2025-2026 Advent and Christmas Series: May Peace Be Within You
Year A 2025-2026 Seeds and Ways Focus and Roadmap: Stay Awake
Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
(Matthew 24:42 NRSVue)
The liturgical calendar calls us to remember expectation. While our memories of the days preceding Christmas may include anticipating gifts and festival gathering around meals and decorated trees, that is not the memory Advent amplifies. While Epiphany greets us at the dawn of a new year, memories of midnight toast and kisses does not frame that season. Lent may evoke shudders as we consider how difficult it may have been to forgo that favorite practice, menu item, or other thing in order to share in the sacrificial activity of Christ. Yet, if that struggle fails to generate empathy for the suffering of our neighbor on our block and across the world, the sacrifice was empty. A sunrise service on Easter Sunday morning may transport our imagination to the empty tomb, but that shocking moment led to uncertainty, discovery, and an empowered movement that launched on the Day of Pentecost and continues today.
The future of the church faces threats. While some have the reasonable fear of closing church doors, the more urgent and salient problem is the church that has lost its way, its voice, its witness, and its commitment to embodying good news in the world as Christ’s agents in the world.
The call to remember expectation is a call to hope, to agency, and to activation in a world in need of conduits and co-creators of good news. In the anchoring text for the liturgical year, Jesus cautioned and encouraged their followers to “keep awake.” The command encompasses attentiveness, alertness, and readiness. The context of the passage emphasizes the anticipated return of Christ, the Chosen One. Could the Body of Christ reclaim its mantle and mandate to embody God’s love and liberating power in the world? Could that be the return we expect…to the movement to follow the way of Jesus in spirit and in truth…not to give us an escape to heaven but to realize the kindom on earth through our collective, Spirit-led salvific acts in the name of Jesus? Are we prepared and willing to be that church?
That is the question we will ponder in Year A even as we heed the call to “Stay Awake.”
2025-2026 Advent and Christmas Series: May Peace Be Within You
The coming of the Chosen One was anticipated; in a similar way, the Second Coming of Christ represents a promise not yet realized. What does it mean to wait in expectation for the incarnation of the Messiah? Like the early disciples, we benefit from revelation and still wrestle with the unknown. If we follow their example, we will simply,if not easily, follow Jesus on our journey.
When Jesus greeted the disciples following the resurrection, he offered them a blessing of peace. As we remember, re-imagine, and participate in the incarnation again during this Advent season, we long, hope, and work for peace understanding that it starts from within.
In this series, we center the words found in Psalm 122:7-9:
Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers.”
For the sake of my relatives and friends
I will say, “Peace be within you.”
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
I will seek your good.
Further, the celebration and commemoration of Christmas immerses us in the power of presence and the gifts of love, hope, peace, and joy. We acknowledge those gifts are planted within us as seeds to grow, with roots that anchor and vines that spread.
We will journey with the wisdom, insight, challenge, and encouragement of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. These voices spoke to the challenges and possibilities of their time. Their story will inspire us to reflect upon the human story continuing to be written in our time. May we turn to the God who comes to us and goes with us.
Peace be within you.
Scripture and Themes
Advent 1A – November 30: Isaiah 2:1-5 | “Raised Above”
Advent 2A – December 7: Isaiah 11:1-10 | “A Branch Shall Grow”
Advent 3A – December 14: Isaiah 35:1-10 “Called the Holy Way”
Advent 4A – December 21: Isaiah 7:10-16 | “Let It Be Deep”
Christmas Eve/Day A – December 24/25: Isaiah 9:2-7| “From This Time Onward”
Christmas 1A – December 28: Isaiah 63:7-9 | “In God’s Love”
Christmas 2A – January 4: Jeremiah 31:7-14 | “The Remnant”
(To observe the Feast of Epiphany on January 4, please see the Worship Ways resource for Epiphany.)
The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology, United Church of Christ, (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves as a local church pastor and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities.