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First Sunday of Advent – 27 November 2022

We mark our journey to the Festival of Christmas by each week lighting a candle on our Advent Wreath. Each candle represents one of the blessings of Christmas: hope, faith, joy, peace and love. These are the true gifts of Christmas, the gifts given to us as those who seek how the life of Jesus is birthed more deeply in our hearts and in our world. In lighting each candle, we are reminded of how we are to be people of hope, faith, joy, peace and love. Lives marked by these gifts are radiant lives, lives that bear the life of Jesus in our world, lives transparent of this Promise and possibility for our world.

On this the first Sunday of Advent we light our first candle, the candle that represents hope. Hope – like faith, joy, peace and love – is not simply a feeling. Hope is not merely optimism. Just as I can discover peace in the midst of conflict, joy in the presence of sadness, faith in the confusion of doubt, so I can also experience hope in the presence of uncertainty and even disillusionment. This is because hope is not just about positive thinking. It is not Pollyanna. It does not deny the problems and the obstacles before us. Indeed, none of the Christmas blessings for which we open our hearts over these weeks deny reality. They accept reality as it is. As the late Australian Jesuit writer and poet, Peter Steele was fond of saying, “Genuine spirituality consists in this: letting it come home deeply and truly how things are and responding out of that situation.” Therefore, we are not those who substitute reality with cliché. Rather, all of the blessings for which we pray and mark by a candle, each in their own way, recognize a wider framework, a deeper context, a higher possibility.

When it comes to being people who live with hope, then, we are not those who abdicate the sense that things might actually be going quite awry. We are not those who might pretend that everything will always turn out ok. Things may not turn out as we would wish. Bad things happen to good people as we know. Yet, even in the darkness of our disappointment and despair about how things might be, we can still hope.

This is because Christian hope is not actually about the future, it is about the past. When we talk about hope ordinarily, we tend to think about something turning out for the best in the future. But we do not necessarily know how things will turn out. And as I say, sometimes we have to be prepared that things will not turn out as we would want.

Yet, our hearts remain hope filled. This is because hope is intrinsically linked with memory. It is our memory that gives birth to our hope. We remember what God has done. We remember the long journey of salvation. We remember how God has acted to bring freedom out of bondage, movement out of paralysis, life out of death. We remember those who put their trust in the Promise given them and the way in which God was active in all the events of their lives, fulfilling his promise even when, at first, it could not be evident. In savouring all this memory of our people, we develop this profound intuition that what is in front of us is not the last word. There is always something more than our own disappointments, our own disillusionments, our own despair. There is something bigger at work, something more encompassing. We are not simply abandoned to our own limitation and finitude. We have a much larger canvass on which to situate our own experience and by which to see ourselves.

All of this renders us with an expectation about life itself. It gives us an answer to the question about life. One of the fundamental questions with which people struggle is whether life is for them or against them. Many interpret that life is not for them. Life is too full of setbacks and obstacles. Consequently, people lead lives of quiet despair, entrapped within cynicism, fear, anger and sadness. We see it etched on their faces and outlined in their conversations.

But because of the memory we celebrate as a community of faith, we are those who believe that life is ultimately gracious, that life is irreducibly blessed, that life is holy and sacred. Life is good. And we dare to assert this even in the face of those difficulties we know. We know it is good, because we know there is a proven Love that holds it all together. And therefore, we are those who live with a fundamental expectation about life.  This expectation gives us the freedom both to seek out the little rays of possibility which present themselves with simplicity and ordinariness and to wonder about the grander design of events. We learn to “expect the presence of God in everything I meet and everything I do. . .  What does God have in mind for me? What does God expect of me?  What is he saying to me through the things that are happening in my world, and what is my response?”[1]

To live with this expectation means to live our lives as those awake. Our hearts are not closed, enclosed, entombed. They are vigilant, alert, surprised. They are alive. This how the writer, Jurgen Moltmann illustrates how the first Christians prayed:

standing, looking up, with arms outstretched, and eyes wide open, ready to walk or to leap forward.  We can see this from the pictures in the catacombs in Rome. Their posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart searching. It says . . . We are on the watch, in expectation of the One who is coming . . .[2] 

Moltmann concludes, “People who know that there is someone who is waiting for them and expecting them never give themselves up. And we are expected.”[3] 

It is because we know that we are awaited and expected that we never lose our hope. May this light of hope burn brightly in our hearts as we wait for Christmas.


[1] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 84-85.

[2] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 83 -84.

[3] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 85.

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