Hope

A sermon for the first Sunday in Advent, based on Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, and Mark 13:24-37.

Would you pray with me?

God of hope, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

You ever get surprised when you glance out your window at 6pm and realize it’s fully dark outside? It’s not late afternoon, it’s not dusk, it’s not even early evening with the stars just beginning to rise. It’s dark. It’s a midnight kind of dark, a it’s-three-in-the-morning-and-I-can’t-sleep kind of dark, a why-does-the-dog-need-to-go-out-at-this-hour kind of dark. I get a little scared when it’s this kind of dark this early in the evening, to be honest. I know it’s going to be a long night before I’ll start to see the sun again, and we all know the dangerous mischief that can happen out there during a long, dark night.

I think that’s a big part of the reason why we light candles during Advent. For as long as humans have been around, we’ve been gathering together through long, dark winters in lands far away from the equator, trying to find some way to get through the season. For us Christians, we gather together, as we always have, and we insist on lighting candles. And not just the same candles week after week, either. No, we insist on lighting one more candle each week, so that as the days grow shorter and the night stretches longer, we shine all the brighter. Just when the world is at its darkest, we celebrate Jesus, the light that shines into the darkness. We know that the darkness cannot overcome his light.

Light is what I think about the most as I approach this Advent season. I think about our four Advent candles and how they build up light each week, even as the nights stretch out around us. That’s what we do as Christians: we hold fast to what we know to be true, to the light and love of God which will never fail and never let us go, and we spread that light wherever we can, even when the night is longer than the day, even when it seems like dawn will never come. We hold on and we trust and we testify to others that even the darkness night will end and the sun will rise.

That’s hard to do sometimes, though. It’s especially hard this Advent, when there are so many who are sick and so many that we’ve lost, when we can’t gather together as humans have gathered for millennia to remind each other of the light. But the Church has endured through darker seasons than this. We’re resilient. We know that a new day will come and so, in the meantime, we’re finding new ways every day to make it through all these disruptions in our lives. We are going to make it through this time of COVID restrictions, an uncertain economy and shifts in leadership. We’ll make it through because, just like the Advent candles we light, we have hope, peace, joy, and love, but most of all, because we have Jesus.

But let’s back up, because Christmas isn’t here yet, and it’s not yet time to reflect on what it means for Jesus to be a part of our world and a part of our lives. This Sunday, our Advent candles call us to focus on hope, which seems like an odd thing to be focusing on, given our scriptures. In Isaiah, the psalm, and in Mark, we have scriptures that attest to the darkness, to danger and worry. Mark talks about suffering, about the sun and moon going dark, the stars falling, the heavens shaking. Isaiah asks God to tear open the heavens and come down, to do powerful and awesome deeds among us. Psalm 80 begs God to restore us, to shine on us and save us. The writers of each of these passages are living in worlds that are mighty dark.

And yet, that darkness is not the whole story. Isaiah calls God our potter. We are the work of God’s hands, God’s own people. This is a good and hopeful word. The psalmist calls God a shepherd, calling on God despite tears upon tears. There is unyielding hope in what the psalmist asks. In Mark, Jesus tells us that though heaven and earth pass away, his words will not. No matter what comes, we will not be alone. No matter what happens, the goodness and love that Jesus has spoken into this world will endure.

We begin with hope because when all else fails, hope is all we have. When the world is in deep darkness, we have hope that the darkness does not last forever. And it is because we see the darkness that we hope. It is because we know that things are not as they should be that we hope. It is because the world brings us sorrow and anger and frustration and tears beyond measure that we turn back to hope. Emilie Townes, a theologian and writer, talks about hope this way:

“Hope means we have opened our eyes, hearts, minds, souls, very spirits, and now see and feel and touch and smell the joy and the agony living in the fractures of creation. That is the irony of hope, for in our yearning for it, we often walk far away from it as we try to come home to it. We often live into the small and narrow spaces of life that stunt our growth and demand far too little of us because far too little is expected from us, or far too little gives us comfort. Hope is one more piece to the fabric of the universe, one more way to signal this restless journey we are on, one more sign that Emmaus is not the end of the journey, but its beginning. You see, I don’t think hope is the end product on the assembly line of our lives. No, I think it is simply a part of the journey, part of the way in which we come to know God’s way in our lives.”

As you reflect on hope this week, I invite you think about how we now are living in “the fractures of creation.” What does that phrase mean to you? What hurt or pain in the world have you become awake to over the course of this past year? Take some time to think about the darkness you see in the world and to write down why you need hope in this season. Pray over it. Let God reveal hope to you this week.

And once you have that hope, hold onto it. Let it light you up. Let it keep you awake, as Jesus calls us to keep awake. That’s all that we need to do this week. Keep awake with hope.

Amen.