Worship - 7 December 2025

Summary of this week's theme

Prophets are strange — perhaps they have to be.  Their task is to speak uncomfortable truth, often to the powerful, and that makes them stand out.  Isaiah, for instance, acted in ways that would shock us today; John the Baptist lived in the wilderness in clothes and habits that marked him as eccentric.  Yet Isaiah gave us the vision of swords beaten into ploughshares; John proclaimed a God eager for repentance and renewal.

That leads to a simple, important lesson: don’t judge the message by the messenger.  Prophetic truth may come from someone we dislike or don’t understand.  The prophet’s role is twofold: to read the present and warn of consequences if we persist, and to imagine an alternative worth striving for. ‘Keep doing what you are doing, and there will be consequences; change your ways and there’s an opportunity for something better.’

Change is the uncomfortable word.  It costs.  Institutions and people resist it because it demands sacrifice and imagination.  Yet the world does not stand still.  To refuse necessary change risks stagnation and decline.

Here, a surprising image helps.  After vandals felled the famous Sycamore Gap tree, caretakers posted a simple sign: ‘This tree stump is still alive.’ If left alone, shoots might emerge — and they did.  Tiny clusters of new growth sprang from the stump; saplings were raised to carry the tree’s life onward.  From devastation, life reappeared.

Isaiah uses the same sign among ruins: the stump yet lives.  Out of what looks finished, God can bring new shoots.  That hope is Advent’s heart: small beginnings, patient tending, and the promise that God is at work where we see only loss.

John the Baptist’s message complements this: life is possible, but it requires repentance — a turning that accepts the cost of change.  Our annual resolutions and self-improvement efforts reveal a buried optimism: we believe in fresh starts even when the past weighs heavy.

And then John points to Jesus, coming with fire and a winnowing fork — a fearful image that means not necessarily destruction but purification and renewal.  The aim is to preserve what is good and to remove what destroys life.

So this Advent, listen for the strange voices. Bear the cost of necessary change. Tend the tiny shoots where you see only stumps.  Expect surprising life: a shoot will come from the stump — new beginnings, offered by a God who refuses to let the story end in ruin.