Sunday 30th November 2025 – Advent 1

(All our songs this morning are from Singing the Faith (StF) & Hymns & Psalms (H&P) numbers will be given where available)

Welcome to our Sunday Service, today shared on paper across our circuit and with the congregation at Calverley Community Methodist Church and led by Rev Nick Blundell on of our Circuit Ministers. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Most of our prayers this morning are courtesy of Roots (‘Worship and learning for the whole church’).

Click on the blue links to follow them for bible readings and associated links

Call to Worship

Come to the mountain of the Lord, to receive God’s teaching and to walk in his paths. Come to seek his justice and peace, as we await his coming among us.

Prayer

As we gather today as your holy people, help us do right by one another and love one another.
May we push away from our hearts and minds all that is unpeaceful, unfair and unloving.
Amen.

Song – H&P 138, StF 254 – Seek ye first the kingdom of God

Prayers of approach, confession, and an assurance of forgiveness.

Advent God, we are on a journey with you, a journey to discover, to seek, to find.
We’ve come to your house, to greet and to meet.
We’ve come to pray, to hear, to see, to feel, to know, to learn and understand.
We’ve come to prepare for the joys and challenges to come.
Advent God, be our guide. Amen.

We sometimes want to rush to Christmas,
not taking time to value the journey of Advent.
Forgive us, God.
We sometimes forget to prepare as we ought, to reflect and to seek,
and to offer to help and support to those who need it.
Forgive us, God.
We sometimes get wrapped up in things that we want,
but they aren’t always right or just or fair.
Forgive us, God.
We sometimes get all wrapped up like a gift,
with tape so tight and secure that we can’t see the needs of the world.
Forgive us, God. Amen.

Our God of Justice, love and peace,
hears our confession, forgives our sins
and walks with us in this Advent time. Amen.

Reading

Romans 13:11-14

Song – StF 489 – All I once held dear

‘..to be found in you and known as yours.’

Reading

Matthew 24:36-44

Song – StF 185 – Sing we the King who is coming to reign

Today is the day we light the first of the Advent Candles, beginning the journey to Christmas, each Sunday the lighting of the flame marking a week passed, a week nearer. Some of us, or our children and grandchildren, will be enjoying advent calendars, each opened door taking us a day nearer. In my household “How many days to Christmas Grandad?” has been a fairly regular question since August!

So one advent theme for us to reflect on today might be time – the counting down of it, the measuring of it, the way in which we use it. In our first reading, Paul is talking about day and night, using the night to represent those things that are wrong in the way we live, and the daylight to shine on that which is good and right. We take his point, and would choose to live in the light, but would also remember that in the Genesis story God makes Day and Night, and sun, moon and stars to mark the movement between. ”And God saw that it was good.”

So I want to give thanks for God’s gifts of day and night – for the joy of sunshine and showers, for mealtimes, for walks, for the places in which people gather to enjoy the day – and for the places in which people gather to enjoy the evening, and for the refreshment of sleep, and dreaming, and intimacy. I want to celebrate the creativity and industry that is part of many people’s daytime activity. But I also celebrate the labour and skill exercised by those who work at night, those who are keeping things going and caring for those in need while many of us are tucked up in bed. Much of what goes on at night is hidden, and I guess that in part that is Paul’s point. He is challenging those to whom he writes to live as if they are in the light even when they are in the dark unseen – to live as in the day.

In the gospel reading Jesus’ words echo Paul’s with the suggestion that the night time is when the thief might come. However, while Paul is musing on day and night, Jesus’ focus is ‘the hour’. ‘But that day or hour no one knows.’

It’s interesting thinking about an hour. Two half hours, four quarters. Sixty minutes. The average length of a church service. A four mile walk. Fifty miles driving. An hour feels very different if you’re in an exam room rather than a coffee shop, a doctor’s waiting room rather than a cinema. I wonder if you have a favourite hour? Or a ‘least favourite?

I’m thankful to Parkinson UK and Bradford City for a special hour I enjoy each week! It’s walking football for those living with Parkinsons, and it’s brilliant. We tend to have half an hour of warm up, stretching, ball skills, and then spend the remainder of the hour playing a match. It’s an hour the effects of which reach through the week, helping my balance and mobility, lifting my mood, cheering me up.

Jesus’ ‘hour’ is in the context of the challenge to be alert, to be living in a way that we are ready when ‘the Son of Man comes’. He is saying that we need to see each hour as potentially our last and so value it and use it well. To reference Paul’s words, we need to spend each hour, whether day or night, in the light.

So whether our take on Advent is on the countdown to Christmas, and the coming of Jesus, or whether we focus on prophets foretelling, in both old and new testament, may each day and each hour, whatever they contain, be open to God’s goodness and grace.

Prayer of praise and thanksgiving

God of the journey, thank you for walking with us. Thank you for:
visions and dreams that reveal more of your purposes;
hope in the future, expectation and exploration;
the guidance you’ve given and the hand that leads us;
the chance to turn things around and make good what is bad,
to make right what is wrong, to make light out of darkness,
to make peace out of war, to make hope out of despair,
to make meaning and purpose where none has been found.
God of the journey, thanks be to you. Amen.

Song – StF 73 – Fill thou my life, O Lord my God

Prayers

On this Advent Sunday, we come. We come with many different emotions. We come with awareness that Christmas is approaching. For some that will be a time of great joy, for others a time of stress and busyness. We come to you knowing that the world is full of tinsel, glitter and mindless music played on a loop, but we yearn to see your face in the midst of all the preparations. We want to look to the future because you have gone ahead into it for us. We may not wish it could be Christmas every day, but we do recognise that the real truth of Christmas is with us every day: that God came into the world to redeem us. So, however we feel today, help us to find you, not in the razzmatazz, but in the quietness of the stable.