When the Future ArrivesUnannounced: Faith and Surrender

On Christmas Eve 2020, the world had been in lockdown for nine months. The pandemic death toll was climbing toward half a million. The future was not just uncertain—it was genuinely unthinkable. And yet a church in Vancouver lit candles, sang carols, and asked its congregation to contemplate something radical: What does it mean to say yes to what you cannot control?

This is the St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church Christmas Eve Service, preserved on YouTube as an artifact of the pandemic era. But it is far more than a historical record. It is a sustained, liturgical meditation on faith when faith seems least rational—when the future has proven itself radically, devastatingly unpredictable, and we are asked to keep hoping anyway.

An Inclusive Welcome

The service opens with a welcome that immediately signals this is not nostalgia or escapism. The congregation describes itself as "an open-hearted open-minded LGBTQ affirming congregation that walks in the path of Jesus because we long for greater peace love and justice in the world." It is a statement that refuses easy certainty. They acknowledge they worship on the "traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples," and commit to reconciliation as "an ongoing process that involves our heart and our actions." This is a church that insists on naming both what is wrong and what is sacred. The welcome concludes with an invitation: "Whoever you are, whoever you love, whatever doubts and questions you bring—you are welcome here. You have a place here at St. Andrews Wesley."

Against that open-armed backdrop, the service unfolds in candlelight. Advent candles are lit in sequence—hope, peace, joy, and love—each a threshold toward the final, Christ candle, which burns as a reminder of "the one who made peace, a light that was never extinguished here on earth." Biblical passages from Isaiah and Luke are read with reverence. Carols are sung—"O Come, All Ye Faithful," "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," "O Little Town of Bethlehem"—their melodies creating a container for the liturgy, turning words into embodied truth.

What the Magazine Could Not Predict

The heart of the service is a sermon that transforms the familiar Christmas narrative into something urgent and contemporary. The speaker begins with a small, almost comic anecdote that carries surprising weight. A member of the congregation—Janet—was clearing out old magazines when her daughters Colleen and Catherine stopped her. One magazine in particular, they insisted, was a "collector's item." It was a 2019 issue of McLean's titled "The Year Ahead: A Guide to the People, Trends and Movements That Will Reshape the World."

The sermon walks through the articles: predictions about Olympic athletes in Tokyo, Elizabeth Warren as the likely next U.S. president, analysis of whether the growing deficit was a genuine problem. "Little did they know," the speaker says. "They had no idea." By Christmas Eve 2020, all those predictions had been swept away by something the magazine's editors—and every other prognosticator—had completely failed to anticipate. "Even some of our very brightest and most astute," the speaker notes, "those in tune with the times and often able to gauge a shift in cultural weather were off significantly wide of the mark."

The sermon quotes physicist Niels Bohr: "Prediction is very difficult especially if it's about the future." It is a joke, but it carries real spiritual weight. The point is not that we are fools for trying to plan. The point is that we live in a fundamental mismatch: we are creatures who crave certainty, who spend enormous energy trying to predict and control the future, and yet the future consistently arrives as something we did not and could not see coming.

"Who could have predicted where we'd be right now at the end of 2020? We can't predict what we can't control and in so many ways the future of the world and of our lives is out of our hands. Granted we're not complete spectators in the bleachers either. We do more than just watch life happen. We're in the game but most of us at a very young age realize that the game doesn't follow our command any more than we can pin the moon to the sky."

The Question at the Heart of Faith

This could be a sermon of despair. Instead, it turns to Mary, and the entire theological frame shifts. The full Gospel of Luke passage is read aloud—the angel Gabriel appearing to a young woman named Mary, greeting her with "Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you." Mary is terrified. The angel tells her she will conceive and bear a son, that he will be the Son of the Most High. Mary asks the obvious question: "How can this be since I am a virgin?" The angel assures her that "nothing is impossible with God." And then Mary answers: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word."

The sermon sits with this moment for a long time. It reflects on what this response actually means in the context of 2020. During the pandemic year, the speaker notes, people have been asking desperate variations of a single question: "Where was the angel when my plans fell apart? Where was the angel when my wedding was canceled, my job was lost, my loved one was alone in a hospital?"

The sermon recounts a conversation with a friend during this period—someone distressed about whether everything would work out, anxious about the future. And the friend's response was this: "It is not for them to decide... I am a servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word."

Surrender as Spiritual Practice

This is not resignation. This is not passivity or the abdication of responsibility. Mary's response to the angel is something far more active and more difficult: it is the willingness to say yes to a future she cannot control, cannot see clearly, cannot fully understand. She does not know what "yes" will cost her—the physical pain of childbirth, the social danger of being an unmarried pregnant woman in occupied Judea, the heartbreak that will come. But she says it anyway. She throws her life toward a future she cannot predict.

The sermon frames this not as ancient piety disconnected from our lives, but as a model for how to live in a world that refuses to be predicted or managed. It is not about accepting suffering or pretending things are fine. It is about developing the spiritual capacity to keep moving, keep trusting, keep saying yes, even when the future is radically unknown. It is about becoming, as Mary becomes, a servant of something larger than our own control.

The carols that punctuate the readings—with their repeated gestures toward arrival, toward light breaking into darkness, toward hope born in unlikely circumstances—reinforce this principle at a depth beyond words. These are not songs of certainty or reassurance. They are songs of waiting, watching, and then the sudden irruption of grace. "O Come, All Ye Faithful" is a summons to believers to come and witness something beyond rational expectation. "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" narrates the precise moment when peace arrives unannounced. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" finds the sacred not in power or spectacle but in stillness and hiddenness.

By the close of the service, the congregation has moved through three distinct spiritual movements: first, the acknowledgment of powerlessness (the magazine's failure, our inability to predict or control); second, the presentation of a model (Mary's willingness to say yes to the unknowable); and third, a prayer that asks not for the future to be secure or controllable, but for grace "in this time of trouble" and "in times of vulnerability and joy."

What Makes This Service Matter

What makes this service remarkable is not its liturgical form—that is ancient and traditional—but its refusal to hide from the moment. This is not a service that pretends 2020 did not happen, that treats Christmas as escapism. It is a service that takes the fact of radical, inescapable uncertainty and asks: Can we transform this into an occasion for spiritual deepening? Can we learn from Mary how to say yes when we cannot see the future? Can we light candles not because we are certain they will dispel the darkness, but because the lighting itself is an act of faith?

The answer the service offers is not naive optimism. It is something older and stranger: the willingness to keep faith with something beyond our control, to keep hoping without knowing how things will turn out, to light candles in the darkness not because we are certain they will bring security, but because the lighting itself is an orientation of the heart toward grace.

Where to Go From Here

This service, now available on YouTube, speaks most directly to those in the midst of uncertainty—those facing futures they cannot predict, those wrestling with how to maintain hope when circumstances are beyond their control. But it speaks more broadly to anyone seeking to understand how faith functions not as certainty but as a deeper kind of trust.

For those seeking to understand their own relationship with uncertainty, Mary's response—"Let it be with me according to your word"—offers a starting point for contemplation. Not as a command to passive acceptance, but as an invitation to ask: What would it mean to say yes to my life as it actually unfolds, rather than as I had planned? What spiritual resources do I need to develop in order to keep moving with faith when I cannot predict what comes next?

Diving deeper into the Gospel of Luke—particularly the Annunciation passage and the birth narratives—offers rich material for reflection. The carols themselves, with their theological density, reward close listening and meditation. For those interested in faith that includes rather than excludes, that acknowledges both justice and grace, the church's stated commitment to LGBTQ inclusion and to reconciliation on stolen land models a contemporary spirituality that refuses false innocence.