30th November 2025

Advent 2025 – 1st Sunday – 30/11/25 - Martin Mowat

Readings: Matthew 12:9-21, Romans 8:18-25

What is advent, because it comes at a time of year so often crowded with events, and overwhelmed by to-do lists, writing Christmas cards and emails, buying and wrapping presents, decorating our homes and public spaces with pine trees and glitter.  

One definition by Dr. Barry Corey, who’s the President of Biola Christian University in southern California, a university that is consistently ranked among the top Christian universities in the U.S., is that “Advent is a time when we, amidst the challenges and mundanities of our lives, pause to reflect on, to anticipate, and to celebrate the incarnation of Jesus. The incarnation” he says, “is a profoundly wondrous, even bizarre, reality.” 

“A profoundly wondrous, even bizarre, reality” and that’s what we’re going to be considering over the next few weeks.  

What, then, is the incarnation?  A dictionary might tell you that it means “a person who embodies in the flesh a deity, spirit, or quality”. 

In our context, therefore, it’s Jesus, the second person of the Godhead, of the trinity, described by John as “the Word”, the creator of the universe, taking on flesh, and spending some 33 years as a real human being on earth. An incarnate person, to redeem carnate sinners, to meet man physically at our point of need. 

First as a baby, whose birth was accompanied by the smells of a stable, of sheep and dirt and blood and milk, and later the glint of gold and the fragrance of valuable perfume. 

Then as a toddler, then as a school boy, then as a teenager and a carpenter’s apprenticegrowing up and to live and minister as a man who ate, drank, slept, walked, sang, spoke, prayed, laughed and cried, while he became the most famous individual who ever lived.

He was not just a concept, a mythical figure, but a real person — fully man and fully God: our Lover, our Savior, our Counsellor, our Lord, our Comforter, our Friend. In the words of that popular Christmas carol “O come, all ye faithful” he is the “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing. O, come let us adore him”.

So what do our five Advent candles represent?  Hope, Peace, Joy, Love, and most importantly, the one in the centre, Christ.


HOPE, then, what is hope?  I googled it and here are three of the things I was told. 

1.   Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances, in one's own life, or the world at large. As a verb, to hope is defined as "to expect with confidence" or "to cherish a desire with anticipation".

2.   The Bible almost never uses the word “hope” the way we do. For us, “hope” refers to something like a “wish” or a “dream.” But in the Bible, “hope” refers to an “expectation”—a future certainty.

3.   True hope is dynamic and powerful because it considers the circumstances of life realistically—and then confidently rests in the promises and character of God.

I like that last one, don’t you? 

But actually, hope is even more fundamental that that. 

I mentioned to you a few weeks ago that a visitor to our church in the summer, David Smith, the brother of a neighbour of ours, gave me this book about the demise of atheism. One of the things that it makes clear is that atheism is losing popularity, not just for academic reasons, but because it offers no “hope”, and we ALL need hope.

Life without hope is pointless, and life that is pointless isn’t worth living, because it means that you’re no better off than a vegetable, a cabbage for example. Are you a cabbage, without hope? 

Atheists need hope.  Agnostics need hope. Muslims need hope.  Buddhists need hope. …. Everyone does.

But we Christians HAVE HOPE. 

“And his name will be the hope of all the world”, Isaiah prophesied, and that was the O.T. scripture that Matthew quoted to his readers in our first reading. The very name of Jesus provides us with all the hope that we need.  

And then, in the second reading from Romans 8, one of the most powerful chapters of one of the most powerful books in the Bible, in the part that talks about the future glory, we heard that all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are.  Against its will, it explains, all creation was subjected to God’s curse.
But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. … We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. We were given this hope Paul says when we were saved. 

Is that good news? Or is that good news? 

As J. John said in our “Natural Evangelism” course on Wednesday, “The Good News of Christ is that hope has broken into our hopeless world.” 

Just before I close, I was interested to read this prayer request in a Christian Missionary Alliance email that I received on Wednesday.  “The West African country if Mali is facing escalating violence as terrorist groups push south toward the capital, Bamako. Christians are particularly vulnerable. Churches have been burned and believers threatened with death. Extremist groups enforce strict Sharia law in some regions, forcing women to wear veils and imposing religious taxes.
Worship has been restricted, and Christian communities live under constant threat. The conflict has created a humanitarian crisis, with severe shortages of food and medicine, especially in the north. Despite these challenges, the Church seeks to remain a beacon of hope in a fractured nation.

That’s what church should be – “a beacon of hope”.

No wonder our very first Advent candle is the candle of hope, of a “true hope” as we said at the beginning, “that’s dynamic and powerful, because it considers the circumstances of life realistically—and then confidently rests in the promises and character of God.”