Ready & Waiting - Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent (November 30, 2025)

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 2:1–5 | Psalm 122 | Romans 13:11–14 | ​Matthew 24:36–44

“Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” (Matthew 24:44)
 
Do you have any favourite holiday traditions? Practices that help you feel well prepared for this special season?
 
Maybe it’s putting up lights, or decorating a Christmas tree. Maybe it’s baking some tasty treats, or putting on a festive album or playlist. Maybe it’s getting together with friends and relations, and taking time to reconnect.
 
One tradition that I absolutely cherished as a child was counting down the days to Christmas with our family’s special Advent calendar: sort of a woven banner, with the numbers one through twenty four marked on either side, and a little white-bearded Nisse, a Nordic gnome-figure, tied to a safety pin that we’d move along every morning… marking our slow but exciting progress towards the big Christmas celebrations.
 
When I moved out, I took this Advent calendar with me, and now it’s my daughter’s turn to excitedly mark our family’s progress as Christmas Day grows ever closer.
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There’s something exciting about these kinds of countdowns… of watching the gap between the present and a much anticipated date steadily growing smaller before our eyes… keeping us well aware that the moment we’ve been waiting for really is on it’s way, and reminding us to do whatever we need to do to get ready for it.  
 
Today, Advent calendars remain a well known and popular holiday practice, even among those without a sense of the specifically Christian nature of the season of Advent… that is, not just as a countdown to Christmas, but as a time of intentional preparation and anticipation of the return of Christ, no longer as a child in a manger, but as the King of glory, and the Saviour of our world.
 
But as our Gospel passage today reminds us, there is no clear countdown for Christ’s return. As much as we might really want to be in the know, only the Father knows the time or date of His Son’s final arrival.
And so, during the first week of Advent, we are invited to reflect on the nature of our Christian Hope, which calls us to get ready… especially when we don’t know when this hope will be realized. 

Of course, when facing any kind of uncertainty or open-endedness, it can be very tempting at times to try to find something more tangible to hold onto, and to place our hopes in. And as the Church has waited quite a while for Christ’s return… two thousand years and counting… it can be easy for us to forget where our true foundation lies, and start building our confidence upon other things… things that might seem solid enough to offer us assurance and security, but in the end they will not endure.
 
These false hopes come in all sorts of forms and disguises, but I’d like to mention just a few today.
 
The first false hope I want to look at in brief is a hope based on our shared human history and abilities… a hope that can be caught up in both our visions of pursuing progress… of leaving the past behind for a supposed better and brighter tomorrow… and it also shows up in our desires to pump the breaks and conserve our old ways of doing things.
 
Whether we’re eager to change things up, or keep things calm and steady… whether we’re more invested in what is possible or in preserving what is familiar… in both cases if our main focus and our confidence is anchored to what we are up to… what we are able to achieve, or defend, or uphold, or strive for… then we have really placed our hope in ourselves… in our own methods, and mechanisms… losing sight of the fact that the Good News calls us to look for hope beyond ourselves… and to find it in the face of Jesus Christ the Lord.
 
Now I’m not saying that we can do nothing good… that all our attempts to bring about positive change, or to preserve what is precious are not important, or even necessary. But what I am saying is that all our efforts can only get us so far. That despite everything we humans do to bring about a new utopia, or try to retrace our steps to Paradise… in the end, we cannot rescue ourselves… but the Good News is we know Someone who can!
 
And while we wait for Him, we can be actively trying to live as those who are shaped by His Good News… walking in the ways He taught us… trusting in His Spirit to guard and guide us… putting His self-giving love into practice… all while recognizing that our world’s fate does not rest in our hands, but in His. And He will not fail us! 

Now there is another false hope we should take at least a few moments to mention: the false hope of escape… of seeking simply to flee from this world and avoid all its heavy concerns.
 
This false hope has been pretty common at times among Christians… especially in some circles where ideas about Christ’s return are framed as God’s abandonment of His creation… scooping up a select few who then get to avoid times of deep tribulation… while the rest of the world’s left to burn.
 
But even those who do not hold to this explicitly escapist understanding of the fate of Christians can still end up acting as though what matters most… what God really wants for all His faithful children is that we are able to avoid anything uncomfortable. That we get through life as smoothly as possible. Or that, when things get rough, we should just give up waiting around to get out of here… that our only hope lies in counting down the days until we can fly away and leave all this mess behind us.
 
I know that this way of thinking can seem to offer some solace to those who are enduring a great deal of pain, and who are approaching the limits of their own endurance, in body, mind, or spirit. But the hope that the Scriptures offer us is not like the hope of an inmate, counting down the days until the end of their sentence. It’s more like the hope of someone who knows their rescuer is on His way. The hope, not of avoiding or retreating from the brokenness and pain of earthly life, but the hope of being led through it to receive new life on the other side… sharing in Christ’s sufferings, so we might also share in His glory.
 
To put it another way, if our hope is simply centred on escaping… we quickly become completely preoccupied with ourselves, and become oblivious to the needs of our neighbours, neglecting the work of the Kingdom that God has called us to do here and now.
  
This kind of escapist hope runs counter to the whole story of Jesus Himself, who was tempted in Gethsemane to avoid the agony of the cross, but instead of fleeing, or refusing to go through with it, He remained faithful to the end… facing death head on for us first before then rising again in glory to reign at God’s right hand. 
 
And this is where we come to the heart of the matter, to the true nature of our Christian Hope: that is, Jesus Himself… God’s Son, who for us and for our salvation, suffered and died and rose again… placing all of His hope in His Heavenly Father’s unending love and resurrecting power… and through His own faithfulness, Jesus shattered the chains of our failures, and the fear of death, finally bringing God’s New Creation into view, where sorrow and pain will be no more.
 
And now Jesus invite us to place our hope in Him to see us through… calling us to remain steadfastly His… ready and waiting for the arrival of our Saviour King, even if He takes another two thousand years. 
 
Because of the Good News of Jesus Christ… His death, His resurrection, and His promise to come again… we can have the confidence… the hope we need to get ready while we wait.
 
Ready to do his will here on earth, laying aside the works of darkness, and putting on the armour of light, as St. Paul puts it (Romans 13:12-13), diligently seeking to do what’s right, not from a sense that it’s all resting on our shoulders, but out of deep devotion to the ways of our Saviour King, confident that as we trust in and follow Jesus, His Holy Spirit will be at work in us to do far more than we could ever ask or imagine.
 
And the Good News of Jesus calls us to be ready to bare witness to this hope we have been given… not to retreat from the brokenness of our world, but to share what we know of the life-giving love of God with all those around us. So that, as the prophet Isaiah tells us,
“Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths’” (Isaiah 2:3).
 
And even though the Good News invites us also to be ready to suffer for the sake of our great Saviour King, we know that anything we go through now cannot compare with the glory that awaits His faithful ones. That all our trials and sufferings, though very real, will one day come to an end, and be replaced once and for all with sharing in the unending joys of God’s New Creation. 
 
And so, as we spend the next few weeks of Advent getting ready together and waiting for the arrival of Jesus our Saviour King, may the Holy Spirit of God fill our hearts with a true and lasting hope. A hope that empowers us to walk in Jesus’ ways every day… to reach out with compassion and grace to those around us, sharing the Good News of God’s love with our broken and hurting world… and to remain steadfast even when we face great pain and suffering, confident that Christ will come again… that even though we may not be able to count down the exact days, one by one, we know that the time of “salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;  the night is far gone, the day is near.” (Romans 13:11-12).  Amen.