Advent 1 Year A
Sunday 30 November 2025 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.
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The first Sunday of Advent! – this is the shortest season of the year – just 24 days.
Like so many things in our liturgical tradition, the season of Advent reminds us of a deeper reality that should colour not only these few short weeks in December, but the whole of our living. We are now preparing for the celebration of Christmas, the miracle of God’s gift to humanity in the birth of Jesus. But we are also, now and always, preparing for and living for Jesus’ second coming and the redemption – the healing and completion – of all creation. That’s the deeper reality that Advent is pointing to. Isaiah offers us a vision of a moutain lifted high, drawing all nations, a place where justice is taught and peace is learnt, where weapons are beaten into tools for sustaining life.
And it is this urgent, fierce hope that God’s dream for our world will be fulfilled that lies at the heart of our gospel reading from Matthew this morning: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore… be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
I think we need not be concerned with the when and the how of Jesus’ ‘second coming,’ however this might be understood. In our faith we see through a mirror darkly… we struggle to speak of holy mysteries… and Matthew, writing his gospel 2000 years ago, was using story to explain theology, and to create hope and meaning for his community. Language like this, apocalyptic language, expresses hope and determination that things will not always be the way they are now. And that hope helps people to live differently in the here and now.
But Jesus’ words are unsettling, deliberately so. We have been dropped into a particular point in Matthew’s story about Jesus that’s quite late in the piece. He’s not on the road, or out healing in the hills around Galilee. He is already in Jerusalem. He has been welcomed to the city with shouts of acclamation and palm branches, and he’s gone to the temple and overturned the money changers tables, confronting the temple leadership. We all know what is coming in Jerusalem – the threat of that destination, with it’s conflict and violence and ultimately Jesus’ death and resurrection, is all drawing very close. Jesus’ own life is about to collide with the worst of humanity. And in this private conversation with his disciples, he is calling them – calling us – to keep awake.
‘About that day and hour no one knows.’ Our lives will look ordinary – Jesus talks about people eating and drinking, working and marrying. In other words, they were living their ordinary lives – and there is nothing very wrong with any of it. No dramatic evil. Just daily human life, the rhythms of building relationships and homes and livelihoods – and yet… we know that as people of faith, it is in our ordinary daily lives that we are called to be attentive to the work of God. But also – so easily, it is in our ordinary daily lives that that our attentiveness can be dulled, that prayer can dry out, that our sense of hope for change can be distracted and blurred. The danger Jesus is trying to alert us to is not so much moral failure as moral sleep.
The call to ‘keep awake’ that runs through this season isn’t meant to create anxiety, or drive us to bizarre end-times speculation. Instead, Jesus is calling for a quality of attention – to inhabit our ordinary, daily lives in the present time in a way that remains open to God’s interruption. To stay awake is to live as though what we do now matters because God’s future is real.
As sacramental people, this resonates deeply. In the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, we are formed to recognise that ordinary material things — bread and wine, water and oil — can be bearers of divine presence. We gather every week at a table that points both backward to Christ’s death and forward to the heavenly banquet. Time itself becomes layered in the moment of the eucharist: memory, presence, and hope converge.
The season of Advent stretches that sacramental imagination beyond the church walls. It asks us to recognise that God’s coming touches the whole of our lives — our kitchens and workplaces, our neighbourhoods and our nation, economic systems, politcal systems and ecological responsibilities. Our faith tells us there is a larger reality behind all of it, calling us to hope and work for a better world; calling us to stay awake to that possibility.
This isn’t an airy fairy call. Just as Jesus was surrounded by threat and violence in Jerusalem, so also – even in this beautiful city of Tamaki Makaurau – we are surrounded by housing insecurity, child poverty, racism and gender violence, mental distress, the impacts of the climate crisis, the cost of living. These aren’t abstract issues and the pressures of this season bring them into sharp relief every year. Advent does not allow us to spiritualise hope in ways that ignore these realities. If Isaiah’s vision shows us the nations being drawn towards God’s mountain, then justice and peace cannot remain far off future ideals – they must begin to take flesh among us here and now.
But we are not burdened with sustaining that vision alone – the gospel insists that the future comes as a gift before it comes as a responsibility. “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” God’s decisive action does not depend on our vigilance, but our vigilance allows us to recognise and participate in it.
That distinction matters when fatigue sets in — when the work of justice feels slow, when community work feels fragile, when the darkness seems stubborn or overwhelming. Advent names that weariness without surrendering hope. It says: keep walking. Keep aligning your life — personally and collectively — with the light you trust is coming. Keeping lighting one candle each week, and holding it up in the darkness.
So what might that look like, in practice, for us, as we begin this Advent season?
It might mean recommitting ourselves to patterns of prayer that sharpen our attention rather than dull it. It might mean examining how our spending, our use of time, or our political engagement either reflects or contradicts the peace we often pray for. It might mean strengthening our bonds of care within this community, and noticing gently where people are tired, lonely, or quietly struggling. It might mean continuing to stand with those whose voices are easily ignored, trusting that such work participates in God’s larger redemptive movement.
At the heart of Advent is not fear but hope — a hope robust enough to face the darkness of this world honestly, and patient enough to keep preparing room for the light to come. Isaiah does not say that the nations will escape conflict overnight. Paul does not say the night has vanished completely. Jesus does not tell us the hour. But together they say this: the future is God’s; therefore the present matters.
“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
The season of Advent brings us an invitation, not a demand. An invitation to live differently because we trust that God’s peace is not an illusion. An invitation to let Advent reshape our imagination so that when Christ comes — in glory, in judgment, in mercy — we are not caught unaware, but already learning to live in the light.
“O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
Amen.