Christmas is just around the corner now friends, and for this final of Sunday of Advent, we are inviting everyone to bring some kind of “sweet” finger food for after the service. It should be a fun and meaningful morning. Also, don’t forget about our Christmas Eve service at 4pm at St. Andrew's. We would love to see you all as we welcome in Christmas together. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself though as we are still in the season of Advent. Advent is often described as a season of waiting, but what if the real question isn’t whether we’re waiting, but where we’re waiting? This week, I want to listen closely to Mary’s song and her unsettling claim that God looks with favour on the lowly. Not the impressive. Not the powerful. The lowly. As we trace Mary’s story and song, we’ll explore why God so often seems to meet people not at their strongest, but at their most exposed, and why that truth is both comforting and deeply disrupts the stories we tell about ourselves.

Friends, this week we’re stepping into the Advent story through the eyes of Mary, a teenager in a nowhere town suddenly asked to carry God into the world. It’s a beautiful scene, until you remember it was also terrifying, disruptive, and about as far from “silent night” as you can get. And apparently, the church has always struggled with this story (so at least we are in good company). In fact, a few hundred years after the fact, church leaders tried to sort out what Mary’s “yes” actually meant. And, well, let’s just say it did not go smoothly. Picture a theological debate that somehow drifted into something resembling an ancient fist fight or an episode of Jerry Springer. Yes, really, it was that bad. Christians have never needed much help making things weird. But underneath the chaos of the story is a question Advent keeps putting in front of us: What does it mean for ordinary people to carry something of God into the world? What does Mary show us about fear, vulnerability, and how the smallest “yes” can reshape a life? We’ll sit with the mystery this Sunday, and laugh a little at our own species, while trying to see where this story might be trying to nudge us next.

This week, we’re setting aside our typical rhythms at Nexus for a Looking Glass Sunday—a morning to pause and notice our ancestors of faith. We want to use this Sunday morning to reflect on the ones who steadied us, surprised us, encouraged us, nudged us toward grace, or simply showed us what a faithful life can look like in the ordinary and unpolished places. We’ll hear from a handful of our own community members as they share brief reflections on the people—known or unknown to us—who left fingerprints on their faith in life-giving ways. Along the way, we’ll be invited to hold up the mirror ourselves, to wonder who helped make us who we are today… and maybe even what kind of presence we’re becoming for someone else. It’ll be reflective, grounding, and maybe even quietly hopeful. So, listen in as we look back to see forward a little more clearly.

Another season of Advent begins, and here again are the competing pulls of hectic shop-till-you-drop fervor and quiet invitations…to stillness and taking time to reflect on our longings and hopes…to consider what Jesus’ coming might mean for me personally, and the world I was born into…to love through giving our presence (see what I did there?). But what a world. This is a bit of a situation. Is God aware? Do the ancient promises (still) mean anything? Dare we believe God will make all things beautiful in their time? It can be hard to find hope. We might more easily notice an ache of shrivelling anxiety, or maybe just more of a numbness settling in. A longing with no hope of fulfillment is a very uncomfortable thing. But let’s courageously notice what we yearn for – our hopes for our lives and for the world. Because it is possible that we are not alone in our waiting. It’s possible that one day our most tender hopes will be met by our God of Love who will bring about a transformed world. As we wait… in the meantime…we have a beautiful, important, and sacred invitation to partner with God and others to build the dream. So, listen in as we consider together what Jesus could mean for us and the world.

Why do stories move us so deeply? Why do we keep turning to them to make sense of our lives? As we wrap up our Narratology series, we’ll step back and look at the bigger picture — not just the seven plot lines we’ve explored, but the deeper pattern that gives every story its power. This Sunday I want to explore why humans can’t help but narrate their lives, why our souls refuse “raw experience,” and why the stories we tell ourselves quietly shape everything from our wounds to our hopes. Across Scripture — this strange, beautiful library of messy, contradictory, astonishing stories — an unexpected pattern emerges. Like birds flocking in perfect synchronicity without a leader, the countless little narratives of the Bible give rise to one great story: the story of Jesus, the story that gathers and transforms every other story we live. It’s the tale that holds our quests, our monsters, our losses, our homecomings, and our rebirths. Listen in as we reflect on what it means to let that larger story hold your smaller one — in the middle chapters, in the unresolved moments, and in the parts you’d rather edit out. And what I hope we come to see this week is that faith isn’t certainty; it’s participation. It’s entrusting your life to a story spacious enough to hold everything you bring to it. And maybe, just maybe, discovering that hope is not about predicting a happy ending, but trusting the One still writing.

Well, we have come to the final plot line in our series, and of all the plot lines, this one probably feels closest to the heartbeat of faith itself. And, for everyone who’s ever told me that The Shawshank Redemption is their favourite film (or the GOAT of films), this is its Sunday to shine. We are going to be exploring the Rebirth plot line, the one where freedom begins not with escape, but with surrender. Through the story of Nicodemus meeting Jesus in the night, and Andy Dufresne crawling through the dark toward the light, we’ll reflect on what it means to be set free by grace and to let old stories die so something new can begin. Both Nick and Andy remind us that sometimes the hardest prisons to leave are the ones we’ve made for ourselves, and that rebirth rarely begins in triumph. It starts when we are stuck in the dark, with a whisper of hope that maybe, just maybe, the story isn’t over yet. Now, someone casually mentioned to me this week that they had never seen The Shawshank Redemption. I felt bad for them. Consider this your excuse to give it a watch or rewatch. Listen in as we explore the Rebirth plot line and the grace that ambushes us in the most surprising places.

Friends, we are onto our sixth of seven storylines. It is time to explore Tragedy. Now of course, some suffering finds us by chance — illness, loss, disappointment. That is tragic, but the plot line of tragedy has much more to do with the suffering we quietly choose ourselves. The Tragedy plot line chronicles stories where a person’s greatest strength becomes the seed of their undoing. From Shakespeare’s fallen kings to Breaking Bad’s Walter White to King David himself, tragedy warns us of what happens when brilliance outpaces wisdom, when ego replaces humility, and when the hero refuses to yield. It begins with small compromises and always ends in isolation. And yet, even here, the story is not beyond saving. The Jesus path meets us not when we’ve fixed the wreckage, but when we finally admit the boat is sinking. Listen in as we explore how even our most tragic stories can still find their way back to grace.

Everyone knows what the comedy plot line is all about, because unlike the other storylines, we measure the comedy plot line by one metric alone: Does it make us laugh? We know that good comedy is supposed to make us laugh, but why? Well, there is a sophistication to the plot line that goes far beyond jokes and punchlines. You see, the deepest truths of our faith are hiding in something as ordinary as laughter. So, join us this week as we explore the strange and serious wisdom of comedy. At its heart, it is a plot line that dares us to believe that confusion, contradiction, and chaos might still give way to something good. Now, on a personal note, I am digging a little deep into the archives for this one. I want to unearth two little nuggets of fun from Nexus that happened during the dark night of the soul that was Covid lockdowns and online services. These two community moments deserve another hearing and they fit the plot line so well. It should be fun to take a little stroll down Nexus’ memory lane. Listen in for some laughs, some wonder, and maybe a glimpse of what happens when the story we thought was falling apart, turns out to be coming together.