Carol Service by Rev’d Lucy

At the beginning of Genesis, before God speaks the world into being, the narrative pauses in a moment of open expectancy:

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

The verb hovering carries the sense of a bird poised above its nest, protective and attentive, waiting to see what will emerge. Creation begins not in haste but with God’s patient, watchful presence held over the unformed world.

This imagery returns later in the story of Noah. When the floodwaters cover the earth, Noah sends out a dove. The first time, it finds no place to land and returns. When he sends it again, it brings back an olive leaf, a sign that the waters are receding. The third time, it does not return at all, indicating that the world had opened toward a future in which life could begin again.

And the dove in that story carries a further resonance in Christian imagination, for when it returns with the olive leaf it signals not only renewed life but the restoration of peace between God and humanity after the flood.

This posture of expectancy is woven through the season of Advent, which leads us to the threshold of Christmas. It is a waiting in which so much unfolds quietly and unseen, like the slow, hidden work of pregnancy, long before anything is ready to be revealed. And Mary seems to understand this mystery more deeply than anyone. After the shepherds tell her all they have seen and heard, Luke says:

“Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

She does not rush to explain what God is doing. She receives it. She waits on it. She lets the truth grow at its own pace.

And the reading from the prologue of John’s Gospel that we have just heard takes us back to that first beginning:

“In the beginning was the Word.”

John echoes Genesis deliberately. Through him all things came into being, and now the eternal Word enters the world as one of us. Christmas is the first revealing of what God has long been bringing to birth, a new creation – echoing the first – and unfolding through the Spirit’s work in what is still taking shape.

All of this feels strangely resonant with our own moment. We are living in a time when the future feels less certain than it once did. Many things we assumed were stable now seem more fragile and the path ahead can feel harder to read. Globally and close to home, we witness tensions, conflicts, polarisation and relationships under strain. In such a climate it is easy to slip into anxiety or resignation, as though the future must be known before we can hope.

But the scriptural imagination offers something else. Hope is not foresight. Hope is expectancy. Hope is a posture of attention, of trusting that God is already at work in ways we cannot yet fully perceive. Isaiah gives us that line spoken into the heart of Israel’s uncertainty:

“See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up, do you not perceive it.”

The question is not whether God is at work, but whether we have learned how to notice the small beginnings, the tender signs, the olive leaves before the landscape clears. And among the beginnings we learn to watch for are the first faint signs of peace.

With this in mind we have created a simple Advent practice this year. You may have noticed the dove projected onto the church window, made for us by the artist Katie Goodwin, a rear projected image visible from inside the church and also from outside as you walk past, or from across the lake. A dove in the darkness releasing an olive branch, a small, luminous gesture perhaps glimpsed only briefly, yet carrying that biblical resonance of peace restored and life beginning again. And echoing this image, the white doves on the Christmas tree outside the church recall Noah’s dove returning with its olive leaf – that sign of God’s renewing presence, peace and the possibility of a fresh beginning.

If you would like to take part, there are paper doves within the flyers at the back of the church. You are welcome to take one at the end of the service and write, on both sides, the peace you long to see in your life or in the world. You can then hang your dove on the tree outside St Giles. Throughout Advent we will hold these hopes in prayer, and on Christmas Eve they will be gathered and offered at Midnight Mass, carrying the prayers of this community into the heart of Christmas.

We may not see the shape peace will take, or know when it will arrive, but naming our longing is part of learning to wait expectantly, to discern what might be emerging. So it is worth asking, where is the Spirit hovering over this community? Where are the quiet places in which God’s future touches the present? Where is peace waiting for a place to alight?

Often what is taking shape reveals itself only gradually, a shift noticed only later, something held open for a moment and then gone again. At other times it comes with a clarity that surprises us. And there are moments when what we offer seems to return to us unchanged, as though nothing has moved at all. Noah’s dove reminds us that some gestures need to be offered more than once before we catch sight of what is taking form. What matters is the attention we give to what God is bringing into being, however it arrives.

Creation begins with the Spirit hovering.
The dove returned with a single leaf.
New creation begins with a child.
Mary pondered the words spoken to her.
Hope begins in the quiet work of paying attention.

And the story of Christmas reveals what this beginning involves, for it tells of a God who does not stand apart from the world’s unfolding. In the Word made flesh, God enters its vulnerability and promise, taking part in its life from within. The angels’ proclamation carries that announcement into the night air. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward all.” Peace from heaven to earth. Peace that does not erase the world’s struggles, but enters them and begins the work of restoration from within.

In uncertain times this is what steadies us: not the clarity of the future but the nearness of God. For in Christ we see that God has not stepped back from creation, and does not step back from us.

Perhaps this Christmas we are invited into that same posture of watchful, hopeful attention: to look for the signs of the new thing God is bringing to birth, to pray for peace even when we cannot yet see its form, to trust that God is at work in the small beginnings.

For the promise of Christmas is that new creation has already begun, and it is still unfolding among us.

Amen.