Every year we of course celebrate Advent. The season has been celebrated for centuries as a time to contemplate Christ’s birth. It also seems to be a time of really contrasting emotions for folks. We’re eager, yet often we’re also frazzled; sometimes we’re highly sentimental looking to our pasts with family and friends, yet we can be entirely indifferent as well. One minute we’re excited by the prospect of getting together with family or friends; the next we are caught up in deep loneliness or sorrow as time has passed, relationships have changed and our loved ones have died. And so our hope is often mingled with dread and our anticipation with anger or despair.
This year we have lost so many loved ones from this community. I know several of you have lost family and friends. Most recently, my mentor, John Wilton died after a long battle with prostate cancer. I haven’t even had the time to mourn and so the powerful emotions well up sometimes and burst out in fits of rage at drivers who seem indifferent enough to nearly run me over and construction project blockages on the sidewalk, tyrannical leaders that threaten our collective future, peers who cannot afford to simultaneously eat and find stable housing, another pending death, that won’t give me the space, the peace, the safety, to let my mind go so I can feel the pain, the emptiness, the glut of being that John occupied in my heart and thoughts, feel it, and give it to God to heal. My lament is distinct from, and yet so very fitting to Israel’s own: Where, O Lord, is your righteous Branch who will execute justice and righteousness in the land? When will we live again in safety?
The words in our Gospel lesson today speak clear hope-filled sound into desolate silence or the loud chaos of our lives to remind us: how we live today is determined not by the circumstances that surround us, but by what we believe about the future. To remember this in the face of current reality and defies all logic, we must listen carefully—pay attention—for sounds of hope, even faint, all around us: “yes my friends, there will be fear and foreboding as we wait for God.
It will seem as if everything else is of the utmost importance in our personal lives; that our institutions, our relationships, our very countries, are falling down all around us. It has always seemed this way. But Jesus has come right into the middle of our chaos and our desolation and says to us, “you will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. As all these things take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near as has been foretold in the stories of the Patriarchs and the prophets."
Make no mistake, the world has been changed with Jesus’s resurrection and judgement according to this change might happen at any moment. So don’t be caught unaware. To be unaware suggests, not just that we’re distracted, but actually that we have lost hope that the Jesus is actually present, gathering people to him. And it’s easy to lose hope unless we clearly understand what the Bible means by hope.
In Scripture, hope that God is making the world new in Christ is not a wish. It’s “a joyful confident expectation of what God is going to do on your behalf. Hope is also not grounded in certain things happening or not happening. Rather it’s grounded in a living relationship with God through giving ourselves over to Jesus in faith, so he can remake and renew and equip for being able to see our current circumstances through the future reality: that he has already reconciled us and those we love to himself through his resurrection; and that in our resurrection in him, we will be reunited in his love.
So rather than living in despair or anger, we can wake up with faith, grounded in hope that we are loved eternally; that we are bound with all whom we love and have lost; and that their love is sustained in us by God who calls us to share just that love, their love given to us, with others. So it is that hope anchors our soul in God. It helps to open us to engage drivers, construction workers, the jerk in our lives, the difficult family member, our own failures and frailty, with patience, rather than judgement and rage. Over time, hope purifies us because it presses us to take everything we think and feel to Jesus where the Holy Spirit might whittle away our anguish and our defenses to make room for a new and right spirit of faith and love. As my mentor John embodied for me, it is hope, grounded in Jesus, that provides us the confidence to bear through these sometimes confusing, busy, painful, catastrophic times of waiting in attentive, joyful readiness, loving those whom we’ve been given to love.
Gracious God, As the Advent season begins, we cry out to you. We come to you looking for hope. When everything else we rely on fails us, our only hope is in you. When we do not understand what has happened, we hope in you. We can hope for better days because we trust you. We know you and we know you are here with us no matter what we are facing. Some of us see only darkness this time of year. Some of us find life overwhelming. Some of us are filled with Advent joy. Wherever we find ourselves today, Loving God, remind us that our hope is in you. Be with us on this journey. Amen.
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