Joy: A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent

Today we light the third candle, the rose one. When Katherine Jefforts-Schori was our Presiding Bishop she liked to jokingly ask, “why is the third candle pink?” To which she’d respond, “just in case it’s a girl!”

In fact, although I think that’s pretty funny, we light the rose candle because today is Gaudete Sunday and Gaudete is the Latin word for rejoice. Today we start rejoicing for the One who is coming into the world to bring…what is it again? Oh yeah, joy to the world. As we heard from St. Paul this morning:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

In John 15:11, Jesus says: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” In the sacristy of this church (that’s the room where the altar guild does their work) there is a print with one of my very favorite sayings from one of the early church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons. It says this: “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” I think that joy is a key ingredient in being fully alive.

So what is joy, exactly? Barbara Brown Taylor describes the experience of joy as “almost irreverent.” She writes:

Joy has never had very much to do with what is going on in the world at the time. This is what makes it different from happiness, or pleasure, or fun. All those depend on positive conditions… The only condition for joy is the presence of God… which means that it can erupt in a depressed economy, in the middle of a war, or in an intensive care waiting room… it is a gift…

She’s right, you know. But it sounds so counter-cultural in a culture where we think we can buy happiness which suggests that happiness is some kind of commodity. But happiness is always conditional. We have happy and sad days, and sometimes even weeks or seasons. December can bring out the sadness and unresolved grief even among the most fortunate among us. I found when I was last a parish priest that inevitably I’d have more funerals in December than any other month of the year. And even when people die at another time of year, the holidays can be especially hard. You all know this. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. The point is that no one can be happy all the time.

The only condition for joy, though, is the presence of God. We can feel joy even on the most difficult of days. We don’t need to wait for December 24 to recall that the truest name for Jesus is Immanuel: God with us. Through thick and thin. So if God is present, there is joy.

Do you all remember Debbie Downer from the old SNL skits? One of my favorites is when the family is all gathered at Disney World and the server says that the special of the day is steak and eggs with a Mickey waffle. Debbie says: “ever since they found mad-cow disease in the US. I’m not taking any chances. It can live in your body for years before it ravages your brain.” (Wha, wha…)

Most of us know a Debbie Downer in our lives. And maybe some days we are even like her. Maybe it’s their personality or maybe it’s because of old wounds and sometimes it’s because of a chemical imbalance and they deserve our compassion, not our judgement. But they can wear you down when they need for you to be as unhappy as they are and that isn’t good for building up the Body of Christ.

On the other end of the spectrum are the perennially cheery, quick to find something happy even in the worst of circumstances. Maybe too quick, because we also need space in our lives for grieving. If you are having a really hard day the last thing we need to hear is to cheer up, don’t worry…

But joy is different. Joy isn’t contingent on whether or not the sun is shining. So Jesus tells his friends, which includes us: I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. That is what the good news does in our lives as it takes hold. The only condition needed for joy is the presence of God, even when the world around us is a mess. It is a gift. It helps form disciples of Jesus who are fully alive and this pleases God.

Now I have a question for you to reflect on. How do we cultivate joy in our own lives and in our homes and in this congregation. Let the world be for now, but how can we make it so that we leave Church each week feeling more joyful and less troubled? I often use the phrase, borrowed from the late Bishop of Newark, Bishop Spong, of the “church alumni association.” Recently here in Bristol I heard almost these same words from a local shopkeeper. I had my collar on and I told the person where I work and they said, “oh, I’m an alum of St. Michael’s. My parents used to take me there as a child, when Canon Tildsley was there…”

Why do people leave the Church? In my experience there are two main reasons generally speaking: conflict or boredom. Conflict burns hot sometimes. We get disappointed or hurt or angry about something or someone whom it seems doesn’t behave like a “real” Christian; and we may well have a legitimate gripe. Boredom runs cool to cold; we just feel we’ve gotten all we need from a place as a kid and now we can move on, the same way we move on from senior year of high school. We’ve graduated…

But the Church at its best is in the business of forming disciples and that’s a lifelong process. I’m preaching to the choir I know, by the way. You are all here on a December morning when there are other places you could be. In the midst of a busy month you’ve made it a priority to be here. There may be lots of reasons. You may connect with my preaching or not. You may like the music or not. You may feel the presence of the risen Christ at the Eucharist or not. But somehow I hope that most weeks through these invitations and just by being in the presence of other people who are seeking and serving Christ, you feel a little more hopeful, a little more peaceful, a little more joyful. And even though we have to wait until next week to light the fourth candle, a little more loving as well.

So how do we cultivate practices here at St. Michael’s that lead to people toward full and abundant life, people who embrace joy even when facing sorrow? In my experience, authenticity and laughter are prerequisites. We have to be real, not fake. And our humor isn’t meant to be caustic or hurtful, but it does mean we hold things lightly, I think.

This is part of what I want for St. Michael’s in this season and beyond and I am praying for you all. I am so grateful for the staff here who held things together from the time Canon Michael left until I arrived. Loretta and Alexander and Steve and Betty are all amazing people and as the new kid I am so grateful for their care in doing their work. And you know, I hope, that the vestry has been working hard as well. And now the vestry continues to deepen our commitment to serve Christ and get ready for what will come next. The vestry covenant is more than aspirational; it’s an extension of the Baptismal Covenant. It’s about how we treat each other, how we disagree, how we stay open and curious. In all of this I rejoice.

David Whyte has said that joy is practiced generosity. I take that to mean that we can always find something to be thankful for, and thankfulness cultivates gratitude and gratitude is the path to abundant joy. And joy is a part of what it means to be fully alive and aware of God’s presence in our lives. No. Matter. What.

No matter what life brings, stay in the Spirit. Is that hard? Yes, some days. But we can do hard things, friends. With God all things are possible.

O come, O come, Emmanuel. Rejoice. Rejoice. Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. O Bristol, too.

Peace: A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

The word for today is PEACE. Like HOPE it is a very good advent word. (To preview coming attractions, JOY and LOVE are the two left!)

But let me confess before we go any further – of these four candles, this one is for me the most difficult to preach on. I can speak from experience about hope, and joy, and love – even if I also have days when those seem in short supply. But peace? I don’t mean just a ceasefire, or the absence of war. The peace that passes all understanding? The shalom that the Bible speaks of to mean completeness and well-being and right relationships: this seems more elusive to me in a nation that feels so bitterly divided. There is no shalom without justice. And so we pray here for the shalom/salaam of Jerusalem, and for peace in Ukraine, and for peace around our tables – at home and in this congregation.

Peace speaks to our deepest yearnings, I think. Yet it seems to be in short supply. Even so, this month we are preparing our hearts and minds and souls for the coming of the Prince of Peace, the one who comes to bring peace on earth and goodwill to all people.

The Biblical prophets dare to speak of a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. In his farewell address to this nation in 1961, President Eisenhower sounded like the Biblical prophets when he warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex and the opportunity for a lasting peace dividend.  That promise is our hope for the world and yet we live in the meantime – in the meantime of unsettledness and dis-ease, of wars and rumors of wars. I wonder if the four weeks of Advent are a kind of glimpse into what the journey of faith is all about. Hopeful expectation. Active waiting. Participation in God’s dream for this world. There is nothing passive about Advent or about the Christian journey: it’s always an invitation to participate, to become followers of Jesus, to do the work God has given us to do. It’s impossible for you or I or even a president or a secretary of state to make peace. But all of us can choose, daily, to embrace the ways that lead to peace rather than pouring gasoline on the fire. In my experience this requires and enormous amount of energy and commitment – which is why I find hope and joy and love easier to preach on than peace. We are so used to might being used for wrong but let’s be clear, even might used for right isn’t the path to peace. Jesus models another way to understand power as the one who falls on his knees with a towel and basin and washes feet. Servanthood ministry – non-violent action, turning the other cheek are all practices Jesus teaches us to work for peace. Shalom. We light this candle today as an act of resistance.

God’s shalom is about way more than a “cease-fire.” It’s about healing and gratitude and hospitality; about a willingness to share and a table set with fine wines and a feast for everyone. It’s about a community where trust is a given, and where walls that once divided are broken down.

Sometimes people say to me that the Old Testament is hard to read because it is so violent. There is a great deal of truth in that statement and there is violence there because that’s part of the struggle in the middle east and around the world. But there’s another way to look at it–a way that makes it so near and dear to me in fact. The Old Testament (and I believe the New Testament as well!) refuse to be “pie-in-the-sky.” They refuse to live in a dream world. They dare to look squarely at what really is. The Old Testament especially does not avoid geo-political realities, but although more subtle in the New Testament it’s there too: the challenge of living under Roman imperial power whose violence degrades and hurts God’s people. (And we are all God’s people!) We heard hints of it today:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 

 And we’ll hear it again on Christmas Eve: in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus…

We have always lived in a world with leaders we sometimes respect and sometimes fear. The prophets are honest about what is. But they also refuse to settle for the status quo of thinking that is what will always be. They dare to dream of the dawn of a new day, of a time when God really is the ruler of heaven and earth, a time when justice and peace go hand in hand.

And so Malachi, a near-contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah, can speak in his context (sometime after the people have come home from Babylon after the Exile) of a day when the people really will be made holy and righteous. He can look beyond the struggles of daily life to a time when the Covenant will be fulfilled. It is difficult for us to hear his words without hearing the music of George Frederick Handel in our heads. For he is like a refiner’s fire…

I’ve always appreciated the song, “Let there be peace on earth...” not just for the memories it evokes from my childhood, and not just because it’s an easily singable tune, but because of the next clause: “and let it begin with me.”

I think that is a very Biblical prayer. We ask God for peace on earth. But in the very next breath we need to listen long enough to hear God’s consistent call for a response from us.  In the end it is not the politicians and the generals who will bring about peace on earth. It’s people like Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and fishermen, and tax-collectors, and teachers and people like you and me who are meant to pray not only “let there be peace on earth,” but also “let it begin with me.”

Each and every one of us are called to be “preparers of the way” this Advent season. Each of us are called to be instruments of peace. “Let there be peace on earth.” And let it begin here, and now on this Second Sunday of Advent. To find our way into that peace that passes all understanding, we need to be able to be still, and quiet. Which is no easy task in December, in a consumer society. But with God, all things are possible! What might we need to let go of in order to find a sense of that peace that Christ offers us in this season of Advent?

I don’t know how we can ever be instruments of God’s peace if we are out of tune and conflicted in our own hearts. It has to begin with us. Advent is so counter-cultural – the month when we are feeling pulled toward freneticism is the very time when we insist, “slow down, you move too fast…” We are invited to take time to reflect this month and to see that as a part of our preparations. We are invited to keep first things first.

As we continue to find our way through this season of transition at St. Michael’s I hope you all took time to read the vestry covenant of behavior. I think that is a very important call to each of us, not just those currently serving on vestry. People feel drawn to a community where there is hope and peace and joy and love. Wherever there are two or three gathered together, there will always be differences and disagreements, sometimes even passionate conflict. But that represents an opportunity, actually. It offers us an invitation to do the work of healing and reconciliation we are called to. It asks us to create a community where the Church is a laboratory that is helping us to learn how to ask for forgiveness when we wrong someone and to offer forgiveness when it will open the door to a new possibility. This is a place where we are, with God's help. learning to grow into the full stature of Christ, Jesus is the light of the world, who shines in the darkness. But we, as the Church, as His followers, are called to do the same: to be the Light of the world. ,

I’m absolutely convinced that most disagreements are not zero-sum games, and that many of our worst disagreements get to that point because of bad communication or mis-communication or no communication. And that this is true in intimate relationships as it is in global politics. So what might it look like for peace on earth to truly begin with us, and then begin to ripple across generational lines and gender lines and different political views, as we come together to learn how to be one in Christ?

What happens when we take seriously our calling to be “preparers of the way” and therefore allow the peace that Christ pours into our hearts to extend to one another, to soften our hard edges, to make us better communicators and more open to healing, and to forgiveness, and grace?

I think what happens is that peace starts to become palpable. People feel drawn into the love of God even more deeply and ministries are energized. We become, through the gift of community, ever more “the Body of Christ.” And as that happens, we learn what it means to be salt, and light, and yeast for the sake of this broken world. When we leave this place to take our place in this community as citizens we don’t leave our core values behind. We take them with us to be little lights shining in the dark.

This may all sound a little naïve and I get that but as we continue to get to know each other, I hope you will realize that I’m not naïve about very much. It’s hard work to be followers of Jesus and as I said when I began, I am fully aware that peace is a challenge. We won’t always get it right. But we try, one day at a time. And when we do fail we ask for forgiveness from God and one another and we begin again. And again. And again.

Keep praying for one another, and especially pray for those who get under your skin and who may even be taking up residence in your head rent free. Let there be peace on earth indeed! But let it begin with us, with each and every one of us. And let it extend to our families–so that between now and Christmas we find ways to reconcile and to be reconciled if there is strife in our extended families. And as we practice forgiveness and love at home, let it extend beyond those walls. If we can do just that much we will make this a holy Advent and the adventure of faith will continue to unfold in God’s own time.

St. Nicholas of Myra

Today is the feast day of Nicholas of Myra—Saint Nicholas. He was a real person: a fourth-century bishop of the Church who may have attended the Council of Nicaea (from whence we get the Nicene Creed.) He is remembered as the patron saint of seafarers, sailors, and children. 

Little is known that can be clearly distinguished from the many legends about his life, but one thing we are fairly certain we know is that he was tortured and imprisoned for his faith during the reign of Emperor Diocletian. His memory and example was brought to this country by Dutch colonists in New York, who called him Santa Claus.

For my money, Miraslov Volf, who is the Director of  the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Professor at Yale Divinity School, is one of the most creative theologians of our time. He wrote an extraordinary book a decade or so ago entitled Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. 

Volf makes an important distinction between God and our images of god. (Paul Tillich was making the same distinction many years ago when he spoke about “the God beyond God.”) That is to say there is this God who is beyond all of our knowing—“I AM” who encountered Moses at the burning bush but would not give a name—the God we can only glimpse and never control. And then there are the images we make—some of them iconic and some of them graven—but all of them limited and therefore always needing to be critiqued.  

Two common (but according to Volf false) images of god are god the negotiator and god the Santa Claus. Sometimes we imagine god as the one with whom we can play “let’s make a deal:” god, if you do this for me then I will do that. And conversely, if I do this for you then I want you do that for me.  Even our prayers (especially our prayers!) can become a means to an end: we want what lies behind door number one or curtain number two. If God will make my child better then we will go to church every Sunday. Promise. Alternatively, we run to the god of consumerist materialism to sit on his lap: the god who knows when we’ve been bad or good, so we better be good, for goodness’ sake! The god who gives everything and yet demands nothing. We go to this god with our shopping lists: insisting that we have discerned not only what we want but what we need.

I don’t want to caricature these images, and Volf doesn’t either. But they permeate American Christianity. And Volf challenges both images as idolatrous, insisting that the God of the Bible is first and foremost a Giver. He insists that the God of authentic Christian faith is the God who has created us and the world in love. But unlike Santa Claus-god, the Giving God’s gifts require a response in us, because God takes us seriously. God’s gifts, Volf writes, oblige us to a “posture of receptivity.” And once we have received God’s gifts, that marks not an end but a beginning. As we move toward gratitude we move also toward a willingness to respond in kind and to act in a similar way in the world. And so his title: it is not only God, but we ourselves who are called to “giving and forgiving” in a culture stripped of grace.  

I think we need to reclaim the Bishop of Myra as a saint of the Church. The problem for us is that "Santa Claus" has been co-opted to the point where the guy at the mall and coming down the chimneys bears little resemblance to the Bishop of Myra, who knew the cost of discipleship and whose generosity most definitely grew out of his encounter with the Giver of all things, the Maker of heaven and earth. So I think that old St. Nick needs a good press agent, and needs to be reclaimed by the Church. This blog aims to do that...

By this we know that we abide in Christ, and that Christ abides in us: because he has given us of his Spirit. Even in Advent, even as we prepare for the birth of the holy child, we remember that in his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit to be with us. We have been given gifts—each of us—to do the work of ministry. Some we already recognize and claim and use. Some we are only beginning to claim, or even identify. And still others have been buried deep within us and remain unacknowledged. These, too, need to be unearthed and discovered like pearls in a field so they can be claimed and used for the sake of God’s reign.

This season of Advent puts in front of us an opportunity to once again encounter the God who truly is beyond God—the God beyond all of our doctrines (even the Creed passed at Nicaea!) all of our images, and all of our language. It gives us an opportunity to be still in the presence of this God who refuses to be used by us or domesticated by us or co-opted by us: this God who is the Giver of all things.

My prayer is that this Advent season we might each encounter this living God anew, the One who so loves the world that he sends Jesus into it in order that we might have life and have it abundantly. And that in a couple of weeks we might recognize the Gift that comes to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. When we do, I pray that we might receive the Gift with gratitude and then respond with our lives. Or as Christine Rosetti put it:

What can I give him, poor as I am? 
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb 
If I were a wise man, I would do my part. 
Yet what can I give him, give my heart.

 

Hope: A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Our word for today is Hope. On this first Sunday of Advent and of a new liturgical year (and as it turns out this very first day of December) we have lit the first Advent Candle on our Advent wreath to mark the beginning of our Christmas preparations and to remind ourselves that we are a people of Hope. Quite literally, we are a people gathered at the corner of Church and Hope. You can’t make this stuff up!

I want to offer you a visual reminder of something important. I’d like to ask that we turn the lights off, for just a moment. And let our eyes adjust. It’s not the same as if it was midnight here but even on a Sunday morning, I want you to notice what it’s like without electric lights. (lights out!)

 I commend to you a book by Gil Rendle, a church consultant who has written an important book called Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World. At the end of that book, Rendle shares this story about a young boy who lived on a farm. He was instructed by his mother to go out on a pitch-dark night to make sure the barn door was closed and locked. He left through the back door but immediately returned, telling his mom it was too dark. She handed him a flashlight and told him to try again but again he came back pretty quickly. He said the flashlight was too weak and he couldn’t see the barn. His mother said, “you don’t need to see the barn…you just need to walk to the end of the light.”

The Scriptures tell us that a people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. The Scriptures tell us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. What I want you to notice is that it only takes a little bit of light to help us walk in the dark. I know that it’s harder and harder to drive at night as we get older, at least that is my experience. But we don’t need to drive anywhere we just need to walk – one step at a time. It's harder to read in the dark or see the words in the Hymnal. I get that. But for now, for just a moment longer, let’s just take in what is here. We are here. God is here. And the lights shine in the darkness of this holy space – and more importantly still, in the world.

That’s hope. It’s a word sometimes cheapened by everyday usage. We may hope that the Patriots win a game, or we hope that it isn’t raining when we take our vacation next summer. But hope is a bigger word in our vocabulary of faith than that.

“Faith, Hope, and Love,” at least according to St. Paul...seem to be the big three. Love may well be “the greatest of these” but the implication is that the three are somehow connected. I’ve always thought that the journey begins with faith, which isn’t about saying a creed, or about memorizing a catechism, but about trust and more specifically about well-placed (rather than mis-placed) trust. Faith leads us to hope. And hope gives us the courage and the vulnerability and the strength to love God and our neighbor.

Hope is an Advent word–the first word that carries us toward the celebration of our Lord’s birth, and sets the tone for these next four weeks. I often turn, when I am thinking about words, to Frederick Buechner. He writes, in “Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC” -

For Christians, hope is ultimately hope in Christ. The hope that he really is what for centuries we have been claiming he is. The hope that despite the fact that sin and death still rule the world, he somehow conquered them. The hope that in him and through him all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them too. The hope that at some unforeseeable time and in some unimaginable way he will return with healing in his wings.

Jeremiah was a prophet of the Babylonian exile. He had a very difficult ministry, called to prepare the people while all seemed to be going well for the Babylonian exile. I’ve come to make a connection between our world and the world of the Old Testament between 586 and 911. (Alright, full disclosure – Walter Brueggemann and others smarter than I am have made this connection, but I fully embrace it!)

9/11 you all get immediately, even if you were a child then or not even born. 586 BCE was the year that the Babylonian Army marched into Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, which led to a period of grief, and despair, and exile in a foreign land. It is a number that marks the end of something, with a future yet to be determined. Jeremiah’s calling was to prepare people who didn’t want to face up to that for what was coming, before it was clear to the pundits what was unfolding.

Imagine our modern prophets in the U.S., as those people who through the 1980s and 1990s tried to warn us that we were on the wrong path in so many ways, that the ferment in the Middle East was not going to go away until there was peace with justice there. We are preparing not just our hearts but our homes, our church, our world for the coming of the prince of peace. There cannot be peace on earth until is begins with us, and surely it needs to include not just followers of Jesus but our Jewish and Muslim cousins as well. Pray today and always for the peace of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah had difficult words to speak in a time before people were ready to hear them. But late in that book–late in that “scroll”–there is this tiny little text of hope, this fragment really of just a few sentences that looks beyond the difficult days to the dawn of a new day.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The Lord is our righteousness."

The days are surely coming…all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as Dame Julian put it. That’s hope. Learning to see well enough in the darkness to keep on keeping on. All Jeremiah gives us is a dead branch. A stump – out of which a new shoot will come. It’s not a lot to go on, friends! But it’s enough. In fact, I suggest to you that that is the only way any of us get through difficult days, is to know that even if it will be a long haul, that a new day will eventually dawn. I think if we can ponder that reality we begin to get a grasp of what hope is really all about. The image of a “stump of Jesse” that gives way to a “new branch of David.”

I’m sure you’ve all tried to keep maple trees from consuming some piece of property by cutting them off at the trunk, only to come back in the spring and find a new shoot coming up out of the old trunk. That happens, as I understand it, because the root system already there makes new life come about more quickly, even though at ground level it appears that life has been cut off.

Stay with that, because that can guide you through this often frenetic month. Ponder for a moment what that means not only in the Bible, but for the spiritual life. For our real lives. Advent is such a time, a time to contemplate new beginnings and new possibilities. It’s a season of hope.

Jesse is King David’s father. What this metaphor suggests is that even though it appears that the Davidic dynasty comes to an end–that it is only a stump, from that stump new growth will appear. For us as Christians that is language we cannot help but to connect to Jesus, the Son of David who is our hope and our salvation.

And so Advent begins with talk about endings, about the end of the world we know. But don’t be deceived. The Christian paradox is that we begin here because we know that God is doing a new thing. God is birthing a new creation–new heavens, and a new earth, a branch of David out of the old stump of Jesse. For us, every ending is but a transition to a new beginning. That’s what we say at funerals, when a loved one dies, that life is changed, not ended. That our dying leads to new life. So, to, with our families, when old patterns die, and new ones begin to emerge. So, too, in congregations and in the world in which we live, and in this town of Bristol. Signs of endings, all around us. But not the end. Rather, a new beginning.

That doesn’t mean we won’t grieve the loss of what we once knew and loved. I have often said that it’s not really change that people fear, it’s grief. It’s loss of what is known, in exchange for what is not yet known. But we do it because of hope. Hope isn’t naivete, or blind cockeyed optimism. Hope isn’t the power of positive thinking. Rather, hope is the conviction that sin and death never get the last word. It is the conviction that love is stronger than hate, that truth is stronger than lies, that trust is stronger than fear. 

Hope is the knowledge that God is in the healing business, and that health is God’s plan for us–personally, socially, and cosmically. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, Andy Dufrane tells Red in The Shawshank Redemption. Indeed. If we face a choice every day to get busy living or get busy dying, then it seems to me that the key to living is hope.

Hathy and I have had the privilege this week of having our son, Graham, and our daughter-in-law, Cara, with us in Worcester for Thanksgiving. We put our Christmas tree up and put the lights on it. (Please don't report me to the liturgical police!) Watching our one-year old grandson, Julian, watching and noticing and being captivated by those little lights is a beautiful thing to see, and an inspiration. The light of Christ has come into the world. That Light continues to shine in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it. 

Today we begin a new liturgical year together, and we light this first Advent candle to remind ourselves and each other that we are a people of hope, and to remind ourselves and signify to the world that we will not let our worst fears dictate our behaviors. We choose to act and live and move and have our being from that place of hope. We just need to keep on walking to the end of the light. Eventually that will lead us to a barn in Bethlehem. Stay tuned.