Sunday December 1st, 2024 Worship

Faith, hope, and… How your brain ends this sentence depends on a lot of different factors, including whether you’ve watched a particular Disney movie or you’ve been immersed in the words of Scripture. And, while I find it fascinating to see how we all end this phrase, what I really want to focus on today are those first two words. Hope and faith. While they both seem passive, they actually both have an active sense to them too, at least when it comes to our lives of faith.
The Greek word that we translate as faith, πίστις (pistis), can more accurately be translated as trust. Faith relates to the person or thing that we put our trust in. And, as we know about trust, it takes work to build. We don’t usually instantly trust someone or something, but our sense of trust is based on our current and past experiences, and/or the stories of history that have been passed down to us. It’s why we tell these stories of God’s faithfulness over and over again, and why they are especially important in our season of Advent. If we didn’t have any of these stories or these rituals and I stood up here telling you about the importance of Advent and why we light these candles, you might have a lot more questions.
I think about our reading from Jeremiah today in which the prophet proclaims that the days are surely coming…when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah (Jeremiah 33: 14). If the people didn’t trust God or the prophet, if there were no retellings of the Exodus or anything else that God has done or promised throughout their peoples history, they wouldn’t be able to trust God and hope that this promise is true. “The days are surely coming” would just be empty words meant to soothe people that would probably just make them angrier. Their hope would feel pointless, because at that point it’s just chance.
And, then we get the words of the Gospel which is an interesting collection of parables about watching for the signs and being on guard and paying attention (Luke 21: 25-36). I was writing this sermon in the car on our drive home from Thanksgiving in Portland, and as I was thinking about this promise of the return of Christ coming on a cloud and what we are supposed to be waiting for exactly, we passed a massive road sign that said: “Jesus Christ. Crucified. Risen. Returning.” For so many people, this promise is something that they cling to, something that they want to proclaim in bold letters and loud voices. But what exactly are we supposed to do while we are waiting? That’s part of what makes hope and faith active verbs instead of just passive ones because they give us something to live into.
Especially in times of pain, grief, and sadness, we need hope to help us get through. We need to trust that there is something different waiting for us because it feels impossible to imagine that the situation that we are in is it. As we begin our season of Advent, this season of hope and expectation, of trusting in the promises of God even when we cannot see them, it feels important that the first candle we light is called the Hope Candle. It’s the one that will guide us through this whole season. And, it also feels important to me that Advent happens in this time when we get the shortest, darkest day of the year, but that we begin to lengthen the days as we approach Christmas. Even just that gives a little bit of hope when it feels like the night just isn’t going to end.
It feels weird to be entering Advent in this time of personal grief, especially because grief to me feels more often equated with Lent, but I also can’t escape it this year. When we had my grandmother’s funeral on Monday, we had officially begun the season of Advent, so the church was full of Christmas trees and Advent banners, the altar and the pastor dressed in blue for the season. There was no question that we had entered Advent, whether I was ready for it or not. But, I also think this is one of the beautiful things about the promises of Advent. That even when we know how the story is going to end, even as we anticipate the celebration, we are still in this season of waiting and not knowing. We join with the stories of Mary and Elizabeth, awaiting the birth of their sons, wondering how it’s even possible that they are in this situation. There is so much trust, so much hope in the way they carried themselves through all the unknowns. But we can’t dismiss how utterly terrifying it must have been for them too, especially Mary as a young, unwed pregnant woman.
And, I also think about how Advent doesn’t require us to be in a celebratory mood yet. Like Lent, there is still a bit of somberness, of seriousness, especially in Jesus’ teachings about watching and waiting. It isn’t all heavy, but it is at the same time, so full of hope because that is what the people needed. They were waiting for the Messiah, the Savior, not because their lives were amazing, but because they were hoping and praying for some much needed change. This is the season where we are waiting for those signs of hope and promise, which really we only need when we are not in that celebratory headspace or heartspace. The promise that things will get better falls flat if we already feel like everything is going great all the time. So, maybe it’s okay to be entering the season of Advent with a little bit more heaviness, a little bit more sadness, and a little bit more need to be leaning on the hope piece. After all, that’s what the Israelites were focused on too.
This is also why I love the ritualization of Advent because while it doesn’t instantly make everything better, it does give us a structure that can be comfortable and familiar. As the world keeps changing, we can come into this space and know that each week we will light another candle, we will sing one more verse of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel, ” a song that is so full of hope and prayer that God will make things better for the Israelite people. It helps to have a reminder that this is not the first or the last time where personally or communally we will have this feeling of an absence of hope, yet we continue to hope anyway. After all, hope is an act of rebellion, of resistance, of trusting that things can and will change, that God hasn’t forgotten us and that God still cares about us. Hope tells the world that we are not okay with the way things are, which is part of how hope becomes active. Because sometimes hope requires us to act a little bit too, to not just leave things the way that they are, but to keep striving for a world that has a little more love, a little more peace, a little more joy.
So as much as I don’t feel ready for Advent yet this year, I’m glad that we have Advent, as this season that leads us into the promises of Christmas because I am definitely not ready for those promises yet. I know that they will come whether I am ready or not, but I’m also grateful for this season where we get to cry out to God. Where we get to sing songs of lament, to lean into the feelings that come when the world feels so dark and heavy. And, even in the midst of that, we trust in the promises to come, the ones we will hear yet again, and we hope, even when it might seem foolish to do so. And, our first act of hope comes with lighting this candle and letting the flame remind us that the pain of the world doesn’t get to swallow us today.