Advent 1 // What Is Hope Anyway?

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Sunday evening began quietly in our house.

With the Illinois chill stirring outside, Winston dozing in his crate, I sat down to dinner with my family. 

But Sunday was different. Sunday was a beginning. 

Some years ago, Holley and I visited an Irish gift shop in Geneva, Illinois and found an item that is now a focal point of our family Christmas.

A rectangular box, open on the top, with interlacing open Celtic designs on the sides and ends. On the front and center is an abstract rendering of a family. 

A father. A mother. A child. 

Each figure sweeps around and behind the other, and your eye is drawn to the child. The small, faceless child. 

Bailey calls him “kidney bean Jesus.” He does indeed resemble a kidney bean. 

In the box are four votive candles. It is our Celtic take on an Advent wreath and we light the votives as the weeks pass towards Christmas Day. 

Each candle has seen lovely, fruitful seasons in our family’s life. They have also flickered under the words of disagreement, disappointment, and forgiveness that found their way to our table. 

We lit the first candle this past Sunday. The “hope” candle. 

It is a candle that celebrates something that isn’t, but that we deeply desire to be. To know that we are waiting, patiently, for change or fulfillment even when we have no clear picture of what that will look like – that’s hope. 

To light the “hope” candle in a year like 2020, however, is to court our own spiritual foolishness. 

For what do we hope? 

What is the better picture?

Vaccines? An end to lockdowns? 

But after that, what does normal look like? 

Will a world greet us that we cannot quite understand?  

I find it interesting that many of the inspirational quotes about “hope” come from strange, strained circumstances. 

The scattered Christians, struggling to find identity after everything they knew felt to dust and rubble heard this calming word – 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, NRSV)

Paul speaking on suffering says, 

…we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.” (Romans 5:3-4) 

Beyond the Scriptures we hear Andy Dufresne’s yearning in The Shawshank Redemptionwhen he says,

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” 

But Andy suffered an unjust conviction for years until he escaped from prison. 

Paul died at the hands of a mad Roman emperor after spending years in house arrest. 

Christians who read the letter to the Hebrews would wrestle with their place in the world for years to come. 

So, what is hope anyway? 

More importantly, what do you hope for? 

The unmistakable reality is that hope appears when we are deeply mired in darkness. Hope is also forged in long-suffering and long-standing challenge. 

A picture of God’s better future is cultivated only when we’ve taken stock of God-with-us in an undesired present. 

This is why I believe we struggle to cultivate hope. 

We struggle with hope not because we are a people prone to despair. Far from it. There are so many examples of people facing darkness with no bottom and smiling their way through to dawn. 

No, we struggle with hope because we refuse to live in the present. To know what hope is means we have come to terms with our distance from the picture for which we hope. 

Advent is a forward-looking season, to be sure. It is a time to watch and wait for God’s new emergence in the person of Jesus. 

I say “new emergence” because God never truly left us and was always with us, but that is another blog post. 

In Advent, we look forward in future hope but that hope is empty and laughable without taking stock of the present. 

Where are we suffering?

What is the reality of our disinformation culture and how have we fallen headfirst into it? 

Where is the center of our faith at this point in time? 

How are we currently struggling with our theology, community, partner, or our inner world? 

Without taking these things into consideration, we have no energy for hope. Hope is a nice word for people who want to pretend the present isn’t what it is or for those whose present tense is insulated from harm by privilege and power.

But real hope begins in the present tense.

It is in the dispersion, the Roman prison, or the hell of Shawshank where hope puts sinew and muscle on its bones. 

I click the lighter and set the hope candle’s wick to light. We read a bit of Scripture, and behind our reading and over the condiments on the center of the table the present waits to be addressed. 

Our frustrations with being knocked out of our element and grounded from travel. 

The mental health struggles that wait like unpaid bills, listless on the counter but heavier than granite. 

Our fear of the little public exposure we must have because while 99% of people who get COVID-19 survive, that doesn’t help our overloaded hospitals.

And not to mention that someone we love would be the 1% who didn’t make it. Guaranteed. 

This is where hope begins to grow. Not in the ideal, not in the canned Hallmark Christmas scripts. 

It is in the prison.

The dispersion.

Wearing a mask and breathing our own air for the love of our neighbors. 

In a candle lit while a pandemic rages on. That is hope. That is hope. 

So, what is your present tense? 

Where is hope growing as you wait for God-in-skin to emerge once again? 

 Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash