This week feels like a new beginning – with some of us joining together for the first face-to-face worship in 8 months. So it feels like a time to give thanks and voice hope for the future.
But this week many of us will continue to gather virtually by Zoom and others again will be worshipping at home alone. So it also feels like a time to mourn for the lives, the freedoms and the hopes that we have lost this year and acknowledge what has been and continues to be a dreadful year for many people in many places across the world.
This week is also a time to wait on God and pray for God to act to restore what has been lost and to heal what has been broken and what is still hurting in the world.
Welcome to the season of Advent, the season of waiting. It is a season that invites us into a space of lament and suffering and longing – longing for justice, longing for restoration, longing for healing. Perhaps for the first time for many of us, we can resonate with the feelings of lament in the Hebrew prophets for God to act and bring change to a hurting world (as expressed in Isaiah 64:1-9).
Advent is also a season of hope. It invites us to a space of trust that God has not forgotten or abandoned us but rather is still at work in the world in quiet and unexpected places bringing new life and new possibilities for change and for good. In the gospel reading this week we are invited to be alert and to look for such signs emerging around us. I wonder what you are seeing?
Some exciting news this week as we begin face-to-face worship at Croydon North this Sunday for the first time in over 8 months. For Croydon North people, the service will start at 10 am in the worship space as per the old pattern. For everyone else, this worship service will be streamed via Zoom in the usual way (fingers crossed that the technology all works as planned). So please login to Zoom from 9.45 am.
We will be basing our worship on the attached worship@home resource for this week, so it would be handy for those on Zoom to have a copy present.
Click here for worship@home resources