This week, our readings areJeremiah 33.14–16 and Luke 21.25–36.

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, a season for reflection, waiting, and expectation. Waiting and expectation, though, are not always comfortable, particularly in times of uncertainty, or ‘fear and foreboding,’ as Jesus puts it. Those words feel rather relevant right now. It can feel like all we’re waiting for is the next disaster: Where and how will ongoing conflicts escalate? Will new ceasefires and truces hold? At what point will the climate catastrophe fully overtake us? This, though, is nothing new. Jeremiah was written something like 2,500 years ago, in a time of political upheaval, international warfare, and the loss of long-established ways of life. Despite this, Jeremiah held firm to the hope that this too will pass, that the Day of the Lord would come, putting all things right and fulfilling God's purpose of reconciling all things to himself. Jesus, also living in a time of political upheaval, international warfare, and ever-changing ways of life, echoes this same hope in the gospel reading. He readily acknowledges that life can be worrying but nonetheless encourages his disciples to hold firm to that same unchanging hope in the same unchanging God and not be weighed down. In their times, as in ours, this call to hope for the future is held in tension with fear of the present. So how practically can we hold it? How can we make our Advent wait one that is full of hope and comfort rather than worry and uncertainty? How can we wait patiently in the expectation of future glory in the face of the ever-consistent narrative of history? Perhaps this tension begins to ease when we let go of an expectation hidden beneath it: that this moment of salvation will be sudden and happen all at once - just as we imagine Christmas does at the end of Advent. That thinking, though, ties us in knots when we look at Jesus’ promise that ‘this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.’ So, let’s assume this isn’t a sudden dramatic change we’re talking about. Let’s take seriously Jesus’ encouragement that the Kingdom of God is near. Now, look again at the language used by Jeremiah and Jesus to describe the arrival of The Day - it’s botanical. Have you ever seen a plant appear fully grown overnight? Neither does this moment - a Branch springs up, in Jeremiah’s words (with an interesting parallel of a shoot from a stump in Isaiah 11), and Jesus talks of the leaves sprouting. These moments of growth are markers and signs of the full plant to come, continuous with it, yet distinct from it - objective waymarkers visible on the route to an unseen fulfilment. Jesus' ministry tells us the Kingdom of God is the same. It is something yet to appear in its fullness, for sure, but it's also somehow already among us, in the same way (perhaps) that the mince pies of Christmas scatter themselves throughout Advent. So this Advent, maybe spend some time not focusing on what's wrong in the world but instead searching for those signs, those tiny shoots of the glory to come. Keep watch for those moments of compassion, generosity, forgiveness, reconciliation, and selfless love that mark it not only as a future reality but as something to be engaged with and enjoyed now. Why not even create some of those moments? Let’s be people of hope, and not let our hearts be weighed down, nor faint from fear and foreboding. Mince pie, anyone?