be made new. When signs of newness spring up close at hand we may glimpse foretastes of that divine renewal already stirring near us, a reminder that God’s newness is not distant, nor rare, but constant and near.

But if God is always renewing, Jesus insists we must be ready and alert - not in nervous anticipation of supernatural drama, but attentive to the fragile apocalypses we create ourselves. Jesus was less concerned with heavenly apocalypse and more about the human devastation that follows when ploughshares become swords. The real apocalypse, he warned, is unleashed not when God’s kingdom breaks in, but when we challenge power with violence instead of peace. Earthly empires - Rome in Jesus’ time, others in ours - rise and fall. Christ calls us elsewhere: towards God’s kingdom, pursued through mutual care, self-reflection, and renewed community.

This brings us to the comfort of trails walked before. I often discover paths that feel new - at least to me, though not in themselves. The reassuring evidence of horses and cyclists testifies that others have travelled there before, that they lead somewhere. Scripture serves us in the same way. The human condition barely changes: hope and grief, failure and joy, pride and love are perennial. In scripture we learn how others have walked similar roads before, meeting God along the way.

I have also found ‘not-trails - mapped routes blocked by locked gates, fences, or walls. How often do we ignore signs, trusting a path leads to Christ simply because we have not yet seen obstruction? Pride can convince us to ignore the truth of a dead end.

Jesus calls his disciples - and us - to readiness, not fear. God works in God’s good time, inviting our participation, often leading to counter-cultural fields. Our small acts do not achieve the kingdom alone, nor all at once. As Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, nothing truly worth doing is accomplished within a single lifespan; we live by hope, faith, love, forgiveness, and patient labour offered into God’s unfolding renewal. Advent trains us for this: a habit of the heart - readiness honed in waiting, active in love, grounded in God’s unceasing newness.