Sermon preached at Evensong on the Second Sunday before Advent 2025

Browsing in a charity shop last week I found “The Unworry Book” - a set of exercises to allay unmanageable stress and panic. Bad enough. Until you consider its target group: children, aged seven to ten. Anxiety really is endemic, and highly infectious. One psychologist who works with anxious children told a newspaper that she gets the whole family together and asks this question: does anyone in your house ever relax?

Touché. But what can we do? Home is a property to be constantly maintained. A space to be constantly tidied, so full of all our stuff. Now our homes have been infiltrated by the sleep-wrecking blue screens, those ever-present engines of envy, stress, and dread. When 79% of British employees check their work emails in bed, it is well worth asking: does anyone in your house ever relax?

But in this house, I hope, we can relax. This house of God where we’ve gathered today certainly is a place to unwind and be ourselves, take the pressure off for an hour or so. That’s why we come. Like the weary sparrow and the nesting swallow in today’s psalm, we find in God’s house a place of refuge and nurture. In a world where we are told that even our closest relationships must be worked at, here is a place of ease. A place where the only work to be done is working out the scriptures. And that too is eased - with preachers to offer a head start, and Jesus himself, in today’s reading from Matthew, first weaving the parable of the sower, and then kindly explaining it, line by line, saving us the trouble. 

The trouble comes when we step out, through those great west doors and back into a world that is equipped to value neither the word of God nor the gifts of peace. If we find a home in God’s altars then it turns out it is a home that we must take away and carry around with us; and, in the manner of a snail or tortoise, it had better be a tough one. The whole armour of God was needed when Daniel found himself in the lion’s den. A good thing that he’d been diligently strapping it on, day by day, for decades. Whether he is praying inside his own house, or answering his accusers in public, living in Jerusalem or exiled in Persia: Daniel enjoys the same strength, the same protection, at all times, as the one whose true home is in God.

The psalmist says that those who have found this home in God will go from strength to strength. And that’s the point of Jesus’ parable, as well. The person who is sown in the good soil of the Almighty will thrive. So if we are rooted in the peace of God’s house, and the comfort of his word and sacraments, then we will be the blessed people who hear the word and understand it, who bear fruit and yield. 

And perhaps, much of the time, we will. And perhaps some of the time, we won’t. There may be, for any of us, however faithful, times of overwhelming desolation. Periods of such pain or anger that the message God sends us in Christ, his message of unfailing hope and consolation, simply bounces off us, like seed scattered on paving stones. Unheard, and unwanted. 

And, perhaps we have all known times when our giddy enthusiasm for the gospel is rather in excess of our commitment to living it. Exclaiming in rapture on the love of God, while we skip our prayers and shirk those shifts at the soup kitchen, and ask ourselves whether spending Sunday morning in bed with the Archers’ omnibus can really be so big a crime just this once. 

And as for Jesus’ warning about the cares of the world and the lure of the wealth choking God’s word in us - well if there’s anyone here this doesn’t apply to, then do let us know. We’ll dig up King Edward’s remains and instal theirs instead - we have a new saint among us. 

The promise of God is not that we will never know hardship - trouble and persecution are, says Jesus in today’s reading, a matter of when, not if. The promise of God is not that our relationship to God will never be troubled or challenged either. We are not guaranteed that we will be constant - you can bet your life that God is banking nothing on our fidelity. We are guaranteed that God will be constant. No matter what we do, He keeps his promise forever. 

And so the difficulty of making a home in God is not, as it might appear, the difficulty of us holding up our side of the bargain. The difficulty is coming to see that there is no bargain. This home is a free gift - pure ease, perfect belonging. The only difficulty comes when we introduce one, fixated as we are on reciprocity, on every relationship being somehow transactional. And so it must appear to us: who take and carry with us, everywhere we go, the addictive blue-lit screen of commerce, exploitation and doom.

God, though, is a home whose walls do not crumble around us because we fail to spend our weekends maintaining them. We may find it gets a bit cluttered, but it doesn’t collapse. It is a home that surrounds us wherever we go - unimaginably bigger than we are, and bigger than the worst that can befall us. It is a place where we don’t have to perform, or be right, and where we certainly don’t need to be sure. If we are no more than ourselves, the selves we are right now - with all our turmoil or fury or sorrow or doubt or boredom or weariness - that home will continue to stand, and to surround us; to be and to give the peace that the world cannot give. 

Today’s scriptures warn us that testing times will call for a faith that endures. And they also say: relax. A faith that endures comes from the God who endures - the Living God, enduring forever, whose dominion has no end. One day in his courts is better than a thousand, because no thousands, or thousands of thousands, no multiplication of cash and stuff and worry, are as anything compared with the sun of righteousness, our light and our defence. If only that were the light we carried around with us, everywhere we went. How different life might be. In the lion’s den or the vale of misery; in our own four walls, or this majestic place of worship; whatsoever good we do or evil we endure: the peace of knowing we are at home. How blessed are they that dwell in thy house, O Lord. They will be alway praising thee. 

Amen.