Prayer

Creator God, you who love us more than we can know
Who chose us from the very beginning to be family
We praise your holy name
Jesus Christ, Son of God, Word become flesh
Who dwelt among us and was sacrificed for us
We praise your holy name
Holy Spirit, present and power in our lives
From the moment that we first believed
We praise your holy name.

Reflection

The Christian in Advent needs to listen—to such a degree that this season becomes both a season of joyful expectancy and a season of poverty—the knowledge that we cannot talk and touch ourselves into life, the deep poverty of the imagination which can only stand helplessly before the outrages and miseries of our world, utterly at a loss for a word of meaning or hope to speak. We are here at all, celebrating Advent … because there has been a word of unexpected interruption, a word that establishes for good the difference between the God we expect and the God who comes, a word that shows us once and for all what an idol looks like in the face of truth. We are here because those acts we call liberation and absolution have turned our history into new and strange courses …

Yet we cannot imagine how tomorrow and the day after that form of liberation and absolution will renew itself, how the word will go on making itself heard to renew ,the world. We are perpetually looking to and giving thanks for an uncovenanted event, a transforming newness, the history of Israel and Jesus; we are perpetually "on the eve" of God's coming, knowing and not knowing what it will be. Advent insists that we stay for a while in this tension of being "on the eve," if only in order that the new thing we celebrate at Christmas may have a chance of being truly new for us, not a stale and pious cliché.
—Rowan Williams, "Advent: a University Sermon," in A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections (Lanham: Cowley, 1995).