Sermon: 2nd Sunday of Advent

Preacher:

Bob Cooper

Date:

Sunday 7th December 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

9.45 Cathedral Eucharist

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I was in a lift in a London office block last week. You know the rules. Face forward. Watch the numbers. Absolutely no conversation.

The man next to me hadn't read the memo.

"Going to the meeting?" he asked the woman beside him. She nodded, hoping that would end it.

"Nervous?"

She admitted she was, actually.

"Me too," he said. "I keep telling myself it'll be fine but I don't really believe it. It's going to be horrible, especially as we're likely to be told we're being made redundant."

I stared at the ceiling as if it contained the secrets of the universe. This man was violating the sacred code. He was being honest.

I was glad to be out of that lift.

There is something wonderfully uncomfortable about John the Baptist. He refuses to be domesticated. Year after year he appears in our Advent readings, dressed in camel hair, eating locusts, and saying things that would get him banned from most dinner parties. "You brood of vipers," he shouts at the religious establishment. "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

This is not a man interested in keeping the peace.

And yet the Church places him before us every Advent as an essential voice. Not despite his awkwardness, but because of it. John the Baptist is the necessary precursor to Christmas precisely because he refuses to let us arrive at the manger without first examining our hearts.

Matthew tells us his message was simple: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." But notice who came to hear him. Not just the poor and desperate, but the Pharisees and Sadducees—the powerful, the comfortable, the establishment. And John does not soften his message for them. If anything, he sharpens it. "Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor.'" Your privilege will not save you. Your tradition will not save you. Your certainty that you are on the right side will not save you. Only repentance. Only bearing fruit worthy of that repentance.

Isaiah's vision offers a remarkable counterpoint to this. Here is the peaceable kingdom, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the world made new. The wolf shall live with the lamb. A little child shall lead them. It is one of the most beautiful passages in Scripture.

But Isaiah's vision comes after chapters of devastating judgement. The stump of Jesse exists because the tree has been cut down. The restoration follows destruction. Isaiah is not offering cheap hope. He is offering costly hope—hope that has passed through honest reckoning.

And this is where John and Isaiah meet. Both insist that we cannot have resurrection without death. We cannot have new growth without the axe being laid to the root. We cannot have the peaceable kingdom without first acknowledging that our kingdoms are anything but peaceable.

So what does this mean for us, gathered in this cathedral in twenty-first century Britain?

I think it means we need voices like John the Baptist more than ever. Not angry voices—anger is cheap and plentiful. But truthful voices. Voices willing to name uncomfortable realities. Voices that refuse to let us hide behind our religious credentials or our national identity or our political tribe.

We live in a time of profound uncertainty. Wars continue in Ukraine and the Middle East. The climate emergency advances while we argue about whether it's happening. Trust in institutions has eroded. Political discourse has coarsened into tribal certainties, where nuance is weakness and compromise betrayal.

The temptation is either to retreat into comfortable religion or to become prophets of doom. John offers a different way. He speaks hard truths, yes. But he speaks them in the service of hope. The axe is laid to the root not to destroy but to clear ground for new growth. The one who is coming will baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire—a fire that refines rather than merely consumes.

The question is whether we are willing to hear such voices, and whether we ourselves are willing to become them.

Speaking truth to power cost John his head. But I wonder if the harder challenge for most of us is not speaking truth to power out there—to governments and institutions—but speaking truth to the powers within ourselves. The comfortable assumptions we never examine. The prejudices we dress up as principles. The ways we use our faith to confirm what we already believe rather than to transform us.

"Bear fruit worthy of repentance," John demands. Not just feel sorry. Bear fruit. Live differently.

What might such fruit look like? Perhaps it begins with listening—truly listening—to those with whom we disagree. In a culture that rewards the loudest voices and most extreme positions, there is something subversive about genuine attention to another person's perspective. Perhaps it continues with courage to speak when we would rather remain silent: to name injustice, to challenge cruelty even when popular, to stand with the vulnerable even when it costs us.

And perhaps, most difficult of all, it means examining ourselves with the same rigour we apply to others. The Pharisees who came to John were experts at identifying other people's sins. What they could not do was see their own need. "We have Abraham as our ancestor," they said. We are on the right side. We have nothing to repent of.

John's response is blunt: God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Your inheritance means nothing if your life does not reflect it. Your orthodoxy is worthless without orthopraxy. Your beliefs are worthless without action.

As we prepare for Christmas, John stands at the threshold and asks us a simple question: Are you ready? Not, have you bought the presents and planned the meals. But are you ready in your heart? Have you made straight the paths? Have you levelled the mountains of pride and filled in the valleys of despair?

Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom is not fantasy. It is promise. But it requires our participation. The shoot from the stump of Jesse has come. The kingdom of heaven is near. The question is whether we will receive it. Whether we will bear fruit worthy of repentance. Whether we will become, in our own small ways, voices in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord.

May God give us grace to hear the Baptist's uncomfortable message. May God give us courage to speak truth when truth is needed. And may God bring us, through the disciplines of Advent, to the joy of Christmas—not as passive observers, but as active participants in the coming kingdom.

Perhaps we need to be a little more like the man in the lift……….

Amen