Sermon: Second Sunday of Advent

Relief sculpture portraying the preaching of John the Baptist

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Listen to the sermon preached by the Rev. Richard Witt, executive director of the Diocese of New York’s Rural and Migrant Ministry, on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 2025.

      Sermon - Advent II 2025 - The Rev. Richard Witt

Lessons

You can read the scriptures for this service here: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12.

The image above is of a relief sculpture, ca. 1508-1519, in the Cathédrale d’Amiens in France portraying the preaching of John the Baptist.

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Hans Süss von Kulmbach, The Ascension of Christ (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Newsletter

Parish News: May 17

In this week’s newsletter, Mother Liz celebrates the parish’s feast day with Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on the Ascension, exploring its paradoxes: ending and beginning, absence and presence, humanity and divinity. Jesus leaves the disciples to fill all things with even more profound intimacy, and it is his broken, still-wounded body—”the heart that broke for all the broken hearted”—that ascends to God’s heart. The rector invites us to sit with these mysteries during the “dazzling darkness” between Ascension and Pentecost, pondering how we are held and hidden with Christ while called to be his presence in a world of crisis, wonder, and grief.

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