A Different Story

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 30, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Advent Sunday

It’s often said the words we most fear aren’t ‘I’m angry with you,’ but ‘I’m disappointed in you.’ It may be because the words are meant kindly – but somehow they sink deep. Perhaps it’s because if a person’s angry, we can say it’s about them – they need to control their emotions better, they need to gain empathy and realise I was acting out of motives they haven’t fully appreciated; but if they’re disappointed, it’s because they had a story about who we were and how we would conduct ourselves, and what’s come to light is a truth about us that doesn’t fit that narrative and shows we’re not the person they hoped we’d be. So they say ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ thereby placing a cloud of failure over us and leaving us with a sense of guilt we’re not sure we can ever escape. All while they get to feel magnanimous and communicate to us they could have been even harsher in their judgement – in fact while we feel crushed, they actually get to feel they’re being kind.

If you want to make God laugh, you say, ‘These are my plans.’ Life has an extraordinary way of never turning out quite as you expect. We spend our whole lives creating narratives and assuming things will follow their predicted course. Most of our misunderstandings arise because we had a story in our head of how an evening or a holiday or a relationship would go, and the other person had a different story in their head, and it didn’t occur to us to check if the stories were in any way similar. Many of us spend much of our lives experiencing disappointment. ‘I always hoped I’d meet a partner.’ ‘It’s a competitive profession and I never got the grades or made it through probation.’ ‘I just assumed I’d have children and didn’t really think about infertility.’ ‘I’ve never understood why I kept on being overlooked for promotion.’ ‘We never had enough money to buy our own home.’ All these are one-sentence versions of stories that didn’t turn out as we expected. They can leave us feeling life has passed us by, or that nothing will ever make up for hopes that remained unrealised.

We seldom recognise that the Christian faith in general and the church in particular are founded on two profound disappointments. It’s hard to imagine Christianity without the cross – it’s the universal symbol of the faith, and the most widely historically attested fact about Jesus’ life. But for the first disciples, it was an utter catastrophe. This was not the way the story was supposed to go. Throughout the gospels we get consistent indications the disciples thought they were part of a restoration movement by which Jesus would go to Jerusalem, seize power, expel the Romans, and inaugurate an unprecedented period of justice and peace. That was what Messiahs were supposed to do. For him to be crucified was a crushing disappointment. You can’t understand the temptation narratives unless you realise these were the three things everyone expected of someone known as the Christ – you did miracles that fed the hungry, you did dramatic things with angels that caught people’s attention, and you took political control. You can read half the New Testament as a way of coming to terms with the desperate disappointment constituted by the cross.

The other half of the New Testament you can read as coming to terms with a second disappointment. It’s often said, ‘Jesus preached the kingdom of God, but instead we got the church.’ The phrase ‘kingdom of God’ occurs 68 times in the New Testament. It sounds like an upbeat proclamation that God is sovereign, and all places will conform to God’s purpose of restored and healthy relationships and flourishing life. But underneath is another story of disappointment. This time the disappointment is that Jesus didn’t return in glory a short while after his ascension. It’s as if the expectation was that Jesus would descend on the clouds and inaugurate the kingdom; but what happened instead was that the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and empowered the apostles to establish the church. What the Acts of the Apostles describes as a dramatic and invigorating event of sending the apostles to preach the gospel to every tribe in every tongue is actually a recalibration of an expectation that the world would end and all would be swathed in justice and peace. It’s hard for us to call the non-ending of the world a disappointment, because if the world had ended then, none of us would ever have existed. But there’s no question the New Testament is written by people bewildered that the story didn’t turn out as it was supposed to.

Once we recognise these two fundamental disappointments that lie at the heart of the New Testament, we can begin to see two further and subtler disappointments that characterise the story. Think for a moment about Christmas. The Christmas story is a curious mixture of two kinds of event. On the one hand we have a grand narrative. We have a huge family tree, going back to Abraham in one case and to God in the other. We have a magnificent display of angels filling the sky and kings crossing the desert. On the other hand, we have a young girl, a pregnancy outside marriage, a gruelling journey, a manger, and no place at the inn. If the God who made heaven and earth were finally to enter the story, surely you’d expect a more arresting beginning than this. It’s painfully ordinary. It’s a bitter disappointment.

Then look at the most extraordinary moment in the whole story: something unprecedented, impossible, incomprehensible – the resurrection of Jesus after two nights in the tomb. You’d think this was such a spectacular event it would be beamed live around the world, like a World Cup Final. Instead, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, a woman of no standing, in a garden, and to disciples behind locked doors. You don’t need to have a degree in marketing to sense it’s a missed opportunity. If part of the point of the resurrection was to persuade the wider public that Jesus was truly the Son of God, you have to put Jesus’ way of rising from the tomb as a major disappointment.

By now you may be getting the idea. The major elements in the story of Jesus, for Christians the focal story in the Bible and the central series of events in the history of the world – they’re all disappointments. I wonder what that’s telling us.

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was a Kosovar Albanian who was born in Skopje, now capital of North Macedonia. After profound spiritual encounters at a shrine in Kosovo, she went to Ireland aged 18 to train to be a nun, and began her novitiate in Darjeeling aged 20. While she remained fervent in prayer, she became deeply troubled by the poverty of Kolkata, and after 20 years she founded her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, devoted to in her words, ‘the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.’ She became known as Mother Teresa. Her work was widely admired and sometimes criticised. But unknown to the world, from this time forward she experienced repeated, if not permanent, desolation in her spiritual life. In letters published after her death she expressed her grief in these words. ‘Where is my faith? Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … If there be God – please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.’

People have tried to find meaning in Mother Teresa’s emptiness and sense of abandonment. They’ve also expressed dismay that a person seen as holy by so many, and subsequently recognised as a saint, could have felt so empty before God. But Mother Teresa’s experience simply bears out what we’ve seen about the four great moments in the gospel story. The incarnation is an obscure disappointment. The cross is a crushing disappointment. The resurrection is a secretive disappointment. The return of Christ is a bewildering disappointment. So it seems less bemusing that the spiritual life of the best-known holy person of the late twentieth century was itself a disappointment.

Advent is about the coming of Jesus, in two moments. It’s about his coming on the last day, in clouds of glory, to vindicate the oppressed, to bring history to an end, and to change us all from glory into glory. And it’s about his first coming, as a tiny child, in obscure Bethlehem, to unknown Mary, in a lowly manger. What we’ve seen is that both are disappointments – the last day because it never happened when it was expected to, and Christmas because it was such a mysterious event the whole world basically missed it. What these two moments have in common is that neither happened as everyone expected.

But Advent is a season that transcends the disappointments of our lives. We think we know how the story is going to go, how the relationship is going to go, how everything with God and ourselves is going to go. It turns out we’re mistaken over and over again. Advent challenges us to say, ‘Maybe not everything has to go the way I hope and expect. Maybe there’s something beyond what I think I want – even something on which I’ve focused my hopes for a long time.’ Because Advent is saying two things. The story will one day come to an end, and whatever happens, whatever goes wrong or disappoints or fails or founders, God will finally draw all things together for good. And in the meantime, whether we feel it, see it, or even believe it, God is with us constantly, even in obscure ways like a tiny baby it would be easy to miss, or in transformations like a resurrection only a few people actually see. God may be a disappointment to us a lot of the time; but we are not a disappointment to God. God has invested everything in us at Christmas, and will realise that investment at the end of time. And in the end, that’s all that matters.