Woodstock Ministerial Alliance Community Advent Service
December 2, 2025
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“Staying Awake to God’s Dream”
The Reverend Kathleen Murray
Woodstock Ministerial Alliance Community Advent Service
December 2, 2025
For the Church, last Sunday was truly the beginning of a new year. Advent arrives, not with a countdown or a ball drop, but with a voice calling across the centuries: “Keep awake.”
Advent does not begin with cozy manger scenes. It begins with urgency. It begins with Jesus asking us not to drift, not to grow numb, not to fall asleep to the world around us. Advent shakes us gently by the shoulders and says, Pay attention. God is drawing near.
And that is a very different message than the one we hear from the world as November turns to December. Many of us are already counting shopping days. We’re planning Christmas dinners and New Year’s gatherings. December becomes a month of wrapping up—not only gifts but loose ends. We hurry to finish every project before the calendar turns.
But the Christian year does something else. It begins when things feel like they are ending. It begins when daylight shortens and shadows grow long. Advent starts not with the clarity of summer but with the lengthening darkness of late fall and early winter. And Advent says: Start here. Start in the quiet. Start in the dark. Start in the longing.
Many people, even many Christians, forget that the Christian year starts in this way. Advent’s opening notes are not sentimental. They are apocalyptic—not in the sense of catastrophe, but in the sense of unveiling, revealing what is real and what is needed.
Even as Advent begins a new year, it points toward an ending:
the end of oppression,
the end of violence,
the end of people living in fear,
the end of long waiting for God to show up.
The angels promise peace on earth. Mary carries a child who will turn the world upside down. The ancient promises of God are on the edge of fulfillment.
And yet, even after the angels sang and the child was born, the world continued to be bruised and broken. Jesus’ earliest followers felt that tension. They had witnessed his life and death. They had seen glimpses of God’s reign.
But the suffering around them remained real. They began to ask: Is sacred time the same as human time? Maybe God’s commonwealth does not arrive all at once. Maybe it unfolds through time slowly, persistently, in moments small enough that we might miss them if we are not awake.
In time, the Church spoke of two Advents: the birth that has already come, and the fulfillment still on its way.
And so, Advent asks us to wait, but that doesn’t mean to wait passively. Waiting in Scripture is never about sitting back. Waiting is a spiritual discipline. To wait is to stay awake to the world God loves. To stay awake is to refuse to look away from what is painful. To stay awake is to keep our hearts open in a world that prefers numbness.
Psalm 72 gives us a vision of what that watchful world looks like: a ruler who “defends the cause of the poor,” who “delivers the needy,”[2] who brings justice that feels as refreshing as rain on parched ground. It is one of Scripture’s clearest pictures of God’s dream for humanity. And it reminds us that the coming of Christ whether in Bethlehem or at the end of days is always tied to justice for those who are overlooked, vulnerable, or cast aside. Staying awake means seeing the people God sees first.
Romans echoes that same hope. Paul reminds the early church that everything written in Scripture was meant for our encouragement, so “that we might have hope.” And then he says something extraordinary: “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you.” That line is not sentimental. It is a command to create communities where divisions are healed, where strangers become kin, where hope is not an idea but a shared practice. It is exactly the kind of community Jesus entrusts to us during Advent.
When Jesus says “keep awake,” he means: See what is happening. Don’t turn away from the suffering of others. Don’t let fear eclipse compassion. Don’t glide through life without noticing the people God has placed in your path.
Because the world in which we wait is the same world God entered. The same world God loves enough to redeem.
So staying awake means telling the truth about the world as it is—its beauty and its brokenness. We see beauty every week in our parish. We see it in the wider Christian community here in Woodstock, especially in food pantries sponsored by churches in our community, pantries that feed neighbors in need with dignity. We see it in people who show up to volunteer, to learn, to pray, to welcome. We see it in the quiet acts of kindness that rarely make headlines but change someone’s whole day.
The Woodstock Ministerial Alliance helps fund emergency housing, utility assistance, and crisis support for families throughout the county. Pastors and lay leaders across denominations work together, not for credit, not for applause, but because we are called to bear one another’s burdens. That is Psalm 72 in real time. That is Romans 15 living and breathing among us.
But alongside beauty, we also see what Verna Dozier, a beloved Episcopal teacher and prophet of the Church in the 20th century, called “the distortion of God’s dream.” She reminded us that God’s dream is always a dream of compassion, justice, and shared dignity, and that this dream becomes distorted whenever fear narrows our vision or when we forget how deeply we belong to one another. The distortion is subtle—it happens whenever we expect too little of love, too little of hope, too little of ourselves. Advent invites us back to the fullness of God’s dream, calling us to imagine a world where every person is cherished and no one is overlooked. Advent calls us back to God’s dream for creation—a world filled with peace, joy, hope and love.
The Advent wreath gives us a pattern. Every candle we light is a declaration that the light of Christ has the final word.
Hope — trusting that no situation is beyond God’s healing.
Peace — honoring the sacred worth of every human life.
Joy — lifting up the dignity of those whose voices are too often ignored.
Love — welcoming the stranger, comforting the weary, caring for the vulnerable.
These candles are not decorations. They represent spiritual practices. They shape how we are called to live in the world. They show us what it means to “keep awake.”
We are wanderers in time, following a promise we cannot yet see fully. But we can walk with confidence, because God has already entered this world once, and God will do so again. Christ comes every time hope takes root, every time peace interrupts violence, every time joy lifts someone from despair, every time love restores dignity.
So, this Advent, may we keep awake. May we open our eyes to the world and to the nearness of God. May we cling to hope. May we practice peace. May we choose joy. May we offer love.
And in doing these things, may we discover that Christ is already drawing near, already lighting the darkness with grace.
May your Advent be blessed. And may we keep awake, together. Amen.
[1] The Propers used for today’s sermon are Advent 2, Year A, Revised Common Lectionary (“RCL”)
[2] Cf. Psalm 72:4, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (“NRSVUE”)