Sunday Sermon - 30 November
The 1st Sunday of Advent is the beginning of our church’s new year. It’s important to note that when the Church begins a new year, it doesn’t begin with shepherds or angels or a warm nativity scene. We begin with Jesus telling us that we don’t know the day or the hour, we are figuratively ‘in the dark’ about the details of the return of our Messiah. If we’re honest, it feels like a strange place to start Advent, our year, but maybe, if we think about it, it’s not that strange at all.
Advent doesn’t begin in the light. It starts in the dark, in the unknowing, right where most of us actually live. It starts in that honest place where the world feels unfinished, where we are waiting for things to be made whole, where we are longing for God to break in again. Jesus’ words today are not meant to frighten us. They’re meant to wake us up. “Keep awake,” he says—not in anxiety, but in attention. Pay attention to the world as it really is. Pay attention to the needs of your neighbours. Pay attention to the places where God is already stirring.
That’s where hope comes in, the theme of Advent 1. Not the sentimental kind— but real genuine, heartfelt hope. The stubborn hope that says the world as it is, is not the world as it will be. The first Sunday of Advent is the Church’s way of saying that even now, even here, God has not given up on us. And because God has not given up on us, we don’t give up on one another… ever.
When I think of that kind of hope, I think of the work happening through organizations like One City Peterborough and our own ministries here at St. John’s. These missions are built on the conviction that people deserve dignity, community, and a chance to begin again. They don’t wait for the world to be tidy or predictable; they step into the uncertainty with compassion. They stay awake to the needs around them. They prepare room—quite literally—for people who have been pushed to the edges. They shine light into places where many would rather not even look.
This is exactly what Advent asks of us: to live as though Christ’s promised future is already reaching into the present. To get ready—not by staring at the sky, but by stepping toward one another with mercy, with love and courage. Readiness, in Jesus’ teaching, is not passive. It looks like accompaniment, advocacy, sharing what we have, and choosing to believe that every person carries the image of God, a spark of the Divine, within them.
So today, we lit that candle of hope and we did it knowing full well that the world is still aching. But we light it anyway. We light it because Christ is coming—and Christ is already here, in the faces of those who are bruised, or lonely, or forgotten - and in the hearts of those who love and care for the disenfranchised. We light it because the darkness does not get the last word. We light it because we want to stay awake— awake to God’s presence, to our neighbour’s need, to our own needs, and to the possibility of a different tomorrow.
May this Advent be a season in which we don’t simply wait for Christ to come, but learn to recognize him in the places he’s already standing. May our hope, like the hope lived out at One City, be something we can see, and touch, and offer to others—one small light at a time.
Amen.