Holy Communion for Advent Sunday: celebrant the Revd Cynthia Finnerty. Junior Church takes place at the same time in the hall.

First reading: 1 Thessalonians 3. 9-13
Gospel: Luke 21. 25-36

Advent Sunday marks the start of the church's new year, as we prepare for the celebration of Christmas. Despite this happy anticipation, however, Advent is also a season for self-examination and penitence: as today's readings make clear, our focus on the birth of the infant Christ in Bethlehem goes hand-in-hand with reflection on his second coming in glory, as judge of the world. Whether or not we anticipate a literal 'second coming', we are led to measure our own lives and actions against the standards set by Jesus.

Advent also draws us into a fundamental and astonishing truth: in his incarnation, God entrusts himself to a human family living in a troubled and imperfect human society. Unlike the Olympian gods of classical antiquity, he is fully engaged with human life, as much today as in biblical times. Rogier van der Weyden's Annunciation Triptych places Mary's pregnancy firmly in the present of his own time in fifteenth-century Flanders, with an unknown figure, presumably the donor of the altarpiece, in its left-hand panel; to the artist and his fellow citizens, these were contemporary and not historical events.