Sermon for the 1st Sunday of Advent 2025

Amongst my youngest son’s collec:on of drawings and pictures brought back from Forest School last week, I found one par:cularly special drawing that caught my aCen:on. It was :tled ‘Theo’s world’, and it had on it a picture of a house in one corner and a picture of a tree in the other. Between the house and the tree were two lines, one straight and one that went round in a bend. I realised that he had drawn, with remarkably accuracy, a map showing our route to Forest School up at Leighton Hall. The straight line was the Coach Road, the route we take if we’re running a liCle late and need a direct way up, and the line in the big bend was Hyning Road, the route we normally take up through Hyning Wood to Yealand Conyers and then up Peters Hill. I always smile when we get there because my dad’s name is Peter Hill. What I saw was the clarity and confidence that my son had to orient himself. These are Theo’s places, these are his ways.

As we begin this new Church year and our beau:ful season of Advent we are faced with a similar opportunity for a roadmap spiritually. We’re all got our new lec:onary, we’ve all got the rota, we know what Christmas is going to look like. And some of the more giPed planners in our congrega:ons have already got their 2026 roadmaps well underway – with dates and :mes and ideas and considerable planning. It is necessary and indeed useful to be able to see clearly and to see ahead.

Except that we need to hold some tension. Because all of our readings today invite us to press pause, even perhaps to press stop on the whole thing. And to acknowledge that in tension with our hopes and expecta:ons and our desire for certainty and the confidence of having a plan, God’s ways are not our ways. We live daily with the things that are known and the things that are yet unknown. I’ve been reading a beau:ful book by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, who speaks about driving in a fog – with just enough light to illuminate sufficiently for us to keep going, but with sufficient darkness and obscurity to ensure cau:on and humility of speed. I really sense that. Because God is God and we are not God. We can never know His ways, there is always mystery, and by His grace a slow and steady unfurling of His plans and purposes in only the way that we are able to somehow grasp them and understand as best we can for now.

I know that feels so deeply uncomfortable but it is the paradox at the heart of faith – that we trust in God, and yet we do not fully know God. It is Paul’s image in his first leCer to the Corinthians of seeing now through the mirror darkly, knowing that then we shall see face to face. It is the refrain in Psalm 42 of puZng our trust in God, knowing that we will yet give Him thanks for all that will come to pass. It is Minnie Louise Haskins invita:on at the turn of the new year to put our hands into the hand of God, knowing that He will show us a beCer way.

And so the invita:on is to bring before God our honesty and our vulnerability, because through those postures a space opens up. A space between heaven and earth, a space in our bodies and souls, a space where once again, laying down our wills and our plans and our purposes, we can whisper ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. Come, into our sorrows and our despair. Come, in the darkness of our lives and our world. Come, into your Church. Make us humble,

give us eyes to see and ears to hear. May we be the new crea:on that you have made us to be. May we lay aside all that burdens and hinders us and fix our eyes on you, Jesus.

I feel the Lord promp:ng me to say through Advent this year that ‘Hope looks different’. Because I think it is so easy to seCle into tradi:on, because it is comfortable and oh so familiar. We like tradi:on because it reassures us of a certainty which I do not think we can own. It is a lie to say that all is well, that our Ways of being and doing are aligned fully with the God’s Ways of being and doing. I really want to pray that though we do have our plans and we will do what we normally do, that there is space to be, as CS Lewis calls it, Surprised by Hope. That our posture through Advent is one of openness to the ways of God so that through our plans and purposes we allow thank chink to let the Light in. And maybe even more than than. In our repentance, can we lament, with Isaiah, the ways that are so dark. Causing so much misery in the world. In our intercessions can we pray with Paul for the Church to wake up, and to respond with urgency to our need for a renewed commitment to living lives worthy of our call? And in the Gospel that we proclaim, can we speak confidently about the Hope we have in Jesus, he truth of the promise that we have that He can come amongst us and He will come again?

Come, Lord Jesus, we pray. S:r us up, break us open, make us to be hearers and doers of your Word as we await your coming amongst us. We want to make room in our hearts for you. We want to see your paths and your Ways unfolding on our spiritual roadmaps. We put again, afresh, our every Hope in you.

Amen