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Please note this script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.
It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events

Opening Anno:
´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4. And now we go live to Cardiff for Sunday Worship.Ìý The service, the first in a series for Advent, comes from Albany Road Baptist Church and is introduced by the preacher this morning the Rev. Roy Jenkins.
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ITEM 1ÌýINTRO & WELCOME ROY JENKINSÌýÌýÌýÌý
Good morning and welcome to Cardiff where the trees have been glittering for weeks, lights sparkling, markets booming and parties in full swing.Ìý As in many places across the land, Christmas seems to have been with us for a long time, and maybe we’re a bit weary of it already.Ìý

But in the Christian calendar, preparation starts here, Advent Sunday, and there’s a tingle of anticipation.ÌýÌý It’s a day for affirming that something good is on its way, and each of our Advent services is on the theme of Longing for hope.ÌýÌýÌý

‘Longing’ suggests we might not even be hoping yet.Ìý With the world as it is, with tensions and terror, with wars, hunger, poverty - we’d like to, but can’t manage it. There’s so much uncertainty, and we can’t watch the news without being depressed, or losing faith.Ìý And maybe we’ve any number of personal crises to navigate, with little idea how, or whether, we’re going to get through. Can hope be any more than whistling in the dark to keep spirits up?ÌýÌý So we begin today with the idea of Hope in the wilderness…simple recognition that that’s where many of us might feel we are.

There are some dark notes in this season.Ìý The New Testament speaks of hard realities to be faced, words of judgment and warning to be heeded.Ìý Yet hope is the consistent thread, hope of a coming which will touch all creation.Ìý

And so our first hymn, from the Cardiff Ardwyn Singers, honouring the Christ who has come, and who offers hope; and after it the theme is taken up by one of the members of this church, the Rev Susan Stevenson, who’s a regional minister for Baptists in South Wales.

ITEM 2ÌýMUSIC 1ÌýCHOIR/CONG/ORGANÌýÌý
Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes (Bristol)

ITEM 3ÌýPRAYERÌýREV. SUSAN STEVENSON ÌýÌýÌý
Advent God, we worship you.
You came in creation, as you breathed over the waters of chaos.
You came in Jesus Christ, made flesh for the world and its salvation.
You come to us day by day, by your Spirit and in other people.ÌýÌý
Grant us grace us to recognise you, and to prepare for your great coming at the end of time.
And as Jesus taught us, we pray together:Ìý

ITEM 4ÌýLORD’S PRAYERÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌý
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.Ìý Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.Ìý
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen

ITEM 5ÌýLINK SUSANÌýÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌýÌý
Later on today we’ll be lighting the first of our Advent candles.ÌýÌý As in many churches, this is an honour which goes to one of the younger members of the congregation.Ìý They’re often excited; sometimes a bit overawed, and need a little persuasion from a supervising adult actually to get the flame burning.ÌýÌý But the light does always come - and with each fresh candle, week by week the story is developed.Ìý The light comes through the scriptures, through those who point to Jesus, through the recognition of Jesus as the light of the world, through the calling of Christians to reflect that light.Ìý Steadily the anticipation grows.Ìý And it begins with a word of hope - that Jesus is coming again.Ìý And so we pray, Christ be our light, shine in our hearts, shine through the darkness.

ITEM 6ÌýMUSIC 2ÌýCHOIR/CONG/ORGANÌýÌýÌý
Christ be our light (Bernadette Farrell)

ITEM 7ÌýLINK SUSANÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý
The idea that Jesus will return in glory and power is easily ignored, dismissed, caricatured.ÌýÌý But the New Testament is infused with it, the church’s creeds affirm it, and there seems little doubt that Jesus himself believed it.Ìý Timetables are forbidden, speculations on literal detail futile.Ìý To his first followers, however, a struggling minority facing daily persecution, it was a sustaining power.

It assured them that his values of love and forgiveness and service would conquer.Ìý Even the worst tyrannies would not last for ever.ÌýÌý All that tormented and oppressed, caused grief and pain, would be confronted by the reign of the one who had conquered death itself.
This offers no pretext for avoiding uncomfortable realities, no permission to opt out of the struggles to protect Gods creation, to strive for the justice and peace for which the world yearns.ÌýÌý Until Christ’s great day dawns, Christians are told, they must live in ways which reflect the new reality which is coming. Here are words from Paul to the church in Rome.Ìý

ITEM 8ÌýREADING BEHROOZ
Romans 12.9-15; 13.10-13aÌýÌýÌý
Let your hope keep you joyful, be patient in your troubles, and pray at all times.ÌýÌý Share your belongings with your needy fellow-Christians, and open your homes to strangers.Ìý Ask God to bless those who persecute you - yes, ask him to bless, not to curse… If someone has done you a wrong, do not repay him with a wrong… Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good.
‘To love is to obey the whole Law.Ìý You must do this, because you know that the time has come for you to wake up from sleep.ÌýÌý For the moment when we will be saved is closer now than it was when we first believed.Ìý The night is nearly over, day is almost here.ÌýÌý Let us stop doing the things that belong to the dark, and let us take up weapons for fighting in the light.ÌýÌý

ITEM 9ÌýLINK SUSANÌý
‘Let your hope keep you joyful…’Ìý But that’s not always simple.ÌýÌýÌý Peter Lewis was in this church every Sunday.ÌýÌý He smiled a lot, laughed a lot, and delighted in corny jokes.
But he also struggled. Peter had learning difficulties, and various physical ailments.Ìý He’d had a rough time growing up, constantly bullied at school and easily baited when he began work.Ìý Even in later years and becoming more vulnerable, he received a lot of verbal abuse.Ìý And in the early hours of one morning, a stranger high on drink and drugs rang his doorbell, argued, and stabbed him. He died shortly afterwards.

The community here was stunned.ÌýÌý Everyone knew him.Ìý He’d made many friends across the city, and championed those with similar difficulties - ‘Disability is not inability’, he’d insist.Ìý Though he’d left school unable to read or write, he had a prodigious memory, and he knew his Bible better than some preachers (and occasionally told them so).Ìý Hundreds packed the church to celebrate his life, and he’d have been delighted that the story of his deep faith in Jesus Christ caused some to do serious thinking of their own.ÌýÌý

Even through the darkest wilderness hours Peter’s hope never left him…not least the hope of a continuing life, with the friend he had trusted from boyhood, from whom not even a violent death could separate him.ÌýÌý With the hymn writer, he’d have affirmed fervently, All my hope on God is founded.Ìý

ITEM 10ÌýMUSIC 3ÌýCHOIR/CONG/ORGANÌýÌý
All my hope on God is founded
Ìý
ITEM 11ÌýADDRESS 1 ROY JENKINSÌýÌý
Like Peter, many people find themselves in a wilderness that can blight their lives - propelled there by the loss of a job, maybe, sudden ill-health, money worries, disruption in the family, disillusion with a world changing too fast …what once seemed secure has crumbled, and it can be deeply depressing.Ìý

But I was fascinated some years ago to encounter men and women who had chosen a literal wilderness.ÌýÌý In the bleak deserts of Egypt, I was visiting some of the country’s most ancient monasteries, and tasting a living tradition unbroken for more than 1,700 years.Ìý
Like the original desert fathers, some live as hermits, committed to solitude, silence and constant prayer, seeking God with a sometimes terrifying earnestness.Ìý ‘Why are you sitting there?’ a busy visitor asked one, prompting the reply, ‘I am not sitting, I am on a journey.’Ìý
Most are in community, with regular patterns of work and worship, among them many professional people - one monastery alone had ten doctors and ten pharmacists.Ìý They see their years of focussing on God and praying for the world not as an escape, but rather a means of strengthening them for the intensity of the work to which they will return.
They know that could involve a different kind of desert.Ìý As Coptic Christians, they belong to a significant minority population, confronted by discrimination in many areas of public life: education, employment, and much more; converts face intimidation, and violent opposition sometimes takes lives.

A notice posted near the entrance to one complex declares: ‘The only law of this monastery is love, without rules or limitations, as it was revealed in the cross.’Ìý There are diverse jobs to be done, but one essential task - ‘to offer ourselves as a sacrifice of love to the Lord Jesus.’Ìý The richness of living out that life of love stands in sharp contrast to the bleakness of the desert.

However hostile an environment, Christian hope is always an expression of defiance, rooted in the conviction that God’s purposes will ultimately be fulfilled.Ìý

The celebrated Ukrainian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who died this summer, was among theÌý dissidents who found themselves in the prisons and labour camps of the former Soviet empire.Ìý I once met her very briefly here in Cardiff, and many years on she’s continued to inspire me.

As a primary school teacher of 29, she was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony, principally, it would seem, because she wrote truthfully about her country as she saw it, and expressed her faith in doing so - despite the attention of the authorities. She spent long periods in punishment cells, often freezing, seriously malnourished, and so ill at times that she was believed to be near death.ÌýÌý But she carried her faith into those cells, and it governed the way she regarded those trying to break her.
‘Under no circumstances,’ she wrote, ‘should you allow yourself to feel any hatred.Ìý Not that your tormentors don’t deserve it.ÌýÌý But if you let the hatred in, there’ll be so much of it in all your years in jail that it’ll replace everything else inside you, and your soul will be disfigured and corroded…The only way to remain human in a labour camp is to feel other people’s pain stronger than your own.’

Even without writing materials, Irina had an ingenious way of continuing to produce poems: she wrote with a matchstick, or any other pointed object available, on bars of soap, memorised them, and then washed her hands.Ìý She managed to get some smuggled out on paper, but when she was eventually released into exile, she had memorised 240.
And one of her first poems in freedom was a beautiful expression of thanks to those who had stood by her: their prayers had prompted, she wrote, A sudden sense of joy and warmth. And a resounding note of love.

Throughout her detention she wore the grey uniform of a political prisoner.Ìý But even as her body began failing, and the shroud of isolation weighed more heavily, she knew that she had not been abandoned to the gloom.ÌýÌý Little wonder that with faith and humour, and not a little defiance, she called her autobiography ‘Grey is the colour of hope.’

ITEM 12ÌýMUSIC 4ÌýCHOIR
This is the truth sent from above

ITEM 13ÌýADDRESS 2 ROY ÌýÌýÌý
The essence of Christian hope is that it enables us to look beyond the wilderness.Ìý I glimpsed something of that earlier this year in a former mining village high above the Rhymney valley.Ìý Cefn Hengoed has significant deprivation, with high unemployment, few available jobs, below-average levels of basic literacy and numeracy.Ìý When the Baptist chapel which had stood there for 300 years closed, one resident reflected that even God had given up on them.Ìý An apparent wilderness, for sure.ÌýÌý

But a youth leader from a nearby village became convinced that it was meant to blossom, and particularly among the young people who gathered for mischief in the vast graveyard.Ìý With her husband Carl and a small number of helpers,ÌýÌýÌý Cath Miller, now the church’s minister, set about establishing a place of unconditional welcome.ÌýÌýÌý

There’s always food on offer, gladly received not least by parents with hungry young children, and it’s always free - a reflection, says Cath, of the outrageous grace of the gospel, ‘because God doesn’t charge’.ÌýÌý It’s been tough, not least because of concerns about behaviour: they’ve been barricaded inside the church, had number plates stolen, items vandalised.Ìý At the start, 15 people arrived to help the pioneering vision; after four weeks only two remained.ÌýÌý

Some of the teenagers have been permanently excluded from school, expelled from the local youth club, ordered to leave other churches.Ìý Here no one is told they can’t belong, however wild their antics - a typical evening can be loud and chaotic.ÌýÌýÌý Yet over seven years marginalised young people have learned to trust, to acquire skills and build relationships, and found friends who’ll support them through tricky interviews and crises of every kind…and in some cases help them into shared worship and a living faith.ÌýÌý
And they know they’ll always be welcomed back - by people who dare to hope in them, to see beyond what might seem to be only wilderness.

The youngest of Cath and Carl’s three children is Tia who’s one of the most important members of the community.Ìý Both trained nurses, they fostered her as a baby and then adopted; she’s now ten years old, but cerebral palsy gives her a mental age of no more than nine months, and profound physical disabilities require 24-hour care.ÌýÌý In the early days, some of the young people struggled with difference: there was a lot of name-calling and cruelty.Ìý Regular contact with Tia has enabled them to put prejudice aside.ÌýÌý Smiling from her special chair she’s a powerful symbol of hope beyond even the most desperate predicament.

All this is a foretaste of the kingdom whose coming is anticipated on this day - where the way of Christ is seen in every relationship, where the weakest teach the strongest lessons and forgiveness is the norm,Ìý where literally no one need be hope-less, because all are embraced in God’s prodigal, extravagant love.Ìý And every wilderness blossoms as the rose.Ìý And so we pray, O come, O come Immanuel.

ITEM 14ÌýMUSIC 5ÌýCHOIRÌý /ORGANÌýÌýÌý
O come, O come, Immanuel (Veni Emmanuel)

ITEM 15ÌýPRAYERSÌý
READER 1: Let us pray.Ìý Lord Jesus Christ, we await your coming with joyful anticipation. All creation yearns for the day when your loving purposes will be fulfilled.Ìý We dare to believe that conflict and suffering and all that diminishes human life will be no more; and death will have gone for ever.

READER 2: But we wait with trembling, knowing that we fail to live as you intend, fail to recognise you coming to us now in the person in need - the one who is different, the prisoner, the refugee.ÌýÌý Grant us grace to change our hearts and our ways; and trusting your limitless love, may we know your forgiveness.

CHOIR SUNG RESPONSE
Wait for the Lord his day is near.Ìý
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heartÌý

READER 1: Lord Jesus Christ, as we await your coming, we pray for all who sense no hope in their wilderness:
Ìýworn out by broken bodies and failing minds
Ìýground down by poverty
Ìýfacing the terrors of war, or persecution for what they believe or who they are
ÌýAnd those who are simply tired of waiting.

READER 2: And we remember all who build hope
Ìýpeacemakers and peacekeepers
Ìýthose who nurture the possibilities for good in the least promising;
Ìýall who keep working for a world with the values of the Kingdom which is to come, a world of mercy and compassion and right relationships.
Lord, renew their hope, and ours.

CHOIR SUNG RESPONSE
Wait for the Lord his day is near.ÌýÌý
Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heartÌý

ITEM 16ÌýLINK SUSANÌý ÌýÌýÌýÌý
Our hope is certain, suggests our last hymn, because it’s rooted in the Christ who is the beginning and the end: ‘Hark, what a sound, and too divine for hearing, stirs on the earth and trembles in the air.’

ITEM 17ÌýCHOIR/CONG/ORGANÌýÌýÌý
Hark what a sound (Highwood)

ITEM 18ÌýBLESSING ROYÌýÌýÌý
1. May God, the source of hope, fill you with all joy and peace by means of your faith in him, so that your hope will continue to grow by the power of the Holy Spirit.

2. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the
knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.ÌýÌý And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with us and remain with us always.

3. Gras ein Harglwydd Iesu Grist, a chariad Duw, a chymdeithas yr Ysbryd Glan a fyddo gyd ni oll.

4. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and forever.Ìý Amen.ÌýÌý 0.20

ITEM 19ÌýORGAN PLAYOUT:ÌýÌýÌý
Chorale Prelude on Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 645 (J.S.BACH)

Closing anno:
This morning’s Sunday Worship came live from Albany Road Baptist Church, Cardiff, and was led by the Rev’d Susan Stevenson.Ìý The preacher was the Rev’d Roy Jenkins.ÌýÌý The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers were directed by David Michael Leggett and the organist was David Geoffrey Thomas. The producer was Karen Walker.ÌýÌý Next week The Revd Hugh Palmer preaches in the second of Radio 4's Advent series 'Longing for Hope' from All Souls Church, London.