First Sunday of Advent: November 30, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson
Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5 | Romans 13:11-14 | Matthew 24:36-44 | Psalm 122
Today, we enter the holy season of Advent. For many of us, this season is a time to hear once again the stories of our faith that announce the promise of God’s salvation and anticipate the fulfillment of that promise in the birth of Jesus. Culturally, Advent is the long season that leads finally to Christmas day. But this season is not just about looking back. This season also bids us to look forward, to a final day of judgment, to the culmination of God’s day of salvation when the fullness of God’s reign will be established. And so, every year, on this First Sunday of Advent, we hear passages that jar us, that jolt us out of our comfort zones, that shock us with their radical declarations about the fleeting existence of systems and institutions that feel rather permanent and indestructible. We hear the promise of coming judgment, of a day when all evil and malice and violence will be stripped from us and from our world. Instead of a tender story of a baby born in a quiet manger, we hear stories of destruction, confusion, and what feel and sound more like chaotic endings.
The passages we hear on this Sunday each year point our attention, first and foremost, to the return of Christ when the fullness of God’s reign will establish justice, peace, and wholeness for all of creation. The thematic warnings to “keep awake” and “be prepared” from the last several weeks carry over into today’s readings, bidding us to live in hopeful anticipation as we await the day that God will bring to fruition all that God started in and through Jesus Christ. This dual focus of Advent – of looking back and looking forward – holds in prophetic tension the dissonance between what is and what shall be. And so, from the very beginning, this season is characterized by longing and expectation, by introspection and fasting. In this sense, this season shares a great deal with the liturgical rhythms of Lent, with the assigned readings that draw us more toward a posture of penitence and examination than to one of festive celebration.
Our gospel reading today comes from the book of Matthew and is taken from the last of Jesus’ five sermons, which spans chapters 24 and 25. This final sermon is prompted by his disciples’ comments on “the buildings of the temple.” Jesus predicts the temple’s destruction, which confuses the disciples who then ask Jesus privately when this will happen and what the sign will be of his coming and of the end of the age. Jesus does not offer a direct answer. Instead, he warns them against false prophets, predicts the rejection and persecution of his disciples, and cautions them about trusting in the “signs and wonders” produced by those selling false salvation. He assures them that he will return “with power and great glory,” a promise that is more permanent than even heaven and earth. Finally, Jesus returns to the question at hand, telling his followers that no one knows the day or time of his final coming – not even Jesus himself.
Matthew was writing to a community that was struggling to reconcile Jesus’ teaching on his return with the very apparent lack of Jesus’ “power and great glory” in the circumstances of their world. Christ hadn’t yet returned, the temple had already been destroyed, and Jesus’ disciples were already being persecuted. There were already wars and rumors of wars. The first generation of disciples and eyewitnesses to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus were dying off. Matthew’s concern was to push this new generation of believers away from speculation about how and when Christ would return by insisting that Jesus’ followers were not supposed to know and that this unknowing ought not lead to apathy or idleness or passivity; instead, it ought to cause the community to double down on their embodiment of Christian living.
The same is true for us today: our waiting is not meant to be idle pastime. Rather, this is a time in which discipleship means an active practice of hope, embodied in vigilance and faithfulness, and in the way we imitate the pattern of life given us in Christ. We practice hope by living into a reality not fully realized, living our lives as signs of restoration, healing, and justice in a broken world. The vision of Christ’s return fuels our practice of hope by shaping our pattern of life according to the reign of God amid our present realities. It forces us to take seriously the disparities between our experience of this world and the vision of what Christ’s return will bring with it. The practice of hope names those disparities not in the throes of despair but in joyful anticipation that divine judgment will ultimately strip us and the world of all evil, malice, violence, and greed, allowing all of creation to rest in the peace of God.
This doesn’t mean that we simply shrug our shoulders at the pain and suffering in our world and leave God to sort it all out at some undefined point in the future. The charge to “keep awake” implicates us to embody the hope we profess, to seek after justice, to love our neighbors, to care for the poor and the destitute, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. Hope is something we live in the day-to-day world; it is an action that bears witness to the inbreaking of God’s reign.
The repetition of the warning to “keep awake” on this first Sunday of Advent invites us into this same practice of hope as we prepare to receive the Incarnate Christ. We are called to push aside those things that distract us from living into the hope God has given us, to dim the blinding lights that keep us from seeing the vision of God’s reign, to turn down the noises that keep us from hearing the announcement of Christ’s coming. We are called into a still darkness that offers us a reflection of our soul, a reflection that exposes those parts of ourselves and our lives that do not express the hope we have been given. As we examine our lives, we pray that God gives us the grace to “cast away the works of darkness,” to rid ourselves of all the things that distort the mystery of the divine life that God offers us, and to “put on the armor of light,” to equip ourselves with the light of God’s countenance.
In the still darkness of Advent, God reminds us of who and Whose we are. In the still darkness of Advent, God invites us to engage in the practices of our faith that tune our eyes and ears and hearts to the soft rhythm of divine joy. In the still darkness of Advent, God invites us to discover the quiet anticipation of a world made new by divine love. In the still darkness of Advent, we stand at another new beginning. Now is the time, Paul tells us. Now is the time, at the precipice of this new beginning, to examine our lives, to bear our souls to the God who comes in the vulnerability of an infant and who will come to judge the living and the dead.
Now is the time to look within ourselves and see all that Jesus has done for us and to look with hopeful anticipation for all that he will bring when he returns.
Friends, in this holy season we are bid to set aside the various distractions and fears that keep our hearts guarded and locked up. This can feel daunting, especially when confronted with the images of judgment so prevalent in this season. It can feel daunting in the face of all that is going wrong in our world. We live in a culture of fear, a time when every news headline brings with it anxiety about what the future will hold, when threats against life and liberty leave us feeling helpless and hopeless. In this culture of fear, it can be easy to retreat within ourselves, to find that sleepy place where we can guard against the insecurities and uncertainties of this life. But now, in this moment, is the time to wake from sleep, to see ourselves through the eyes of our judge and redeemer, to examine our hearts and lives so that we might let go of all that keeps us trapped in this culture of fear. Now is the time to let go of our grudges and offer forgiveness, to repent of the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf, to seek restoration of relationship, to beat our weapons of war into tools of reconciliation.
As much as this is a call to each one of us, individually, it is also a call to us as community. Today, we enter a season of intentional preparation: we prepare for the coming of the Christ child; we prepare for the coming of God-with-us in this moment; and we prepare for the coming of Christ in power and great glory. As a parish, we stand alongside one another on the precipice of this new beginning, on the first day of our New Year. On this day, as theologian Stephanie Paulsell suggests, “We have the opportunity to enter [the] new year awake and alive to the presence of God in our midst, a chance to recalibrate our lives and our commitments in the light of God’s vision.”[i] It seems fitting, then, that today we also celebrate our annual ingathering of pledges, commitments that we each make to the life and ministry we share.
During the offertory, you’ll be invited to place your pledges in the plate as it’s passed. These pledges are more than just a commitment of time, talent, and treasure. They are also testimonies to the presence and activity of God in our midst, declarations of the dream of God unfolding in our welcoming and fearless community, proclamations of our trust that God continues to bring to completion the good work God began within us. So let us enter this new year awake and alive to God’s presence in our midst, let us join together in hopeful anticipation of all that God is doing, and let us with faithful expectation “tell out our soul! The Greatness of the Lord!” Amen.
[i] “Awake and Watching this Advent,” in The Christian Century, Dec. 2016.