Holy Communion for Advent 2 Sunday, 7 December 2025 presided over by Revd George Mwaura.
Click on the title above for the online service sheet and the link to the live stream.

We are grateful for anything you can give to support the work of Christ the Cornerstone in Central Milton Keynes. Giving may be through any of the following methods: the Parish Giving Scheme, online giving, giving by telephone banking or by cheque.
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Join us at 6pm this evening for a relaxed evening of music, prayer and fellowship, led by Ian & Janet Trimnell.  The meeting will be held on Zoom.
Click on the title above to find details of the meeting.

God of all hope and expectation,
as we journey through this season of Advent, teach us the discipline of waiting.
When the world rushes past, slow our hearts to watch and listen for your coming.
When despair threatens to overwhelm, remind us of your promises that never fail.
Grant us the courage of John the Baptist to speak truth and call others to repentance.
Give us eyes to see the tender shoot growing from Jesse’s stump,
even when the world looks like a barren wilderness,
for we ask in the name of Who was, and is, and is to come.
Amen

Active Hope in the Darkness
By Revd George Mwaura

We gather on this First Sunday of Advent, not to escape the darkness, but to name it, and to proclaim that our waiting is not a passive resignation, but purposeful resistance. The world laments. Wars rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. Hunger stalks its victims in Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Climate catastrophe displaces millions as we have witnessed this week in Indonesia and other south-east Asia countries. The darkness is not metaphorical; it is the cold reality of children sleeping in rubble, of mothers watching their infants starve, of entire peoples erased from their lands. And into this darkness, Advent whispers: Wait.

But this is not the waiting of helplessness. The Hebrew prophets knew no such passivity. Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into ploughshares was not wishful thinking, it was a revolutionary manifesto. When he cried, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,’ he was calling for an active preparation: straightening the crooked systems, levelling the mountains of injustice, filling the valleys of inequality. Understand this: Christian hope, properly understood, is not optimism. Oh, no! Optimism is the privilege of those insulated from suffering. Hope, on the other hand, is something far more dangerous: it is the defiant conviction that darkness does not have the final word, coupled with the willingness to act as if the Kingdom were already breaking in.

Jürgen Moltmann taught us that Christian hope is not about the future as mere tomorrow, but about God’s future invading our present. We wait in darkness, yes, but we wait as light-bearers. We do not idle in despair; we labour in anticipation. This Advent, our hope must be embodied: in advocacy for the displaced, in solidarity with the suffering, in resistance to the powers that profit from war and environmental destruction. We light candles therefore, not to prettify the darkness, but to defy it! To say that even the smallest flame is an act of theological rebellion.

The Incarnation we await is God’s descent not into gilded comfort, but into the raw heart of crisis. Jesus was born in a stable, in a country under occupation, and threatened by imperial violence from his first breath. As you can see, our hope is in a God who does not transcend suffering but transforms it from within. So, we wait. But we wait awake – eyes open to injustice, hands extended in mercy, voices raised in prophetic witness. We wait as those who know the end of the story and therefore cannot be silent in the middle chapters. Today we proclaim, come, Lord Jesus. And until you do, make us your coming.

Amen!

Advent Carol Service with the Choir of Christ the Cornerstone directed by Adrian Boynton.
Click on the title above for the link to the live stream.