Advent is the name the church gives to the four weeks before Christmas. It is a time of preparation and a time of waiting. But do we know how to wait? You bet we do. We do it all the time. But aren’t we rubbish at it. We hate it. In fact, whatever we can do to avoid it – taking a shortcut, driving to work at an unsocial hour, buying online, paying for speedy boarding, whatever it is…we are there and doing it. But Advent is about making a virtue out of the waiting, it is about really really doing it well.

It's about looking for God and hoping for God, and waiting for God, …in a situation where God's presence, his promises, his embrace of our world, is ambiguous, is not yet proven. And that is part of our human life. To live in this intermediate world, neither Heaven nor Hell, neither all good or all bad, with its contradictions, its frustrations, its moments of absolute pain and its moments of absolute glory.

So we wait…because we don’t yet know. We don’t get the big picture. We don’t get God’s vision. We only see a tiny bit. The waiting is where we deal with all the things we don’t know about God - what theologians call the “epistemological distance”, that gap of knowing, between creature and creator, between the object and the subject, between the human and the divine. That part of us that only sees bits, pieces, the mess on the back of the tapestry and not the beautiful picture on the other side.

And it is at Advent that we can cultivate that discipline. A time to put a check on our rush to the happy ending, a time to hear the angel’s message, a time to abide in the fields, a time to follow a star, a time to wait on God. “Now, we see only in part”, wrote St Paul. “We see in a mirror darkly”. And while we do, we bide our time. We wait.

Click 'More Info' below to see a recitation of Rowan Williams 'Advent Calendar'

On the second and third Sundays in Advent, we typically focus our thoughts on John the Baptist, the fore-runner to Jesus. He stood up in the desert and he had a very simple message: God is going to come and visit his people, and you've got to get in there and clean your life up if you're ever going to meet him.

The trouble was that most people didn't clean up their lives, and many people chose to ignore John the Baptist, and carry on as they were.

But, as we saw in Jesus, God came anyway, not with a sort of ‘sin-o-meter’ to test how sinful people were - but he came and loved & accepted people as they were, he came as a complete person, to stand alongside them… as a fellow human being….and people were changed by his presence.

Sometimes we are tempted to throw our hands in the air and think how terrible the world is, how far removed from God's Kingdom, how remote from how God would have it be. But that Kingdom is here already, it is in our midst. Jesus comes today and everyday into a torn and broken and unloving and distrustful world. His presence is not dependent upon us: he comes anyway and that is what we will be remembering at the great feast of Christmas.

And we have these four weeks of Advent to prepare. It's not a 4 weeks to do your spring cleaning and get your soul squeaky clean. It's not to make us all so righteous, that we can in some way welcome him with a clear conscience. It is 4 weeks to remove barriers, to identify those things in each of us which stop us hearing what he has to say, those things which stop us recognising him in our world today.

So that when he does come, we are ready to respond to the call of his Kingdom.

Click 'More Info' below to see a recitation of Rowan Williams 'Advent Calendar'

The picture of John the Baptist above is part of a painting by artist Jen Norton. For more information, see https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jen-norton

Our traditional service of Nine Lessons and Carols follows the tradition of King's College Chapel in Cambridge.

It will be led by the Pueri Cantores children’s choir, and will include bible readings and carols (in English and Spanish) for us all to sing, as well as choir pieces.

After the service we will be serving mulled wine and mince pies.

Do come and join us for this traditional Christmas celebration. But come early to be sure of a seat!